Funeral

Fifty years ago, when I was a lad, I served as an altar boy at the funeral of the 8-year-old son of the local chief of police. The boy had been killed when he slipped from a snowbank into the path of a truck one week before Christmas.

The church was cold and dark, the small casket draped in black and the minister had been drinking. He droned his prayers, stumbling over words and tottering too close to the candles.

The chief, the biggest and strongest man in town, began to cry – not tears, but wrenching sobs that contorted his entire body. His wife, deathly white and frail, looked as if she would evaporate into a puff of smoke at any moment.

I have never attended a funeral since.

I Felt a Funeral in My Brain
by Emily Dickinson

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.

I love when everyone shows up to see me. Too bad we can't talk anymore. My funeral is the only place all my friends and family would get along.

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant – a combined gardener and cook – had seen in at least ten years.

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The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot--say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance--literally to astonish his son's weak mind.

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