As a music planner and organist, I’ve worked with families on countless funerals, and most requests follow a familiar pattern. But one woman wanted something entirely different. She had loved the original Wizard of Oz movie and asked that the music from it be part of her service. The pallbearers and family friends dressed as the principal characters as they entered the church, with dozens of people dressed as munchkins packed into the pews.
There wasn’t a dry eye in the place when the soloist sang “Over the Rainbow” after the eulogy. But there were plenty of smiles as the coffin was carried out to the cemetery, everyone singing “We’re Off to See the Wizard” at the top of their lungs. Another family asked us to play hardcore gangsta rap for their mother and grandmother, who was in her late eighties. The song had heavy themes of murder, drug use, and pretty foul language.
We happily obliged. Her service finished with a recital of the Lord’s Prayer. The contrast was jarring, but the family loved it, and that’s what mattered. When my grandfather died, we had a request we were afraid was too odd, but the funeral director told us he’d seen much stranger.
Grandpa was a motorcycle man. He had Harleys for as long as I could remember, and even after hip surgery and a doctor’s warning to stop riding, he retooled his bike into a trike just so he could keep going. After he died, my uncle outfitted the trike with a special, very secure and very safe rack so we could take Grandpa to the cemetery in his coffin on the back of the motorcycle. My uncle drove while all the members of Grandpa’s riding club circled him from the funeral parlor to the cemetery.
It was badass and awesome, and I know my grandfather would have loved it. I’m not a funeral organizer, but a control engineer who worked on crematorium oven systems told me some stories. One young man died in a diving accident, and his friends and family wanted him cremated in his diving suit. The crematorium staff told them that couldn’t be done but didn’t explain why.
So the family sneaked the neoprene suit underneath his normal clothing for a proper farewell. The coffin went into the oven, the suit caught fire, and if you’ve ever seen a car tire fire, you know what comes next. Picture the scene: lovely countryside, lush green fields, birds tweeting, an elegant crematorium in the center, and huge black bellowing clouds of smoke pouring out of the chimney visible and smelled across the whole area. Whoops.
The same engineer told me about people sneaking bottles of expensive whiskey into the pockets of the deceased, popular among the Indian population. The combination of an eight-hundred-degree oven and a bottle of forty-percent alcohol is exciting, to say the least. But his best story was about an eco-friendly coffin. The crematorium used a system where the coffin was lifted with two metal forks, inserted into the oven, the door closed halfway, the forks retracted, and the coffin pressed against the door until it closed completely.
That system worked perfectly for wooden coffins. But this guy was into the environment and had a coffin made of recycled cardboard. The forks slid in, the coffin disintegrated instantly in the intense heat, and when the forks retreated, they brought the body right back out of the oven. The family and friends were distraught.
Staff tried pushing the corpse back in with broomsticks. Total chaos. When my sister was killed by a drunk driver, we had to figure out what to do for her funeral and memorial. She was cremated, so we held a lovely memorial at my dad’s place outside and planted a couple of trees for her.
My sister had a big personality and loved to have fun and make people laugh. My other sisters and I decided that instead of wearing black, we’d wear the most outrageous ball gowns we could get our hands on. Mine ended up black with peacock feathers embroidered all over. One of my other sisters wore an enormous orange tutu.
She would have absolutely loved it. It helped make the day a little less bitter and a little more sweet. A family once arranged a Viking funeral, putting the ashes of their loved one out to sea in a little boat fashioned out of salt and covered with dry flour and kindling. They fashioned biodegradable arrows with flaming tips, and everyone shot at the boat until it caught fire and dissolved into the sea.
Now, to be clear, Vikings never actually did any of this, but Hollywood gave people ideas, and apparently it was cool. Put the fun back in funeral. A few years ago, when my grandmother died, my two sisters and two cousins were preparing her body for the viewing. They were all cosmetologists.
My family has a bit of a strange sense of humor, and for anyone who says this might be disrespectful, my granny would have laughed her ass off. They were putting on her makeup and playfully arguing over how it should be done. The argument escalated until they were comparing their own makeup to what they were doing for granny. To get an accurate comparison, they lay down next to the coffin, closed their eyes, and folded their arms on their chests while the others judged and adjusted both their own makeup and granny’s.
