An Amusing Story from a Funeral

SSCHWOOOAAAAAHHEEEE!!! 

The Brutal, insistent, incomparable (and apparently unspellable) sound of amplification feedback. It is impossible to prepare oneself for it and equally impossible to hear it without wincing. It portends a more calming communication to follow, but is not itself calming in that it also foretells that whoever is trying to speak is going to continue wrestling with the microphone until they subdue it, which suggests the ominous promise of more unnatural shrieking.

This is how the funeral began. With the all-too-earnest reverend going through the motions of setting up a microphone which all observable evidence indicated was unneeded. There is call for amplification in a small room where only five people, four living and one dead, were gathered. But to neglect this perfunctory step would be to acknowledge that the turnout for the deceased was disappointing, and this could destroy the entire façade of a dignified, normal funeral which our pious leader was determined to maintain. 

Once upon a time, in a magical, mystical place known as Allentown, Pennsylvania, I was having lunch with an older member of the bar in hopes of receiving some mentorship, or, more specifically, in hopes that my more senior colleague would pay. I interrupted my sushi-scarfing long enough to ask my buddy, who I will call “Mike”, because that was his real name, if he would swing by my office with me. I was working on a tough case, and I needed some advice.

“Mike” said he’d be happy to, but he had to first make a brief appearance at a funeral. One of his clients, a very old woman named Pearl Fenstemacher, had died and he had apparently promised her he would attend her service. He said I could stop by the funeral with him, and then we could head to my office. I was reluctant for fear of becoming trapped in an hours-long life-summary of someone I had never met, but he assured me we could sit in the back, stay for five minutes and then leave. So, after I motionlessly stared at the lunch check long enough, Mike grabbed it and we were off to bid Pearl a bon voyage over the River Styx.

Our plan became more complicated when we arrived at the funeral home and realized that Me, Mike and one other very old lady were the only people at the funeral. Sitting “in the back” of a single bench would be both awkward and geometrically difficult. Instead, we three mourners sat in a row. I wanly nodded a greeting at the old woman to my right. She looked at me as if I were a ferret.

At this point our minister entered the room. He was boyish and seemed to take his job very seriously. And without the slightest intention to do so, he did things that I found hilarious almost immediately.

First, after he entered, he looked at us, sighed, and then walked back to the anteroom from which he came. He reemerged holding a rope which dragged a table with an urn on it. I thought to myself “I bet Pearl is in the urn.” Then I thought, “who the fuck else would be in the urn?”

At this point, the minister wordlessly went back to the anteroom and I wondered if he was going to bring out a second urn. But why? Maybe Pearl was a large woman whose ashes didn’t fit into one urn. But then, like my previous thought, this one was followed by a second thought. Had the preposterousness of this situation I was now trapped in rendered me a complete and utter moron? Before I could delve too deeply into that possibility, our minister emerged again.

This time, the minister, who I will call Reverend Tom, because I don’t know his real name and “Mike” is already taken, was carrying the aforementioned microphone and a small speaker. I wondered why we needed a microphone since there were only four of us in total, and we were going to be sitting close enough together to play pinochle. But apparently Reverend Tom had planned on a microphone, and God-Dammit! He was going to use it. (Reverend Tom, being a Reverend, probably didn’t think the “God-Dammit” part).

This began the seemingly endless battle between the amplification system and Reverend Tom, with each new howl provoking both a strange brew of auditor anguish and increasinly irrepressible hilarity within me. Eventually, the microphoned at least temporarily tamed, Revenund Tom began the ceremony. But by this time, I was barely keeping it together. I was hoping that the events to come would pull me back into an appropriately somber state of mind. That was not to be.

It seemed that Reverend Tom knew Pearl and as he began speaking about her, he was clearly dancing around some significant issues with Pearl’s personality, which probably explained the scant attendance at her farewell. “Pearl could be difficult. Nobody can deny that” Reverend Tom began. “But as…(searching pause)…aggressive as she could be, I know she had a good heart”.

The old woman sitting to my right (who I will call “Ethel” because that’s a fine old-lady name) then made it clear she felt no need to “dance” around anything. She was there to tell it like it was. As Reverend Tom finished his sentence about Pearl’s “good heart”, Ethel blurted out “She hated men!”

At this point, a swell of laughter rocked my body, and I convulsed as if I’d just been tased. I sunk my face into my hands. What made it far worse was that I could feel that Mike was enduring the same torment immediately to my left. It was all I could do to keep it together. But the fun was nowhere near done.

Reverend Tom, trying to steer the mourning back in a more pro-Pearl direction, replied to Ethel’s outburst by saying “sometimes I felt when Pearl seemed most troubled, she was actually calling out for love”. But Ethel was having none of it. “Just miserable!!” she belted out to no one in particular, but to everyone present. It then occurred to me that Ethel was not there to mourn at all. She was thrilled Pearl was gone and was only at her funeral to make sure she wasn’t coming back. And of course, I found this to be the funniest thing ever!

It was all I could do to stop myself from rolling on the floor cackling while peeing myself, which I know from bitter experience is not a good look for me. I was pinching my legs so hard I had welts the next day. I tried to distract myself by imagining I was going to the Chair, or sitting in a hot-tub with Michael Dukakis. Nothing was working. But then, shit got real

Reverend Tom, who was laboring mightily to be positive, had an idea. “I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s all go down the row and one-by-one, tell us about a special time you had with Pearl.” “NO! NO! YOU BASTARD!” I thought. I knew there was no way I could get through this. Not only had I never met, or even heard of Pearl Fenstemacher, she had been a non-related woman a good sixty years older than me. What possible “special time” could I have appropriately had with Pearl. What story could I even make up? “I remember the first time we made love…”

At this moment, I completely lost it. I stuffed my face into both of my hands and laughed so hard my body rocked back and forth as my torso heaved up and down. But luckily, miraculously even, Reverend Tom knew just what to do. He actually pivoted towards me, abandoned the microphone he worked so hard to set up, sat down next to me, put his holy, loving arm around me, and said “There now. It’s alright. Let it out”. Reverend Tom thought that I was overcome with uncontrollable grief as I faced the loss of my unrelated, six-decade older, miserable, man-hating, dear friend. I was crying uncontrollably, and he was going to do what he did best. He was going to comfort me.

Sometimes I miss opportunities in the moment, I’m oblivious or don’t think quickly enough. But on this one occasion, I didn’t miss a beat. As Reverend Tom sat next to me, with his arm on my shoulder, patting me gently, I exclaimed, in a high-pitched, but yet muffled voice, “I’m sorry, I just can’t believe she’s gone!”, and I jumped up, and with my face still buried in my hands, I ran out of the funeral parlor into the parking lot where I laid on top of Mike’s car and laughed and whooped and shouted until I couldn’t catch my breath.

I’ve thought of Pearl often since that day. What kind of life had she actually led? What had caused her to be so unhappy? In moments, I’ve felt guilty about desecrating her final goodbye. But then I usually think that this may be the only time in her 90-plus years that she was the cause of so much pure, uncontrolled laughter. And maybe, if she had truly lived a life of sadness and loneliness, that was the best possible send-off she could have had.