Tales from Kentucky Funeral Homes

3 Funeral Humor and Mistakes

3 Funeral Humor and Mistakes Humor often helps people cope with sad and difficult situations. Even when they are grief-stricken, bereaved relatives and friends of the deceased find comfort in remembering and retelling humorous stories about their loved ones. Funny stories and remarks also help people work through the stress of funeral services and burials. Funeral directors use humor among themselves, too, as a means of coping with the challenges of their profession. The stories in this chapter feature humorous comments and misstatements at funeral services, bodies that move or go missing, deliberate pranks, falls and blunders, and family disagreements. The chapter also includes stories about embarrassing and distressing mistakes, some made by funeral directors and some made by the families they have served. Whatever the focus of these tales, they provide meaningful insight into what family and community members face after a death and into what funeral directors face on a daily basis. Death Due to Being Bathed This event happened during the time when funeral homes still provided ambulance service to the county. The call came from out in the country asking for an ambulance for an older lady who was sick and needed to go to a hospital. She lived off the main roads, and so James Pendley and I met some people with a tractor and wagon and rode in that to this one-room log house out in the middle of a field. She was being cared for by her son. It was in the dead of winter and was extremely cold. We saw this little old lady lying in bed, and we didn’t think she had enough cover and would freeze before we got her to the ambulance. So we decided we would look for more blankets or quilts. We found a large v 50 Tales from Kentucky Funeral Homes number of quilts but they were all pinned together. It took us forever and a day to get a few of these quilts unpinned. We loaded her and all the quilts into the wagon and took her to the ambulance, then on to the Logan County Hospital. As we were going, James said, “They will kill this poor woman. They will bathe her, and she will be in that warm place. Her pores will open up and she will get pneumonia and die.” Well, three or four days later, we went back to the Logan County Hospital to pick her up, because she did die. Back in those days, people didn’t have running water in the house. They got their water from a spring or well. They also did not have bathrooms, and so not able to take full baths as often, especially in the wintertime. If they got sick enough to go to a hospital, while there they would be bathed and kept away from the environment they were used to, and around other sick people and in contact with new germs, and took pneumonia and couldn’t fight it off, thus died. I’m not exaggerating when I say there were probably seven or eight quilts on that sick little old lady that had been piled on her by us two young men. A few years later we went back to that little one-room log house to pick up the son who had died there. And just like his mother before him, he was covered by many quilts, although not pieced together. It was winter again and was very, very cold, but we decided we didn’t have to ride a wagon in to get him. We drove the hearse in to pick him up. John A. Phelps, Bowling Green, with James M. Pendley, Morgantown, March 3, 2008 Not Rushing It used to be that when you went to the cemetery, people wanted to go directly to the grave and watch the casket being lowered. Funeral directors pretty much try to keep people from doing that now for safety reasons. There was a family that had gathered around the grave, and one was crying very profusely, “I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.” One other person said, “Does she want to go with them?” [Laughter] I don’t know if the person was in shock or not. But the tears dried, Funeral Humor and Mistakes 51 and there was silence from that moment on. I thought, now that was a devilish...