I often have a little chuckle to myself when ever I pass a funeral chapel, because I recall that when I was younger, the term "funeral chapel" was confusing. A chapel in my vocabulary was a place where two people wed. While at the same time, I knew that a funeral was aplace to honor someones death. Therefore as the imaginative child that I was I put the two together.
So as the family car would drive past and there would be a line of cars I would think to myself "Aw, two dead people are getting married. I'm glad they could find love after death." Yes, I suppose that is a little macabre for an adolescent to think but as my family can attest to, that's me.
My thoughts of two dead people getting married didn't end there. As the car continued onwards to our destination my mind was still at the funeral chapel, it answered all sorts of questions for me. The hearse for example, it finally made sense, it was the limo for the deceased couple! It also became obvious as to why beauticians were needed; of course old aunt Gertrude would want to look her best on her wedding day. The cemetery was of course the reception where as a family we would send our loved ones off into postmortem marital bliss.
I suppose the strangest part of all this is that I had already attended a few funerals, I knew there were no weddings, just the putting to rest our dearly departed and yet, when I thought back to those funerals, not one of them took place at a funeral chapel. So it was, to me, still a separate event. Not every person found love after death and so not every dead person used funeral chapels.
The little ditty would spring to mind, "ding dong, the wedding bells are going to chime!" It all became so practical and real. Something old, well that would be the bride and groom. Something new, their caskets would be new. Something blue? A lot of old women have blueish looking hair. In my mind the deceased couple didn't resemble the rotten corpses from say Thriller, but more like the heavily perfumed, caked on makeup that still resembled a living person, they walked much stiffer and there eyes were closed but other than that the wedding proceeded as normal. Friends and family would sit in attendance and the couple would mumble their vows...Exhausting this fantasy, my mind would come back to the real world and my attention would be caught by something equally interesting or confusing. But I never forgot the oddities that are funeral chapels.
So the next time you drive by a funeral chapel, you will have to ask yourself, "Did I just hear wedding bells?"
