I laughed a lot at my father’s funeral. The evening before the ceremony, I stayed up late with my mother and our friends Bart and Ruth, trying to compose an appropriate eulogy. My little sisters, who had just turned eleven, had fallen asleep on the couch. When we tried out the speeches we came up with, they sounded so pathetically silly – “Thank you all for coming, Mike regrets not being able to be here himself…” “Mike has led a full and satisfying life…” “Every life must end, and so did Mike’s…” – that we couldn’t recite them without being overcome by giggles. The funeral itself felt like an absurdist play. The procession from the funeral hall to the grave took so long and was so abruptly twisty that I thought the master of ceremonies had lost his way. As we slowly proceeded along the winding gravel paths between the neat rows of graves, passing through somber islands of conifer trees and along stone walls that sheltered the dead from the hustle of Amsterdam, I imagined the master of ceremonies’ rising panic at the realization that he didn’t remember the location of the grave and was leading the dead man and the solemn line of mourners in a haphazard walk through forgotten corners of the cemetery. Read more…
