Funeral poems

Funeral poems are strange things. The poems we have at the mortuary for families to choose to have printed in the programs or Mass cards are nice, and families usually choose from the most popular 6 or 8, and those same ones always seem to have deep meaning to the family,which I suppose gets lost on me, as I read them and hear them a lot.

I had a funeral Mass yesterday that was very large, for a young guy that died of heart problems. The family was all really nice and the siblings of the deceased were my age, so it was easy to talk to them like normal people, not like elders. They were funny, laughing a bit during the arrangement conference which is always nice, and everything went smoothly. It helped too that the parents of the deceased were in fairly good spirits too considering. It really is crazy, the differences between grief reactions of families that are anticipating a death and those that have a family member die suddenly. Anyhoo, after the Eucharist, the Monsignor allowed one of the family members to say a eulogy, and at the end of the eulogy the gal read a poem from The Family Guy:

Oh squiggly line in my eye fluid. I see you lurking there on the peripheral of my vision.
But when I try to look at you, you scurry away.
Are you shy, squiggly line?
Why only when I ignore you, do you return to the center of my eye?
Oh, squiggly line, it's alright, you are forgiven.

It’s strange, but it really stuck with me. Hmmm…