Funereal...

  I fell asleep with the TV on last night, and woke up in the midst of a movie about a British funeral involving overdoses of a synthetic drug disguised as Valium, the corpse being ejected from the coffin when a drugged attendee thought he heard him scratching inside it, and a blackmailing gay dwarf attempting to collect his financial due.  The movie turned out to be "Death at a Funeral," what is referred to as a rousing British farce.  That may or may not be an apt description, but in the mid-night gloom, it did remind me of a funeral I attended last summer.
    The three of us were on time for the service for a relative we hadn't seen for a considerable time, but, in acknowledgement of our childhood years, we felt drawn to pay our last respects.  The viewing and subsequent funeral service were held at a well  appointed and respected funeral home in Troy, and when we drove in, a member of the staff assisted us in parking the car so as to facilitate traffic movement, even though at the time ours was the only vehicle present, besides the hearse.  We entered the funeral parlor, as I mentioned on time, maybe a little early, to find the deceased in the coffin, and no one else present.  We each approached the kneeler, said a prayer and took a seat in the second row of chairs, leaving the first row to the immediate family.   We waited, past the appointed time, and finally I went in search of a funeral director, who had  been in an adjoining room.  The arrangements had been made, he said, by the next of kin,  the time for the services  had been agreed upon, so all we could do was await their arrival, hoping that the priest would not be inconvenienced by the delay. Finally the next of kin showed up, with a companion who may well have fallen into the same category as a character in the movie cited above.  Whatever the circumstances, the dead do get buried and the survivors do carry on for a time in the farce known as life---rousing or not is the choice.