“Unexpected Laughter: 55 Hilariously Awkward Moments Shared at Funerals That Will Leave You Speechless!”
“And you see, that’s what Joe’s life was like, she thinks. Just a beautiful, extended SUV rollover crash where he lived persistently, stubbornly, in the present moment.”
Now, all through this dada-esque scree, my partner and I are sitting on the hard wooden pew, our grief short-circuited into utter bemusement, and we are literally shaking with mirth at how surreal and inappropriate it was for this stranger to hijack a nice ceremony with her weird woo-woo worldview, and how inappropriate it was for us to be responding this way. And the thing about the wooden pews is they perfectly convey the vibration from the other person’s repressed laughter, and so we sat hunched over for the entire presentation, trapped in this cycle of inappropriate laughter reverberating back and forth between us, trying to quietly gasp for breath and thinking of anything that wasn’t this insane experience. At one point, we have to mask our gasping laughter as a quiet sob, which is equally inappropriate.
She proceeds, “I would have really liked to know Joe, and if I did, I think I would have thought of him as a comet, always moving forward, leaving bits of himself wherever he went. Dim the lights, please.”
This is the part where we pretty much black out from lack of oxygen.
The lights dim, the haunting melodies of Enya fill the small chapel, and up on the projector screen, the slideshow images of my uncle’s face are replaced with a four-minute montage of spiraling galaxies and nebulae and a single comet image, straight out of a mid-90s Bowl-a-Rama. This is clearly a video of her own design, she chose it for this occasion over her other greatest consolatory hits (waterfall.wav, sunlitmeadow.wav, SUVrollover.wav), and it means a great deal to her – she stands watching it intently for the full four minutes, and then turns to us with great gravity as the lights rise, and says, “To Joe, our shining comet. We miss you.”
