My Students Threw Me a Funeral
By: Daniel Williams
Tags: Schools, Comedy, Humor, Teaching, Death

Image by elukac from Pixabay

I’ve thought a lot about my funeral, and I’ve decided the only way it’ll be any good, is if I’m alive for it.

I can be dressed uncharacteristically in a suit. The mortician can use makeup to make me smoking hot. There can be a sermon, a slideshow, even an open mic, fine, but I have to be alive. Why? Because a funeral is a symphony. The attendees are the orchestra.

Who is the conductor? Only the most valuable player: the stunningly spruced up person in the box.

Which is why funerals suck. The conductor is dead.

image by author

The orchestra warms up and tunes, the instruments making their mad chatter, then suddenly the conductor arrives. A stern looking strong man wheels him to the head of the orchestra on a hand truck.

The conductor doesn’t tell the musicians to begin, because he’s dead, so they do their best to start on their own and then play through the entire long song without a leader. And it’s out of control: the violins cry at random times; the oboes, flutes, and piccolos try to out-scream each other; and the kettledrums boom unexpectedly, stealing the limelight like ill-timed farts. It all sounds like a stampede of undomesticated instruments. Why? You know why:

Again, the conductor is dead.

I’ve also thought of funerals as failed award shows where the host says:

“And the Lifetime Achievement Award goes to…Dan Williams!”

The audience loses its mind. Beatle mania. People shrieking, fainting, people hugging friends and enemies, and everyone waiting for Dan Williams to take the stage, seize his trophy, and then deliver a thank-you speech that breaks hearts and then rebuilds them as strong as his own.

But our host gets a little nervous when he doesn’t see Dan Williams weaving his way through the packed auditorium. The host glances around frantically.

Where is he?

The crowd’s roar rises. The people are on their feet: leaping, dancing as if possessed. Their roaring transforms into a chant:

“We want Dan! We want Dan!”

The host is bathing in a hell-bath of sweat. It’s clear to him now: Dan isn’t coming to the stage, and he thinks, I’m going to have to do this. To say something.

So, he says something, something he hopes will capture the meaning of this magnificent life, but everything that comes out of his mouth is empty and lame, declawed, not capturing even one percent of the missing man’s meaning.

The audience writhes in discomfort. Their chant has gone silent, gone internal. It focuses hatefully on the host and has changed to this:

“Say it better! Say it better! Say it better!”

image by author

But the host can’t say it better. He has the right emotions, just not the words. In fact, he’s overflowing with the perfect emotions for the moment, because Dan was not only a good friend to him, but saved his marriage and taught him how to be strong enough to stand up to his father, and his children, and to demand a promotion at work, and to write poetry, but again, the words fail the host. There’s too much stress over the absence of Williams, too much pressure from the audience to say something that will mean everything.

Thankfully, he doesn’t have to suffer long, because audience members, one by one, rush the stage and mercifully steal the mic from him.

This event has become an open mic.

The host mops the sweat off his face and thinks, “Thank God. Maybe one of them will be able to say it.”

But he quickly realizes this is not to be. The audience members do a worse job than he did. They’re blubbering. They’re snorting into the mic like pugs. These people are machines made to produce one thing: clichés. They produce them all:

“He was the life of the party.”

“He would have loved this event.”

“He’s in a better place.”

“There’s a reason for everything.”

“It’s all part of God’s plan.”

Audience member after audience member astounds themselves by witnessing as their worlds on fire with emotion transform into empty phrases on the little journey from their brains to their mouths.

Everyone leaves the event, shaken. They came to celebrate a life but ended up taking all the vastness of living and shrink wrapping it in a dead language, words that turned 90 years of rocking it like a warrior poet into a drunk dial to the ex.

To this, I say, “No thank you.”

See me in my casket, alive, dressed to the nines, and ready to conduct the daylights out of this funeral.

Pastor Steve starts preaching beyond the time limit I set for him. Clearly, he sees this as his moment to prove to the audience that he, like the MVP, can turn a phrase.