It was at that exact moment the funeral director walked in. He opened the door and saw my cousin lying on the floor as though she were dead, with the others giddily adjusting granny’s makeup and using my dead cousin as a reference. There was an awkward pause for a few seconds before the girls burst into laughter. The funeral director was visibly uncomfortable and silently left.
Afterward, they went to apologize, admitting they were just having a bit of fun. He said it was all right, just a bit strange, and admitted he’d chuckled a bit as he walked away. Fast-forward to the service. A family friend was giving the eulogy, and the girls were up front looking at granny, trying to hold back smirks.
A few people noticed. They looked to the back of the room where the funeral director was standing. He flashed them a smirk himself, then closed his eyes and pulled his hands to his chest, imitating a dead person in a coffin. Apparently it took everything they had not to burst out laughing on the spot.
I’m a funeral director and usually ran the back of the house, but I met with families on a few occasions. One time I met with the parents of a sixteen-year-old girl who had died in a car crash. The arrangements were tough at first, because how could they not be. We got the official stuff out of the way and then talked about what she, the deceased, would have wanted.
We ended up rearranging the funeral home so that the lobby had crock pots of boiled peanuts and a lunch with The Lion King playing inside. The main parlor was a purple-themed dance party. The pinnacle of the evening was the girl’s mom leading everyone in doing the Wiggle. It was amazing, and I’m still floored by that family for being able to truly celebrate their daughter’s life that way.
My dad was a funeral director in a small town. One day a guy called and said, “I’m going to be dropping off my foot this afternoon. ” Dad was like, what? The guy was diabetic and had to have his foot amputated.
He had already purchased a burial plot in a local cemetery and wanted his foot buried there, with the rest of him to follow eventually. Sure enough, the guy came in a wheelchair with a big bundle containing his foot. He insisted my dad embalm it, so Dad did. It was buried in his plot.
About a year later, the guy calls again. “I’m going to be bringing over my leg. I need you to embalm it and have it buried. ” His diabetes had continued to progress, and they’d amputated the leg on the opposite side from the one missing its foot.
My dad dutifully embalmed it and arranged for the burial. About another year goes by, and the man finally dies. My dad embalmed him and saw to it that he was buried with all the parts that preceded him in death. A co-worker’s father passed away, and as I was getting to where he was laid out, I heard John Facenda and Myron Cope calling Super Bowl moments, and I was immediately confused.
I got to the main room of the funeral home, and my co-worker’s father was laid out not in a suit but as if he were ready for a Sunday afternoon of Steelers football. There was a TV on showing their first Super Bowl win and all kinds of football memorabilia around. My co-worker said they wanted to lay his father out as they truly remembered him. It was the first time I’d ever seen something like that at a funeral.
I sang in a community choir with a man diagnosed with terminal cancer. The choir performed Handel’s Messiah every year, and this man was our bass soloist on “The People That Walked in Darkness Have Seen a Great Light. ” Even though we didn’t normally sing at church services, his dying request was that we come to his church for the funeral. The minister’s text was “The People That Walked,” and we were told to sing all his favorite hymns.
While we were tearfully warming up on the day, the choir director said he hadn’t specifically requested it, but what if, after the recessional, we surprised everyone by breaking into the Hallelujah Chorus as a reminder that we’ll all be together again someday. So we did. We finished the requested recessional while the pallbearers were recessing, and then burst into Hallelujah before the mourners left. Not a dry eye in the house.
A friend of mine died. He was a musician, locally famous for his TV performances. He was a great, big, fat guy we called Bacon, a lovely mate with lovely blues. He used to perform one particular song very often, and it was obvious it should be played at his funeral.
But we lived in a boring, stiff, Catholic Orthodox country, where the funeral is more about the religious ceremony than the actual dead person getting their goodbyes. The priest wouldn’t allow any non-religious song to be played. So a bunch of friends basically hijacked the whole ceremony. They turned up the speakers and played his song loud and clear for everyone to hear.
Everyone besides the priest was content. His children were really small back then and probably didn’t understand much, but I’m glad they got that memory of a song associated with their father forever. He died of leukemia. When my great uncle passed away, his last request was to have his ashes scattered on the same mountain where my grandpa’s were scattered.
