Struggling to get it off my mind, I furiously said to my wife, “If you ever do something like that to me, I’d fucking kill you!” only to realize how stupid I sounded for saying that; after all, what I was referring to would mean that she’d be already dead.
“Do you ever realize how at funerals, people always talk about the dead in a positive light?”
“Fucking Tradition!”
No one ever referred to the Decease as a fucking prick, an ass-hole, a whore nor a good-for-nothing-son-of-a-bitch; of course not, that would be so disrespectful and untraditional.
But considering this shitty world, we live in, where glimmers of kindness are adored as poetry, it’s obvious that people are more ass-holes and good-for-nothing-son-of-bitches more than they are decent and sincere.
And while some people are afraid of spiders, snakes, and violent outbreaks, my phobia has always been to live a lie; you know, to die with a secret or to then realize that what or who I thought was real, wasn’t even real.
For me, that would be so fucking tragic.
But unfortunately, like I said, people are ass-holes so it does happen.
Mr. and Mrs. Jones were married for sixty years and had three children together. I don’t know all of the details, but with sixty years of marriage, our imaginations can run wild with the bond that they shared, how much they cared and the storms they weathered. Still, I was a little blown away to learn that those storms included an act of infidelity on the part of Mrs. Jones, some forty-plus years earlier.
I guess that I just can’t see past the innocence of a frail old woman known to me as Mrs. Jones, whom might once had been drop dead gorgeous, chased by many men and gave into temptation. Still, that’s irrelevant to my point.
Mr. Jones, on the other hand, who had been sick for years, eventually died last week and as expected the now widowed Mrs. Jones was devastated. Her lifelong love is no longer here. His death burdened her and because most of the money that they had, had been spent on hospital fees, she was again burdened by the cost of funeral expenses.
Pitied for being broke and heartbroken, she scraped together donations which allowed her to afford a half-decent funeral for her husband of sixty years.
And in her beautiful eulogy she embarrassingly expressed their financial strain, based upon her husband’s deteriorating health which led to his demise, before thanking friends and family for their support.
But a few days later, while going through some of her husband’s belongings, Mrs. Jones was gobsmacked to discover that Mr. Jones had a secret sole-access bank account with over a quarter of a million dollars in it.
The expression on her face said it all; it said that if she could retract the words from her eulogy, they would read “Son of a bitch!” but the only thing Mrs. Jones managed to murmur amid her tears was “He never forgave me!”