I sit up out of my comfy box and say, “Okay, Steve. That’ll do.” Then I lie back down and start clapping. The audience joins me. We clap Steve off the stage.

Slide Show

An idiot forgets to kill the lights. I sit up again and glare at the AV guy who I notice isn’t dressed for the occasion. Tsk-tsk. Just because we aren’t friends, Travis, and you feel untouchable in the sound booth, doesn’t mean you get to wear hobo clothes to this, the most significant day of your working life.

image by author

Not only does Travis forget the lights; he didn’t test the sound before the event. Sarah McLachlan starts off way too quiet, ruining the first seven images of me as a baby.

I flip out of my casket now, hurl Travis from the sound booth, take the helm, and then we start again, and we start right.

Lights off. Cue McLachlan. Loud. Cue baby images of me. I return to my box and enjoy the sounds of delight and bitter-sweet agony from the audience as they watch my life in pictures and weep for all they’re worth. I weep too.

But oh no. The slide show is super long. Even I’m getting bored. My aunt Jinny constructed this show, and it seems she doesn’t have any idea how attention spans work. She imagined people enjoying 9 hours of every image of me that exists.

I don’t blame her. I understand how she made this mistake. I am fascinating in picture form. But even baby pictures of Jesus would lose the audience after a while.

I jump from the box again, fade down the music, stop the slide show, then fade up the lights.

There would have been an awkward moment here if I wasn’t alive and able to tell the audience members to look under their chairs for the complimentary gift baskets filled with my best books, in other words, all my books. And candy.

Open Mic

image by author

Back in the box again, I listen as people do their best. They’re a little nervous because I’ve installed a trap door beneath them. When a person yammers on too long, twisting this moment into a compliment for themselves; or when they start in on the clichés; or when they passively insult me, I hit a button built into the casket and send them falling with a scream through the stage.

It’s a very long fall. Maybe into water. Maybe into a foam pit. Maybe not. Some people need a little concrete awakening.

The Wake Party

My casket is equipped with wheels and a steering wheel. I drive it onto the dance floor and blow everybody’s mind with my Evil Knievel level tricks: burn outs, side-wheelies, conventional wheelies, and donuts.

The food? Doughnuts. And pizza. The drink? Mountain Dew. The music? Accordions. Not polka-style. Are you kidding? Pirate-style. And mad, melancholic Russian piano music. And very angry rap.

My Classroom Funeral

I just had a birthday and my students surprised me with a classroom full of balloons and also a few gifts. I noticed right away the biggest gift, a huge box that resembled a casket.

“Looks like a casket,” I said. “Is it my casket?”

“Open it,” they said.

I went over and reached for the lid, and just when my fingers were an inch away, the lid exploded open and out jumped a screaming student, prompting me to yell in terror.

After the scarer joined the rest of the students, I had an idea about the empty casket.

I put the box up on my big desk and said, “Who has a camera?”

“We do,” everyone said.

I climbed into the box. “I need pictures.”

We didn’t have flowers, but we did have a ton of free range balloons, so the students selected a few and placed them tastefully over my dead legs.

I crossed my arms like Dracula, and then the students filed past the casket, saying their goodbyes while I watched them through squinted eyes.

After everyone had a good long look at me and prayed in their hearts that I wasn’t in hell, I did what a body ought to do at a funeral: I sat up. I climbed out. I opened presents. I partied. I taught. I partied some more.

It struck me later that my students had given me my dream funeral. I got to lie in a comfortable box and feel like the destructive payload of a USS Enterprise photon torpedo. I got to be observed like a rare artifact. I got to play dead then rise from the dead and then receive presents and then teach the assembled masses from my storehouse of wisdom.

It strikes me now that this is probably the only funeral of its kind I’m ever going to get.

At the next funeral of mine, which could be next week, or decades away, the mood will be very different. Relatives and friends will gather to say appropriate, meaningful words, but in their grief they won’t be able to pull it off. They’ll need help. They’ll need my help.

But I’m dead.