But the way he wanted it done was the weird part. He wanted his ashes put in a plastic bag, hung in a large pine tree, and then have everyone shoot it open with shotguns. Only three family members actually shot, but three shotgun blasts simultaneously shredding a plastic bag full of human ashes is pretty wild. Kind of like one of those gender-reveal balloons.
My great uncle was a weird man. I’m hired frequently to play violin at funerals. One time, a woman died in her late eighties, her entire family there including three or four great grandkids. She had a big family and was well-liked in her community, so there were about a hundred to a hundred-fifty people.
Everyone was dressed super nice, and from talking to everyone, it was clear no one knew what was coming. Turns out their grandmother was a huge Tolkien fan, so she had a Lord of the Rings themed funeral with me playing “Concerning Hobbits,” “Gandalf’s Fall,” and the like. It was fun, but the shock on everyone’s faces was hilarious. My grandmother was supposed to have a Jewish funeral but was accidentally cremated when she died.
So then it was decided by the family to have her cremated after all. Every year my family goes to the same beach, and that year my aunt brought the ashes without telling or asking anyone. My cousins and I took about half of her ashes, put them in a handful of tiny plastic baggies, and taped them to a bunch of bottle rockets. We then gathered the family at the beach and set off the fireworks over the ocean immediately after telling them about the ashes, but that we’d left half of them behind.
No one was mad, and it was agreed by all that she would have loved knowing she went out with a bang. My dad passed away in January. He always joked about wanting popcorn kernels in his pockets when he was cremated. So my siblings and I decided to get full one-pound bags of kernels and pour them all over him in his cremation box.
We also split a Miller High Life, his beer of choice, in his honor and placed that with him as well. The funeral director put our dad into the furnace and closed the door. Seconds later, he hurried us over so we could hear the popping of the popcorn. It was surreal.
At the viewing, everyone was allowed a Miller High Life before the service began, because that’s what he would have wanted. The funeral procession was led by a semi truck, since my dad was an over-the-road driver. When my father was interred, the semi drove through the cemetery parking lot and out onto the street, honking his horn the whole way to honor him. The guys who helped with my family friend’s funeral said they had never seen anything like it.
He had worked in theater since he was a teen, and everyone he knew was theater people. We got to use his old first theater for the funeral, and everyone who was a technician wore their work blacks. He was buried in his blacks. Several actors and musicians performed poems and fitting music, and we sent him off with a curtain close.
It was heart-wrenching, because he had young kids, but it was the perfect funeral for him. A cousin of mine killed himself several years ago, and his service had no religion whatsoever, just family and friends speaking about him. As someone who doesn’t do religion myself, it was so nice not to have all that thrown in. My childhood doctor’s funeral ended nicely when everyone sang his favorite song, “When the Saints Go Marching In.
” I much prefer going to the viewing the night before. There isn’t as much sadness, and you can mingle. I’m living in Germany, and my dad and I help out with funerals sometimes. We have some kind of remnant of the Third Reich called the Reichsbürger.
Just google them. Crazy people. Usually they’re distrusted, but for their comrade who recently passed, they gathered together about fifty people. It was so surreal that something like this still exists and is even allowed to do so.
I didn’t know about this before, and I think I’ll never forget it. My own grandpa’s funeral was memorable. Grandpa had very clearly requested one specific preacher, even though I’d met this guy before and it was obvious he had early signs of dementia. But that’s who Grandpa wanted.
He got up there at the funeral and started complaining about everything from cell phones to unions, gay people, elevators, and how beautiful women are. I literally think he forgot he was at a funeral, because he didn’t mention my grandpa once. It was really upsetting, and he contradicted a lot of grandpa’s strongly held beliefs. As a musician, I played for the funeral of a fallen RCMP officer.
There were six uniformed officers standing behind me as I played. One officer stood right behind me and read the lyrics off my sheet music as he sang along. It was distracting, but in a good way. It was a nice service, mostly police and medical emergency crews in attendance.
I kind of have a thing for uniforms. The most memorable was playing for my auntie’s funeral. The church was filled to capacity with over four hundred people. When asked to perform a solo, I didn’t dare look up until I finished.
When I did, I gasped. There were people lined up because all the pews were full, people lined up in the hall and outside. The entire church was listening, many with their eyes closed. Seeing my dad and mom watch me as they cried nearly broke my heart.
It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, even harder than playing at my own mum’s funeral.