Spring
is an amazing season. Flowers bloom, baby animals are born, the world awakens, and…people
attend funerals. Yeah, I know that last one is a bummer, but it’s true. I’ve
attended at least three funerals in the last eight weeks. A distant relative
died, then a small child with leukemia who the community had rallied around,
and finally a co-worker. There’s a certain kind of stress to dealing with loss,
even if you’re not that close to those who passed. As it happened, I was
actually semi-close to the co-worker in a very indirect way, but that’s not why
it was stressful. It was stressful because my cousin, whom we’ll call Bonnie,
is friends with a really close friend of the co-worker, and that friend,
apparently, doesn’t wear rings that fit.
And
thus begins the whole story…
The
person who passed away, we’ll call him Joe, was a co-worker of mine, but in a completely
different department in another branch in a suburb of our city. In other words,
I didn’t know him at all and barely recognized his name. However, one of my
colleagues who did his same job and collaborated with him all the time because
she traveled from site to site knew him really well and was devastated by the
loss. This co-worker, whom we’ll call Lena, wanted to go to the viewing but
hates anything death-related and needed emotional support to pay her last
respects. I volunteered to go with her because Lena is a lovely soul and because
viewings don’t bother me in the least. As it turns out, Lena is also friends
with my cousin Bonnie, who also volunteered to go to the viewing as moral
support. So Lena and Bonnie and I all end up going to the viewing to pay
respects to Joe. Simple enough?
Oh,
hardly.
We
get to the funeral parlor and everything seems to be going to plan. Lena is
weeping with Joe’s wife and children and mother and cousins (he came from a
HUGE family) and then shuffles, sobbing, to the casket to view her friend one
last time. Bonnie and I hang out on the fringes, both of us being respectful
and me interacting with my colleagues who knew Joe to varying degrees when we
weren’t reading the cards on the flowers. Finally, Lena heads our way and we’re
all ready to leave. We get to my car—I drove—and suddenly Lena lets out a
shriek.
“I’ve
lost my wedding ring!”
She
shouts this in the middle of the parking lot with mourners ambling by, and they
all look at her like, “Who cares? Joe’s dead.”
But
Bonnie and I cared. We knew, in Lena’s mental state, losing her
wedding ring would be tipping point from upset to hysterical, or maybe even
wigged completely out. We calmed her down and finally surmised that her ring
had been in place up to the point of—you guessed it—viewing Joe.
So
Bonnie, being rather fearless and goal-oriented, decided to backtrack and
followed Lena’s footsteps from the time she entered the viewing until she left,
paying special attention to the part where Bonnie wept over Joe in the casket. Let
me just say this at this point that I should have known better than to trust Bonnie.
Because
here’s what happened: She gets to the casket and acts mournful in a way that
allows her to scope the area around the deceased. As it turns out, Lena, who’d
recently lost weight, had put her hand on the side of the casket long enough
for the ring in question to drop into the bedding, or whatever you call that
stuff on the inside of a casket. Bonnie spots the ring waaaaaay down in the
bottom of the bedding, nearly under Joe’s arm. If one more mourner sobs loud
enough over the casket, the ring will slide deep into the lining and it will
take some digging around to get to it.
As
fate would have it, a very large co-worker, Maggie, who is very…large, leaned
over the casket sobbing uncontrollably next to Bonnie, and Bonnie watched Lena’s
ring take the plunge into the depths of “Your wedding ring is getting buried
with a dead guy-ville.”
But
you must remember Bonnie is my cousin. And we both grew up with superstitious crazy
people who held the belief that if you don’t touch the dead person whose viewing it is, you’ll have
dreams about them. So my cousin and I grew up touching a lot of dead people.
Therefore, Bonnie has no compunction about retrieving Lena’s ring. However,
Bonnie was not raised under a barn, so she knows that digging around in a
casket for something might make a few people very uncomfortable and cause a
scene. The best way to offset that, Bonnie figured, was to…cause a scene.
So,
Bonnie starts wailing and thrashing around the casket and Joe, throwing herself
across the body and choking through her tears. People are horrified, and it
takes three funeral parlor workers to pull her off Joe.
I
know all this because, knowing Bonnie, who promised to get Lena’s ring back “no
matter what,” I found myself a window to peak through and see what was going
on. It was like driving past a car accident…I couldn’t look away.
By
the time the funeral director, a security officer, and two other mourners
escorted Bonnie to the parking lot, where she fell dramatically into my arms,
the ruse was in full effect. I think, at one point, Bonnie believed her own
grief, even though she didn’t even know Joe. All I can say is, "That's my cousin!"
As soon as her grim-faced escorts hustled back into the viewing,
Bonnie grinned and held up something shiny. As soon as Lena saw it, she
squealed, grabbed it, and gave Bonnie a huge bear hug. Apparently, Bonnie had
been digging around for Lena’s ring as she crawled all over Joe under false pretenses, and she
finally got it.
We all drove home in silence—Bonnie grinning in triumph, Lena smiling at her ring, and me checking the rearview mirror for the police, because it’s got to be some kind of felony to fake grief to retrieve a wedding ring and grope a a newly deceased person under false pretenses.
Well, that’s my spring so far. How’s yours going? Please do share in the comments.
We all drove home in silence—Bonnie grinning in triumph, Lena smiling at her ring, and me checking the rearview mirror for the police, because it’s got to be some kind of felony to fake grief to retrieve a wedding ring and grope a a newly deceased person under false pretenses.
Well, that’s my spring so far. How’s yours going? Please do share in the comments.
