Celebrations..??!

Over the last couple o’weeks I’ve been around/involved in/have overheard/etc. plans dealing with weddings, birthdays, funerals, retirement parties, etc. Two things all these celebrations seem to have in common:
1. They all have to do with a single person (i.e. the birthday person, retiree, etc.) or single select group (i.e. the wedding couple, the family of the deceased, etc.).
2. The planning of said … celebrations? (a rather inappropriate title for a funeral, I realize, just bear with me) … wind up having nothing to do with the wishes and feeling of those for whom the entire occasion is supposed to represent!

What do I mean? Okay, let’s say you’re getting married. You’re going to have an actual wedding. You and your soon-to-be have all these grand ideas of how you want things to go. You have your guest lists (which you manage to hopefully condense into one list without breaking the engagement). You have, perhaps, your own vows written. You’ve picked out your music and have burned a stack of CDs full of same. You know what pictures you want taken and how you want everyone posed. This is, after all your day … right? Ah, but then the parents get involved and they know what’s best. The priest/preacher/chaplain/minister/boat captain/pilot/justice-o’the-peace/president/grand-poo-bah-of-marital-bliss steps in with they way he/she/they have always done it, and thus is how it shall be, forever, and ever, amen (alternately, “Ar! Walk th’ plank if ye don’t agree, me hardy! I be the cap’n o’this here boat!”). The photographer decides what pictures he thinks are nice. The music director no one remembers hiring tosses your CDs in the trash because he, after all, knows best what music to play. Next thing you know, Dear Aunt Tilda-May, a life-long spinster decides that everyone is wrong and she, quite obviously somehow an expert at weddings, having avoided her own for 60+ years, demands that everything be done her way.

Next thing you know, you are, on your day, on the day folks are supposed to come together to celebrate your union, being ordered around by parents, ministers/captains/grand-pooh-bahs, /Dear Aunt Tilda-May, etc. You find yourself being yanked from place to place by a pushy photographer, whose orders you cannot hear over the blaring crap the music director is blaring out over the building’s tinny sound system. With your day thus stolen, you can at least, in the inevitable times of trouble ahead, look at each other and say with some honesty, “Look, if we survived our wedding and managed to not kill any of our loved ones, we can work through anything!”

Okay, what about birthdays, retirements, and similar celebrations? They are, in general, about one person. Okay, there’re the occasional multiple births, and sometimes more than one person retires from a firm on the same date. But still, even then, you’re dealing with a celebration for each of the individuals, no matter how many are crammed into the same room wearing idiotic cone-shaped hats and eating food they’ll need six months of dieting to overcome. These days are supposed to be about celebrating the achievement(s) of the (wo)man of the day, right? Well … yes, supposedly so. But, once again, everyone starts making plans for where they’ll hold the party, who will be invited, what presents are or are not appropriate, where we all go for dinner, … Then next thing you know the celebration is no longer about the birthday boy, retiree, employee-of-the-month, or whatever. No, it’s about the person-of-the-day submitting to everyone else’s whim.

Go back and read that last bit again. Think about it. Yes, it becomes a day dedicated to the main celebrant having to submit to everyone else’s whims. Even if anyone bothers to ask what the subject of the celebration wishes, or I he manages to voice a meager protest, his words will be in vain. The Planners know what is best. Do not question them. Just grit your teeth, locate all emergency exits, and count the minutes as they fly by like hours … slow hours … swimming through thick molasses … in January.

This brings us ‘round to the solemn subject of funerals. What the HELL gives ANYONE the right to dictate how a grieving loved one must act? What if I just want to be alone with my grief? Huh? What then? What if I just want to have a quiet gathering of only a tiny handful of the deceased’s closest loved ones at grave-side? Everyone else can gather together somewhere and support each other, right? I mean, why do I, while trying to control my own miserable grief, have to deal with the melo-dramatic bleating of someone who couldn’t bother to come see this loved one when they were bloody alive but show up at the funeral and do their dead-level best (no pun intended) to jerk tears out of everyone else?! I just LOVE the comment made by some aunt or other that I overheard to the shattered teenage daughter of a lovely lady taken by cancer. There, in front of her open casket, just as the young lady had managed to bravely compose herself, this over-perfumed hippopotamus wrapped her in a crushing hug, managed to wring out a few tears of her own, and blubbered, “Oh! It’s soooo sad! You’re mother will never see you graduate school, marry, or give her grandchildren! You must be so sad!” Thankfully there were several people between me and the blubbering hippopotamus so there was not, in fact, a need for a second funeral.

Ah, then, of course, we have the funeral director/minister/priest/ necromancer/whatever. Why, oh why do these people feel like it is their solemn, sworn duty to further upset everyone present? First they insist on playing fecking sad, stupid dirges. Okay, we’re not upset enough. Our loved one has died, they’re gone, they are no longer here, we must shuffle on through Life without them. I think that point is abundantly clear. In case anyone forgot why we’re all here wearing black and it’s not a Goth party, why, there’s the corpse lying in state right in the front of the room. Yeah. I think we all know why we’re here, thank you. If we are not personally upset by the loss, then we are present to comfort those we love who are devastated. So, with that in mind, why on God’s Green Earth do these fecking vultures feel the need to play the saddest, most tear-jerking songs ever written? Then they’ll get up in front of the grieving family and see how much more emotional damage they can render upon them. There, they should offer a brief litany about how good a life the deceased has led, how we’ll all miss them, sure, but they are beyond pain now, and would, no doubt, berate us at this moment for being so sad … etc., etc. Do they do this? No. Instead they look at those in the audience who are already hysterical or very close there to and begin firing off painful quip after barbed dirge. This minister will look at the deceased’s son, a young man barely holding it together and trying to keep his own children from hysterics, and he will then begin to relate the saddest tale he ever heard about the young man’s childhood. I’ve found that making a clear, steely-eyed promise of the most painful death that can be envisioned will often silence such a man … but it often upsets other present. