(After our recent article on weddings, someone suggested we tell about unusual funerals over a half-century of ministry. Here goes….)

I don’t have any funerals where the “honored guest” got up and walked out, or where the wrong person was discovered to be in the casket, or such foolishness as that. And for good reason.

Funerals are highly structured affairs, regulated by state law and overseen by a whole battery of employees and family members.

When we gather at the funeral home, the family has already been in conference with the mortician on how they want things done. The funeral directors stand nearby to make sure all goes according to plan. As a result, there is usually very little wiggle room there, space for the unexpected to occur.

And that’s not all bad.

I did this one funeral…

Where the man and his grandfather were buried together. The man was 34 and the grandfather was 64.  If the numbers don’t work for you, consider that the grandpa had died a full decade earlier but the family had not held a funeral. When the grandson was found in his freezer with an axe in his head–put there by his wife’s lesbian lover–the family wanted a joint funeral for both. The two women are serving life terms in the state penitentiary.

And the first time I held a funeral in one of New Orleans’ above-ground cemeteries….

The day before the funeral, the daughter-in-law said, “Now, pastor, tomorrow when we bury Roy’s mother…”  Yes?  “My mother will also be in the casket with her.” I said, “Excuse me?”  She said, “We cremated my mother some ten years ago and we haven’t known what to do with the ashes. We found out that it’s legal, so just before the casket is sealed, we’re going to slip the urn inside it and put both their names on the marble slab.”

She got a little gleam in her eye and said, “Just think–my mother and my mother-in-law in the same casket.” I said, “Did they get along together in life?”  She said, “It really doesn’t matter, does it?”

No, some things do not matter after death.

It’s interesting what people put inside the casket….

One lady whose funeral I did had a certain color combination to which she was devoted.  The same shade of hair, clothing, and fingernail polish. Her husband looked all over town, he told me, and bought up several bottles of the fingernail polish–“It’s a rare color!”–which he placed inside the casket.

Did he think she would be needing them in Heaven? Of course not. It was simply a sweet gesture, and who can fault him for that?

When my dad was buried in 2007, a couple of his grandsons decided to drop a pack of playing cards into the grave. One went so far as to buy up 13 decks of cards and pull out all the aces.  Then, he inserted all 52 of them into one of the card boxes and put that in the casket.

Again, just a little fun thing. Pop would have gotten a kick out of it, and recognized it for what it was: pure love.

Sometimes, funny things (or mistakes) get engraved on tombstones….

Our local Advocate humorist, Smiley Anders, told recently of a woman whose recipe for potato salad was forever drawing inquiries.  But she never let out her secret, saying, “Over my dead body.”  When she died, she had the recipe for her wonderful potato salad engraved on the tombstone.

Some close friends of mine decided they would install their gravestone now while they’re living to make sure it was done right. Everything except the final dates, of course, were engraved.  And on the reverse side, they had a lengthy scripture carved into the marble, a text that evidently meant a lot to them.

Except the engravers got it wrong.  I was there recently visiting the graves of loved ones and spotted that before I learned the story behind it. Standing there and reading that Scripture, I wondered, “Why in the world would they want that text on their stone?”  Later, I learned it was a mistake. Some miscommunication had taken place, but no one knows who was at fault.  At any rate, regardless who pays the bill, the engraver will have to grind off the mistake–there are several lines of it!–and put in the correct verses.

It doesn’t hurt to check and double-check these things before doing something so lasting (not to say expensive).