Sorry For Your Loss

How I Feel About Funeral Homes

My Granny Bain never went to funerals. She’d always say “Sheewee it’s too depressing. I just don’t like being around dead people!” as if any of us do. I’ll be honest, and I know this sounds grim, but I have bought a new suit before that looked so good on me, that my first thought was “Damn, I hope someone I know dies soon so I’ll get a chance to wear this!”.

I never want it to be someone super close to me, and I certainly don’t want it to be the tragic loss of a young person taken too soon. I want it to be a friend of a friend’s Great Grandmother or something like that. Someone I may have only spoken to once or twice, that had lived a full life, and whose death was not a shock to anyone. OK… I have wished death on a few pricks in my life, what can I say? But only those who we’d be better off without. You’re thinking of a few right now so don’t you dare try to paint me as some sort of sociopath. And frankly, you haven’t seen how good I look in this suit!

I don’t know how they do it up north, but in the south, we really take that “Celebration of Life” angle to a funeral pretty serious. I’ve said before and I’ll say again, some of the hardest laughs I have ever laughed have been at a funeral home in the south. One time we were burying our friend Natalie Caylor, wife of the painfully funny comedian “Big Ed” Caylor. Nat had been eat up with Cancer as they say, and we all saw this coming, but that of course didn’t take away from the profound sadness felt in the room. Even a room full of comedians. As we sat there huggin’ one another, crying, and cursing God for taking away one of the staples of our local comedy club, comedian Janet Williams, one of the funniest women I’ve ever known, walked up wearing her leopard print spandex and matching purse that contained all the pills a woman in her mid 60’s needs… she kissed Ed on the cheek and very loudly said: “Big Ed, once the dust settles, I’ll let you fuck me!”. From that moment on, it was a party.

I guess that’s anecdotal though. Every funeral can’t have a room full of comedians in attendance. The funeral home itself has a depressing vibe even without considering that it’s full of dead people. They are always so poorly lit. Have you ever noticed that? If Katherine Hepburn had funeral home lighting in her makeup trailer, she’d have the director flog the person in charge. I don’t know who invented fluorescent tubes, but whoever it was had to look at them and think “ahh yes, the perfect lighting for chopping off limbs and police interrogations”

Then you’ve got the people who work there. It’s always old dudes who are only a few years away from greeting you at Wal-Mart wearing one of those stupid smiley face buttons. They are all dressed in matching suit jackets, and usually of some color your kid would toss out of the Crayon box. They hold the door for you, and walk you to the room where the family is located. I like to call these sectioned-off rooms “Death Cubicles” You know the ones. There are sometimes as many as 5 funerals going on at the same time, so they have the poor dead souls partitioned off as if they were different theatres playing the same sad movie. The old men mean well, but they do seem to “comfort” the pretty young girls a bit more than they do the other demographics in attendance.

At most funerals I’ve been to you damn near need a gas mask to keep yourself from choking on the pungent medley of old lady perfumes. To this day if I smell White Diamonds by Liz Taylor, I have a Pavlovian response and immediately think of everyone I have lost over the years. For only some does this memory warrant a smile. A pretty big smile though. I sound like I’m talking bad about all these old people, and I mean, I am.. but I was trying to be funny. Truth is, old people at funeral homes are the best. They have a different energy about them. Old people at funerals act like they are playing a baseball game and standing in the On-deck circle. The men crack up and tell jokes, the women pretend to cry for someone we know they all hated, and in the end, you get to eat all the casseroles they brought. Unless it’s Pauline. She lets her cats get up on the counter.

While I complain about the Old lady perfume, aka the Eau de Mammaw, it sure beats the hell out of the other notable scent found at a funeral home: Old cigarette smoke clinging to your Uncle’s Dale Earnhardt windbreaker. There is, of course, a smoking section outside where the bereaved gather to unironically mourn the loss of a family member due to lung cancer or emphysema, but the damn door stays open most of the time. Plus, some of the old men, trying to save a little money, will only smoke half the cigarette, spit on it, and put it behind their ear for later, giving them that pleasant odor of a wet dog who lives in a liquor store.

I’m not a religious man. If you are, more power to ya, but it just ain’t for me. I grew up in a very stereotypical Southern Baptist church and have been scarred my entire life because of it. For this reason, funeral homes have always given me sort of the wimpy man’s version of PTSD. Funeral Homes are like churches, only their offerings cost you a bit more, and you don’t get to see any fat people dunked in a glorified bathtub. Everywhere you turn there are Precious Memory dolls, scriptures stenciled on the wall, and I have never been to a funeral home that doesn’t have one of those tiny little statues of Jesus that has been carved in such a way that his eyes follow you no matter where you are in the room. That shit gives me the heebie-jeebies. It makes me feel like I’m being judged. “Yeah, Jesus, I drank a little bit before I came, but I knew Uncle Steve was gonna be here and I can’t listen to another one of his bullshit stories about the war without a buzz. He was in the COAST GUARD…..QUIT LOOKING AT ME! TURN THE OTHER CHEEK, GOD DAMN IT”

I guess I gotta admit that I’m like Granny. I really can’t stand funerals either. But then, they aren’t for us, are they? Well I guess they aren’t for the dead person either, now that I think about it.. what the hell do they care? They’re dead! Every time we say goodbye to someone at a funeral, we say some version of “Good to see ya, even though it was under these circumstances!” or “I wish someone didn’t have to die for me to see ya!” And I guess we are telling the truth, but I don’t know. Maybe there is a God. And maybe he cares for us. Perhaps once every few months, he gathers us all in one place so that we can leave knowing how lucky we are that we don’t have to see these mother fuckers again until someone else croaks. Praise be to him, I reckon.

till next time

‘Corey Ryan Forrester