by Sandra Lowen

Created on: December 14, 2009   Last Updated: December 15, 2009

Subjects to Avoid at Funerals

I just walked out on two of my friends. One was dead, the other was just dead wrong.

Mike died after a long and painful illness. His fifteen-year-old, Jay, elected to live with his dad, because his mom’s drinking was getting him down. His mom had left Mike, after an affair. Mike decided to re-marry, and a year later he met Maria, who married him just in time for the diagnosis. They enjoyed four years of life together, even though the last one-and-a-half were not the best.

Mike did hospice, and died where he wanted to be, in his wife’s arms, in his own bed, in his own house. He’d made all of his arrangements. The funeral director and minister arrived, and his designated person called the friends he wanted present.

All was well, until his sister, Bonnie, arrived.

Bonnie wanted the marriage moved to the church, not to the Mike’s sun room, where he lay serenely in state, surrounded by a sea of flowers. When no one agreed, she ensconced herself on the sofa and began complaining about everything: the flowers were dinky, this or that person could have sent a more luxurious bunch, and WHERE was a bouquet from his office? Why wasn’t this person or that person there? Why didn’t she have anything to do with the program planning?

At the funeral, a gathering of over a hundred people, the officiator gave Bonnie an opportunity to speak, and did she ever! She purported to read old letters about her brother, but mostly she spoke about his peccadilloes as a youth: his weakness with the ladies, his brief dalliances with drug use and a gay lifestyle, and her own sterling existence as a model citizen. His colleagues and friends were somewhat aghast. The officiator rose, and clapped her to her seat.

But Bonnie wasn’t done grinding her many axes.

At the reception she began berating Maria, proclaiming how much she had liked Mike’s first wife, and denouncing her brother for having divorced her. “She was a saint; a jewel!” she said. “I mean, it’s nothing against you, Maria, but she was just better at everything.” She told Jay he really would have been better off living with his mother, and said she didn’t know how the poor woman was going to manage without him; she would probably become an alcoholic and wind up on the streets.” Then she began critiquing the furniture Maria had picked out after her predecessor’s departure, all with a beatific smile: “Nancy

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