You Know You're At A West Side Funeral When...

...people start posing for pictures at the head of the open casket as if they're auditioning for "Weekend At Bernie's 7." We buried my great uncle Jay Wednesday, and before the official funeral began, someone who I believe was one of his daughters brought a 10-year-old boy who must have been her son to the casket, kissed Uncle Jay goodbye, and picked up her daughter who couldn't have been older than 3 and had her kiss him goodbye. They then posed for pics as the son snapped away with the digital, checking the turnout of the pics after every click. Who wants pictures of a corpse? I thought to myself, I know I don't go to many funerals, but is this a new tradition? Apparently it is. I told a co-worker about it the next day, and she said, "Oh yeah, they took pictures at a funeral I went to a couple of weeks ago. I never heard of it either." This same woman was causing other drama as well, according to my aunt. Some woman in a do-rag actually walked in front of the casket during the service, looked around with a lost expression as if she were at the wrong funeral, then spotted her friend--the woman taking pics--threw her hand up as if she saw a homie at a house party, and sat down next to her. It's a shame, because Uncle Jay was a quiet, peaceful, drama-free person, with nary an ill word for anyone. The proceedings were mostly tasteful except for a few ghetto moments like that. Some tattooed guy, I presume one of his sons or grandsons, stepped into the final burial scene where flowers were being thrown onto the casket and decided to toss in his baseball cap. I was so stunned that I just assumed he accidentally dropped it until someone straightened the cap out for him and placed it right side up on the casket. I don't know everything about Uncle Jay, but he was not into baseball. This was some thugged-out attempt at a tribute, and I wasn't impressed.

But the two funerals I attended in the last few months did make me ponder what my final scene might look like. It potentially wouldn't be pretty. Either it would be very quiet and empty except for my family, or some of those women from the last couple of years would show up with awkward speeches about how big my heart was and how human I treated them even though sex was the only reason we all met. I could see "Torrie" saying that even though I wasn't a "superstar in the bedroom," she still liked hanging out with me, and "Sarah" telling everyone how I never flinched when I saw scars on her body from her more dominant partners, and "Shelley" sobbing because she never got to thank me for spending so much money on her and never even fucking her. It could easily turn into the memorial service for Dan Fielding on "Night Court" when all of his "ladies" thought he had been killed in a plane crash, and if you never saw that, let's just say that it was not a tasteful goodbye. Thankfully, whatever happens, I won't be there to see it.