A Woman Walks Into A Funeral…
Ok, I originally thought that sounded like the beginning to a bad joke. You know, like, “A man walks into a bar” or something similar.
But it’s not.
I think the strangest thing about last night’s funeral is that I felt like I somehow stumbled into the wrong one. Seriously. They were describing this person. The “open mic” portion of the eulogy saw person after person after person (about 10 in all) go up and espouse on the virtues and kindness and loving nature of this person. The word that kept coming up was “sweet” or “sweetheart.”
The closest I could come was that most of these people knew him after I did.
Well, no, that’s not entirely true.
There were a group that knew him way before I did too.
Only one guy within an eight year period of me knowing him.
…and I had no idea who they were talking about.
I shook the cobwebs of my brain loose to sift through everything I knew about him looking, searching for those kind adjectives. Trying to find one instance of this person I kept hearing about. All the memory archives came up blank.
So…I was at a stranger’s funeral. A sweet, kind, loving stranger who wrote letters and notes and sent clippings to, it seemed, hundreds of people while calmly and patiently collecting his collectibles and enjoying his hobbies. A sweet, simple, down-to-earth man. One that would be sorely missed by so many.
Then…a glimmer…one of the speakers mentioned his mother – in her 80’s at the time – raking the leaves in front of the house they shared. “A-ha!” I said to myself. “Here it is, then. One sentence in a whole funeral that refers to the man I came to mourn.”
The one that made me believe that inside of that closed baby-blue casket was the man I remembered.
Well, that and the whole Chaucer middle-english thing. That was a dead giveaway.
No pun intended.
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