Saturday, April 08, 2006
MOURNING IN THE MORNING
In this photo you see the three areas all set up. In the nearest and biggest canopy is the catering area and a seating area - I'm not sure if there was any order to it, other than the family seemed to be in the one on the far right of the picture, and they had a couple of special boxes there on the table - wondered once if it might have been ashes, because there was no hearse at the funeral today - the man was a member however, so I'm not sure. The funeral was to start at 8:30 AM and did get going about 9:15. But once they were through inside the chapel - took about an hour and a half, they moved out into the shaded areas and began the social aspect - at 4:30 in the afternoon they were starting to slow down a bit - with food served and if you look carefully you can see the big PA over by the "family" stand which played music all day long - they had to run a cord to our building to get power because the church wouldn't handle it.
This group of ladies were some of the last - notice the dark dresses and the three just entering the canopy were doing the African shuffle as part of the service - nothing official - just feeling the spirit. It must have cost a fortune to pay for the catering - given the number of people and how long they stayed. I was in the office and heard "Here comes Peter Cotton tail - hopping down the bunny trail" being played over and over and over again - so I went out and commented to Barb that I couldn't understand why that would be such a popular funeral song - turned out she was hunting Easter Cards on the internet and that's where the music was coming from.
This picture was from the funeral a week earlier - the caskette was loaded on the back of this pick up truck and then as many mourners as possible piled on as well - I wondered if the front wheels would even stay on the road. Several of them had a white handerchief around their heads and they sing and yell and generally make some pretty strange sounds as they go - the graveyard was 50 kilometres away so they were probably pretty hoarse when they got there - but they all returned for the goodies - interestingly - everyone waited for over two hours for them to return before they started the social part - no where to go, and no pressure to get there! One other point of interest - the week previous had two people they honored - not related nor even known one to the other, but they had the same ceremony - paid tributes to each of them individually and had the two funerals at the very same time. I"m sure however each group had to furnish their own goodies.
