ITALIANS

    Lately, I have been thinking about all the funerals I have been to.  I think they are a strange way to say goodbye.  Even the funerals for my parents.  My parents had so many siblings.  And so  I went to a lot of funerals while I was growing up.  One of my dad’s brother’s died when I was about 21.  When I went up to the casket,  I remember looking at my uncle and grinning.  I wasn’t close to him at all.  So I felt almost nothing and thought that it was messed up to be in a casket like that.  I watched a cousin in tears and I wondered how close she was to him.  Then I saw my parents and they weren’t too shaken.  They would just make the rounds and see everyone.  One time my mother was walking out of a wake for another uncle and my cousin Lynette stopped her and said, “Aunt Eva, are you bringing your cannolis tomorrow?  My mother said, I am defrosting the dough to make “Pit than quze.”  I am phonetically spelling this but they were these spinach pies that my mother made from a recipe passed down from my dad’s mother.  Lynette said, “So?” My mother said, “So I don’t have time to make cannoli’s.”   Lynette said, “Well, what about tomorrow?” My mother said she was making a different kind of cookie tomorrow.  Lynette followed my mother out the door trying to convince her to make her famous cannoli’s.  It's all about the food for us.  My cousin Jeff at one funeral went up to a cousin, shook her hand and said, “Thank you for coming.”  He handed her a picture of herself in the 60’s. He was so serious when he did it, that she thought he was upset that our uncle died.  He wasn’t. It was her high school picture with the Dr. Zhivago French twist that all the girls wore back then.  We all giggled over this.

  Nothing beats my Aunt Kay at my mother’s wake and funeral.  We kept the casket closed and I’m glad, but she began crying and then screaming, “Eva! EVA!!!!” She sounded like a monkey.  My mother was the youngest of seven and Kay was the oldest.  My mother was also the first to die which threw her siblings for a loop.  They all expected her to outlive them.  “Eva!  Eva!”  Then my mother's sister, Aunt Clara,  started shaking and doing the same thing.  I heard one uncle say, “There they go.”  I guess this is what they did at funerals, but I never saw it.  So my cousin Joyce tried to calm down Aunt Clara and told me I had to come over.  So I did and Aunt Clara couldn’t let go of me.  Her husband came over, tried to pry her arms away from me and said, “Ok.. let her go.”  She wouldn’t.  It was like a Marx Brothers routine. Then at the funeral, my Aunt Kay did the same thing.  As the priest was saying the Lord’s prayer when we were all outside at the cemetary, she started screaming again.  We passed out pink roses as those were my Mom’s favorite  and she threw her’s and hit my My Uncle Joe with it. Uncle Joe was one of my mom's brothers.  He tried to restrain her and she said, “I love you Joe, but I love EVA!!!”  When he died about a year later very suddenly, his daughter Micki told me Aunt Kay would look at the open casket and scream, “Get up Joe!!! Get up!!!”  I had missed this and I am glad.  After my mother’s funeral, we talked and laughed about everyone.  We kept imitating Aunt Kay.  So much so that pretty soon my not quite 2 year old nephew was doing it.  It seems we could have had as much fun giving a party.  It would have been cheaper.