Thursday, September 15, 2011

Manly Thor's Day Special

We'll here it is nearly six o'clock on the day of the funeral. It took a long time and then I had to take down fifty feet of cedar hedge. I barely have the strength to lift my whisky.

If we go on the old standard of there being a new generation every fifteen years. there were five generations of men from where I grew up at the funeral. Looking them over, it's hard not to think that it has been downhill all the way.

I have no time for a real post so some general thoughts:

Two eulogies is two too many. The problem with these things is that there are two different kinds of motivations behind them and they are both bad. The first motivation is pride. Someone in the family is a good public speaker and everyone else in the family thinks they should get up and say something. And they do but the foundation of everyone's belief that this guy is a good public speaker is his ability as an after-dinner speaker. So he gets up tells jokes.

The other motive is because someone has something they really want to say. That is worse. They mumble so you can barely hear them, what they want to say is really about themselves and not about the deceased and then they get all worked up and cry.

Someone with authority in the Catholic church should do everyone a favour and ban the phrase "a celebration of the life of" from all Catholic funerals. For starters, it's a %&*#ing funeral not a celebration. But even if it is a good idea to celebrate somebody's life, and it usually isn't, for heaven's sake do it while they are still alive. When they are gone the more sincere thing to do is to mourn.

But not to mourn as those who have no hope do.

One rather sad moment, the son of the deceased remembered his father loved to sing along to Ghost Riders in the Sky, and suggested in his eulogy that his dad was now up there "riding hard" having apparently never noticed that the reason the ghost riders are in the sky is because they have been eternally damned.

Oh well. Here's praying he is not riding but sitting around a fire ring harmonizing with the Sons of the Pioneers.

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