Funeral At Red Lobster

Crow was in town to be there for his mother as they buried her sister who had died of old age and a stubborn refusal to stop smoking. He asked me if I wanted to go and I decided to tag along seeing as how I had never been at an open casket funeral, particularly one for someone who belonged to a family as notoriously dysfunctional as Crow's. I had seen plenty of Hollywood funerals in movies and on TV and their sentimentality always seemed hollow as a cross fade and a few jokes got everyone moving again.

As we drove up through the Dallas to the funeral home I realized how it was that a funeral could be such an expensive endeavor, simply because this one was so "bare-bones". We had been traveling through the city and into the worst dregs of the strip-mined strip-shopping center run-down parts of town. It was a hard to imagine that we were on our way to a funeral.

We passed graveyards by the highway, shaded by motels and billboards that had sprung up around it, I couldn't imagine that a burial would have to be party to the sound of passing cars during any final words.

Not that I'm one to get sentimental about a big fancy funeral. Still though, I could see the charisma of being able to drive through a small town, and not battle with three lanes of traffic trying to drive from the funeral house to the graveyard. We arrived at the funeral home, located in a parking lot next to some office buildings and a golf store. Crow told me this place used to be a Red Lobster that he went to with his family as a kid. You could see the vestiges of the franchise restaurant hidden inside of the building.

The Dallas Funeral Home sign was clearly atop a high metal mast for the sole reason that it has once been used to advertise the seafood eatery. But pressure washing the years away had gotten rid of the fried fishy smell that must have once permeated every inch of drywall, and new paint and plywood had created the somber setting that was needed. I wondered how many All-You-Can-Eat Fried Shrimp nights had been clogging the arteries of future clientele for the building's new incarnation.

Everybody was pretty casual- dress shirts and jeans, the sorts of outfits I always tried to get away with at home but never could slip past my parents who insisted on their son looking 'nice'. Everybody greeted one another mostly cordially and all eyes were dry in the house, the effect of which made it pretty hard to get into funeral mode.

My Hollywood idea of what a funeral was supposed to be was getting in the way of reality.

I was just in another strip shopping center in Dallas and I didn't feel like we should be conducting a wake here any more than we should be, say, taking a corpse's hearse through a Burger King drive thru.

I made myself scarce in a pew while family members exchanged greetings and sympathies. Crow had always told me about the dysfunctional family he came from and looking around I wondered what the toll was of growing up in an abusive household. There was no doubting the toll the years had taken on the people there- life was wearing out the gloss in their eyes, gravity seemed to pull just a little harder on their faces; others overcame their environment and wore their new success on their sleeves and in the process, distanced themselves from the relatives and life they didn't want to remember, much less be a part of.

Crow sat down next to us as they closed the casket and began the service. They started it off with music- a song rang out over the PA. It was a Grateful Dead tune. I don't know any of their songs by name but it was one of those beautiful songs about death and eternity that they do so well. The vocals broke through the cheap speakers and the music streamed through and everyone fell silent like the beginning of a sermon being preached by the resurrected body of Jesus himself.

I remembered the forgotten function of music then: that being the ability of good music- such a rare thing- to wash away the reality of the present moment, no matter how normal or awful or regular it might be, and replace it with the heartache and soul and poetry of life and all its abstract ways of movement that usually escaped our ability to put into words.

Everybody in the room felt the same way I did, we were are linked together in that moment through the song.

The function of a metropolitan city is only to grow and pave over itself and make money and provide for itself and its people way before anything like culture and beauty can come into consideration.

The function of Hollywood and all of its filmed funerals and weddings and unlikely dramas and impossible romances is to create a fake reality that has to keep outdoing itself from movie to movie to satisfy the unlikely theory of its marketing executives who believe that audiences always demand more.

The power of music is to do what neither of those can accomplish, to provide an escape and create a reality with real heart and genuine soul. I imagined speakers on the corners of all the dilapidated buildings and parking lots of America, reminding us to act from our hearts and to remember our humanity. Any notion of banality and conformity would be gone, the way it was at this funeral in a Red Lobster.