Southern Lamentations

Southern Lamentations

by Gary Wright

A lot of folks pray for eternal life that can’t occupy themselves on a rainy afternoon.

Southerners don’t merely have funerals. We hold death events. Historically, funerals have been held to bury and honor the deceased. In the South a funeral is a manifold operation carried out on multiple levels over several days. There is the obituary; which is not so much a historical statement, rather, an interminable litany of the good and decent things which the dead person may or may not have done. Careful planning of the visitation must be made. It has to be scheduled on the busiest day of the week to inconvenience as many people as possible and, of course, the weatherman must be consulted to ensure rain. A great funeral service consists of a long-winded, boring preacher’s dissertation on how the audience can avoid going to Hell. Then, of course, the well planned trip to the graveyard and the official lowering of the casket into the ground with hands full of dirt tossed in by every spectator.

Finally, the main course which is the competition between the Methodists and the Catholics to see which of the blue-haired old ladies can prepare the most caloric, greasiest deep-dish pot roast. An endless argument will commence about whether to include Grandma Huchins’ world famous candied yam upside down casserole. But enough about all of that, we’ve got a menu to plan.

If you’ve ever been to a true Southerner’s funeral you’ll understand what I mean. If you’ve never been to one, then you won’t have the slightest clue what I’m talking about. A proper funeral in the South requires two things: a corpse and a collection of casseroles. Southern funerals are less about the dead, remembering the deceased and comforting the loved ones and much more about having, if not a party, at least a reunion of family of the deceased, all their friends ,and whomever happens to show up for a food festival. When Cousin Alva Lee Brinley died, Aunt Mavis Beasley was overheard saying, “I hope his wife didn’t make her usual Alabama ambrosia salad. It’s awful.”

No one enjoys a visitation of the dead with the family, but it is one of those rites which must simply be endured. Particularly dreadful are those open casket varieties. The head of the family stands at the front of the receiving line next to the eldest surviving member, next to the heir to the estate, next to the most ineligible and so on, often including an endless litany of cousins, nieces and hangers-on. I remember Buford Underdoer’s open visitation. Herman Elsechance stated his name and mentioned that he and the deceased had once lived in Fort Worth. The next person said, “He was in the Army with Buford.” The adjacent person heard and repeated, “Him and Buford fought together.” That was interpreted as, “He hated Buford.”

When it finally got to the last one in the receiving line, Clemmie Bohannon, a niece-in-law, twice removed, she said “If he hated Buford, then why the heck is he here?” Whereupon Cleavis Mae Burnbridge, fuming that the receiving line was going too slow and no one could eat yet, hollered, “He heard the Episcopalians are feeding everybody after the funeral. They’re such great cooks.”

Eulogies are delivered up north somewhere but down South we get a good dose of ‘Hell-fire and brimstone’ preaching at our funerals. Irvin Cobb once said, “A funeral eulogy is a belated plea for the defense delivered after the evidence is all in.” It has been said that at funerals the preachers have a captive audience and the hereafter is in the forefront of the audience’s mind. You can always tell if the deceased is someone of importance because they’ll bring some elder statesman preacher out of retirement because the young whippersnappers couldn’t handle the job.

Invariably, at all Southern visitations someone just has to say, “Don’t he look good?” Well, uh, no! He looks dead and for good reason. Cousin Edna Everlaster was overheard at her own Uncle Eddie Joe Casterbean saying, “I hope they don’t bury him with those glasses on. He looks good in them but he ain’t gonna need them in Heaven.” To which Uncle Eddie Joe replied, “That toupe’ ain’t gonna impress St. Peter much either.”

Whenever anybody dies down South they are the sweetest, most precious person who ever lived. You’ll hear such syrupy locutions like “If he don’t go to heaven then none of us has a chance.” Or “She was the kindest, sweetest person I ever knew. Bless her heart.” Finally, “He is sure gonna be missed by the whole congregation. He was so faithful to keep the church grass cut.”

Most Southerners are an emotional, heady lot; quick to fly off the handle – some almost psychotically so. They wear their emotions on their sleeves and are given to laugh a lot, cry often, tell you ‘I love you’ and ‘I hate you,’ often in the same sentence. They believe in signs, omens, stargazing and spirits. They tend to mix up the supernatural with the everyday here and now, just like it was peas and carrots. They’ll say such things as “Lord, Uncle Teddy Joe came to me last night and sat on the edge of my bed smoking a cigarette. He was as alive as you are, ‘cept he died three years ago. He told me that Mama was in heaven. Lord, them cigarette ashes nearly burned a hole in my brand new Belk’s on-sale, rayon bed comforter. I told him he’s gonna haf’ to quit smokin’.”

You see, down South we ain’t ‘fraid of no ghosts ‘cause we all see them a lot, usually while hanging out with Jim and Jack, that’s Beam and Daniels. But we do believe in them, in fact most of us rely on them for advice. Don’t you know that most ghosts aren’t mean or sinister? They’re mostly just family who’ve gone on before and are trying to help us in our day-to-day struggles. You can ask the apparitions of your recently departed families things that you could never talk about to another living person ‘cause they ain’t gonna be repeating nothing.

You need to understand that a Southern funeral is a whole lot more about life than it is about death. It’s part of a ritual of how to keep your head screwed on right amongst a whole lot of craziness that’s going on in this world. Here’s one way to try to make sense of it. The South, as a whole, is a mixture in a Depression glass bowl of all the wonderful, delicious berries you can think of: blackberries, blue berries, strawberries, raspberries, dew berries and so on. And right in the midst of all of them, atop the whipped cream, is the Southern funeral – a pokeberry.

Bobby C left this  comment for Gary Wright in June, 2014 – “I have known Gary for near 40 years and if you want wit mixed with down home common sense, he can prove it’s not an oxymoron.”

All images here were taken from Google Images