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Not many funerals are as entertaining or interesting as the one I attended yesterday. Bob, a friend of mine, died last Friday, and was to be given an 11:AM funeral Mass, to be followed by burial at a nearby cemetery, with lunch served to the mourners back in the church basement afterward. The service went as planned, Bob got his ride in the hearse, and the pall bearers carried him from the hearse down a slight incline to the grave site and placed the casket on the rollers of the casket lowering mechanism. The funeral director told them to let go of the casket, and they did. There was a loud bang, the casket took a nosedive and came to an abrupt halt when it hit the far wall of the grave, and out popped Bob.
More remarkable than the event itself was the paralysis that ensued. The funeral directors were stunned. The guys who brought the lowering mechanism were stunned. The priest held the mourners back and there was some praying going on from a distance, but the family members, once they had correctly realized that all the officials were shocked into inaction, decided to take on the task of getting Bob out of there themselves. Which was, of course, the wrong thing for them to try, because in order to get Bob out, he had first to get all the way in. There was no way that Bob and the broken casket were going to be salvaged simultaneously; it would require a three part removal process, consisting of 1) letting Bob drop down to the bottom of the grave, 2) removing the broken box, 3) getting Bob back out, returning him to the funeral parlor, cleaning him up a bit and putting him in a new casket.
American funeral parlors are such a sanctimonious industry. Their reputations and earnings are made by the illusion of smoothing death into the grave, like spreading warm butter over bread, and by monopolizing the grip on the handle of the butter knife. Bob's unauthorized actions were a direct confrontation to all they know and hold holy, and they were no doubt thinking that nothing like this had ever happened before and how big a law suit was going to result?
Fortunately a saner head made suggestions that even flustered people could follow. Everyone drove back to the church to eat the post-funeral lunch that no one any longer had the stomach for, and the fire department was called to the grave site to extricate Bob's remains and those of his casket.
The funeral resumed at 2:00 in the afternoon. SInce the priest had another appointment and could not be there, and since I was standing in the wrong place at the wrong moment, the job fell to me to "speak a few words" over the grave. I allowed that anyone who knew Bob appreciated that he was just negotiating for a better deal on the funeral, and that now he had achieved it, we could get on with the business of burying him. I think there was considerable relief in the laughter, because it was true of the man and because we badly needed to laugh.
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Gregory
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