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(#10) Pallbearers Bear Witness To All
From user PallbearerThrowaway:
"As my account says, I'm a pallbearer. In the three years I've worked there, I've had some pretty weird funerals.
Once, a 16-year-old died because a self-made nail bomb exploded in his face. His friends, the white trash that they were, all arrived on scooters. A friend of the deceased stopped and put his helmet off. His father then said: 'Nice helmet, if our son had one of those we wouldn't be here.'
On another occasion, I saw the family smoking at the grave and throwing their cigarettes in the grave after they were done.
But the most awkward was the time I suddenly had something in my throat. It was right before the ceremony, so I rushed outside the church to cough. It was one of the longest coughs I've ever had, so my eyes were all watery when I went back. I only realized it when it was too late, and a woman noticed it. She thought I was super emotional, so she tried to comfort me the whole day. It was so uncomfortable, because I couldn't say 'Oh no I actually don't really care.'"
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(#5) A Family Feud Ruined A Funeral
From user Mortician-for-hire:
"Funeral service person here, have to say that the saddest funeral I worked was the death of a 30-year-old woman who was very attractive and successful and had recently gotten married. Children and those in their prime are more bothersome, sure. But her family. Jesus.
Her husband had very little to do with the arrangements. I do not know why. So her father and stepmother were in control of the ceremony. The father seemed more unemotional than people I usually work with. Even people who don't seem stereotypically sad, have a level of anxiety or just a numbness of someone who hasn't full accepted it. I can't read minds or know someone's heart so I can't say for sure, but he did not seem to care what we did.
The stepmom was strange. I caught her snooping through areas of the funeral home not open to the public, like opening doors to storage closets, and she even made it into our casks loading area almost to the morgue proper before I caught her roaming. 30 minutes before the funeral she was worried about having time to go get something to eat. She got in to an altercation with I'm assuming the ex-wife in our foyer; that side of the family stormed out. She did not seem remotely concerned or interested in her deceased stepdaughter.
The deceased sister was handicapped and made noises she couldn't control when upset. (They also hadn't bothered to tell her that her sister was dead until the day of.) The family kicked her out of the service because she was interrupting. More visitors left because of this. This only left a few meager funeral attendees.
This made me particularly sad, because I think everyone deserves a decent funeral. The girl seemed sweet, caring, and full of life but instead of trying to celebrate her memory they just seemed apathetic. You see all kinds of emotions running through people working funerals, but I have never seen anyone act that disinterested and self-absorbed."
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(#6) You Don't Need To Be Early To A Funeral
From user satansfloorbuffer:
"My dad and stepmother were sextons for a cemetery in Baltimore for about six years when I was a teenager. We usually only got about one burial year and a couple of cremations, it wasn't often that we had to deal with anything; we mostly just lived on the property, answered the phone, and fed the dogs.
Anyway, we had an actual burial late one January that went stupidly wrong. The groundskeeper had dug the grave a few days before, but since then it had rained and the temperature had dropped the ground had frozen solid. The vault arrives first, we set up the pulleys and go to lower it down, and it won't go in. A minute later, we realize that the ground had swollen during the rain and then frozen in place. Nothing was going into the ground until we made the grave bigger.
"We get shovels and quickly bend the blades on the rock-hard sides. We scrounge up a couple of axes and those work, so we crawl in and start chipping away. The funeral director shows up with the hearse to set up, but there's not much he can do while we're in the way, so unloads the casket into the driveway, sets up some chairs and asks if we mind watching the body while he runs down to the bodega for a soda. We say why not - the service isn't for another hour and we're nowhere near done.
Well, about ten minutes later we hear a car pull up and look up to see a pair of horrified people staring at us from behind the wheel. Uh-oh. Looks like some people arrived early! Casket laying in the driveway! A pile of muddy people crawling around in a grave with a thousand-pound cement vault dangling over their heads! Aaaaand the newly returned funeral director drinking a beer!"
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(#9) Problem With The Procession
From user blk_thomas:
"My great aunt and uncle owned a funeral home and my mother worked there for a bit as mortician/funeral director. One weekend, she couldn't find a babysitter so I rode along with her to help with the funeral stuff. En route to the cemetery, one of our police escorts for the funeral procession was hit by a car running a red light. He died."
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(#7) Fist Pump At A Funeral
From a deleted user:
"I used to altar serve, and once witnessed a lady walk up to her mother's coffin as the perfect picture of anguished, raw grief, and as she kneeled down to kiss it, she got a huge, relieved, joyous smile and actually did the 'Yes!' fist, hiding it as part of the sign of the cross. She tipped us $50 each for serving, too. Weird."
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(#8) Saving Face... Sort Of
From user rednaxelAnaV:
"A family friend of ours owns a funeral home and he is a funeral director while his wife does the paperwork and consultations. One night we were all drinking and they started telling us about this story of a family that were looking to put on a funeral for their deceased son. The son was only 20 when he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head (think messy, brains everywhere).
The mother and father of the deceased were at a standstill in the process of deciding on their options for the funeral. The father wanted a closed casket, given the horrific way in which his son had died. The mother wasn't having any of it, she needed to see her son one last time. Now this was a rather important issue that needed to be ironed out ASAP (they need to be able to prep the body properly).
Well, they couldn't come to an agreement, so my friend offered to sew up what was left of this guy's head to the best of his abilities. This pleased both parents and off he went to reassembling the cadaver''s head. Now my friend is rather talented at what he does, he's got a great community presence and gets a lot of business. Basically, he's not just your run-of-the-mill funeral director. He takes great care of the deceased. But this particular cadaver was a bit different.
The victim had used a revolver against his right temple, which was cocked at an angle so that the resulting explosion of brains popped open right above the right eyebrow. Pretty much the whole upper right quadrant of his head was blown apart. To make an already long story short; my friend rebuilt this guy's face, and glued the skin back together to make it seem normal. He insists to this day (this happened 20+ years ago) that it was one of the best reconstructions he had ever done. When the mother saw him, she was in tears at how beautiful he had made him look. The father was impressed. Everyone was happy, right?
Wrong. The visitation was scheduled for the morning and the funeral was in the afternoon. The visitation was going well, when suddenly one of the ladies viewing the body lets out a startling scream.
Apparently, the fake skull fragment that they used to reconstruct the kid's face had unstuck and sunk back into the head, leaving a sort of crater. It left the face lopsided and disfigured. I distinctly remember going from shocked to laughing hysterically when my friend jumped out of his seat and started making the facial expressions of what this guy looked like. He said it looked a bit like Sloth from The Goonies.
They had to calm down the lady who witnessed the sink, and then the father closed the casket. They fixed it for the actual funeral, and things went according to plan."
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About This Tool
As most people say, the funeral service industry is dirty and strange, but someone must do it. The funeral is the last and one of the most important moments for all people. The funeral directors and undertakers speak for the dead person and are accustomed to anything related to death. We feel uneasy and scared when we see the dead body, but this is a daily job for funeral directors and undertakers.
However, even the most experienced
funeral services are often shocked and afraid of some strange and crazy things at the funeral. The random tool tells 16 true stories about the craziest things at the funerals that these funeral directors and undertakers have ever experienced.
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