Morbid moments – funeral directions.
Sister, just about any time we get together, has to tell the funeral story. There really are two parts, and then, there’s the trigger for the telling of the story. Pa Wetzel has explicit funeral directions for a party, when he goes. Sister is Tibetan this week [Gemini>, and I’ve requested a Bubba Sean eulogy ™. Ma Wetzel wants a decent Methodist service through her church, punctuated with a little rolling of the eyes, and a hint that Pa Wetzel will be buried with a regular Methodist service, too.
Which means we always have to go back and talk about my maternal grandfather’s funeral. In his will, he left a portion of cash money to insure that all of his grandchildren could fly in for the “burrin’.”
At that time, Sister specifically requested that I meet her at the airport, and we high-tailed it back to the funeral parlor where my grandmother, preceded my grandfather by a good five years, into the hereafter, I assumed, Sister concurred, that it was all going to be at the same place.
We bounced through the funeral home, asked about stiffs, and I don’t recall any of this, but according to Sister’s version of the story, I wandered into the visitation – viewing parlor, then wandered back out, “Ain’t him.”
According to Sister, I asked, “Got any more bodies?”
Eventually, that evening, we sorted out where to go, and we got off to the right funeral parlor, and paid our respects. Just took two tries, and it was all sort of blackly comic, wandering around a darkened North Dallas, neither one of us very at home, looking for our next of kin to pay our respects.
The other half of the funeral story was my dear grandfather, hold it, a little history here. At some church downtown, there’s a room named after him. He was a very devout man. Big into that bible study. Spent just about every Saturday night preparing a lesson for Sunday School.
All laid out in his casket, there, on his satin pillow, there was a copy of the Bible, open to its cover page. There was an inscription. From my grandmother, his wife.
She may have preceded him by five years, but guess what? She still got in the last word.
