If that was staged, it was brilliant! If it wasn't, stuff like this happens.
A friend died. Let's call him Don. He was our age; one of the gang. More than a party buddy. The circumstances of his death took us all by surprise. It was a side of him none of us had known; his dark secret you might say.
So we were all knocked off balance from this. Of course, we went to his funeral. Well, it was in a little town out in the boondocks none of us had been to. We got lost and entered the open casket service late. We filed in to the little church, a lot of the people inside swiveled around to look.
It must have happened to all of us at once! I took one look at Don and thrust my hands to my mouth to silence and cover it and almost dove into an empty pew to hide. My friends were right behind me and I could hear them choking back laughter as well. You see, either by a quirk of the Gods or design, Don had the :censored::censored::censored::censored:eatingest smirk on his face you could ever imagine! The thing was, it was SOOO VERY DON! We had seen him make this smirk many a time -- usually at the very peak of whatever insane party we were having.
We couldn't even look at each other and we didn't have to because each knew exactly what the other was going through. And then, the Priest began to speak his eulogy. Don had never told us, but his parents were Slavic, from the old country and attended a Slavic Church with a lot of people from the old country who were all trying to speak English. The Priest made a valiant effort but was so bad at pronunciation, well...get the picture? We howled in unison!
We couldn't help ourselves. We had to leave and we were incapable of doing so gracefully. I never really thought until now how that may have caused some people a lot of pain, but at the time, it was just more funny than anyone of us could stand who really knew Don and we were also caught up in the irony that none of us really knew Don.
We laughed for months. Never have I received such a wonderful gift from a dead man!
