Rest in peace

Funeral rituals can be as complex as weddings. I am talking of the different kinds of mourners and the ambience at a place and event where everything ‘joyful’ must be banished from the air. I am amazed at all those people who weep as if their supply of oxygen has been cut off due to the departing of the deceased. What leads them to wail and beat on their chest so hard and proclaim that this death has caused a great void in their lives and that it will effect their emotional well being ? In all due respect to a loss of human life, I perfectly understand and can relate to if close family members express their profound sorrow. But I am talking about the ones that sound phoney even when sobbing. It doesn’t stop with merely sobbing, those who are present, will also get an opportunity to hear about the exemplary life lead, how the deceased always put the interest of others before one’s own. Such statements voiced out does not really matter even if deceased has been a selfish miser, conner, swindler or just another loser I have spotted numerous times, where people who genuinely knew the person would tend to wear snickering smiles and eyeball each other as if they were throttled to spit out the appropriate character attestation of the deceased. The rest who probably have known the deceased not quite well, will have no option but to listen to the sorrowful chanting of these sometimes hired mourners. I also tend to think about all the back hand operations that run behind the curtains of some funeral undertakers. All those people who typically hang outside state hospitals waiting to receive news of indoor patients hanging on life’s last strings or has already kissed life goodbye. The total death count for the day would be conveyed by hospital attendants (who are more likely to be rewarded, for providing instant information) This information will instantly be conveyed to the funeral undertaker who will arrange for his representative to go to the respective wards and explore the possibility of securing an order for a coffin. Some turn low to the extent of getting the flower wreaths that stand near the freshly dug grave back so that could be a double sale. My brain rattles in every direction making me ponder on the strangeness of human lives. Funerals always make me look at the big picture. My first one was my dad’s. I was 4 and couldn’t understand why my father lay in a stupid wooden box and so many people standing around. The only memory I have of my first funeral is being quiet until 4 men came along and closed the box confirming that it was the end.