"Ohhh he looked like he was sleeping." she would say... Now considering that the person was dead, I can't imagine them looking like they were doing anything else...
When I was a kid...I thought then that the way she talked about the job the funeral director did or didn't do was kind of morbid..
''Don't take him to Cantrell....They don't do the make up right...take him/her to Hawkins...They do the best undertaking..."
By the time I was a teenager....I used to find this kind of talk funny and would laugh about it with some of my cousins...(Sad to say, some of my older cousins didn't find the humor in a lot of what my aunt did at funerals and found it a bit offensive.)
My aunt used to snap photos of the dead body in the casket too....She snapped a photo of my grandfather in his casket and sent it to my mom....This totally freaked me out....I don't know how she felt about it...But I cut that photo up...I did not want to remember him that way...
But my aunt and her proclivities aside....This post is not really about her...
See..I was willing to put my aunt in a box and just say...that was her....It was not until I got on social media and the internet that I discovered that there are more people out there just like her and worse,if you can believe that...
Lord have mercy...I call them the professional mourners.....
If you have a decent amount of Facebook friends and Twitter followers as I do...then you know what I'm talking about...People that can't wait...can't wait for some celebrity to die, so they can post a RIP tweet or status update and act as if they knew the person....It's like a race to be the first person to mourn someone...
A lot of time these people don't fact check and they wind up reporting someone dead who is actually very much alive...Ask Bill Cosby, Sinbad, Eddie Murphy, Nelson Mandela to name a few who have been declared dead a number of times...
The most ridiculous one was this summer when several people were mourning the death of Lena Horne...
Despite the fact that Lena Horne actually died about four years ago... People were writing tributes and RIP's like it was going out of style...
A phony story started going around about Jackie Chan being dead....I told people that it was a hoax....Even sent them a link saying that it was a hoax and some of the same people kept reposting the same phony story about Jackie Chan being dead...
These are the same people who will glide by their real friends tweets and status updates about a family member who has passed and won't even offer a condolence...but let some celebrity who you don't know and had no chance of ever meeting die and they are posting heart felt condolences as though it was a member of their family!
I have to shake my head.... My Aunt was old and I'm going to give her a pass....She was at an age when most of her friends and loved ones were dying.....These folks on Twitter and Facebook are young people...So what is their excuse?????
We have created a culture of mourning.
4 comments:
That was laugh out loud funny Keith and so true!
You got me over here spitting my coffee out and laughing like crazy!
Where did this story come from?
This is funny, but it's also true..
Cousin, age - and that rotator cuff medication- has softened you nicely! Yeah our aunt was a trip at funerals as well as many other places. I didn't appreciate the picture taking or the standing guard by my parent's caskets. She wanted to read a poem about herself at my mother's service!! she called our pastor for permission because she knew we would flip!! Time helped me forgive. And your carefully placed humor helps every day!!
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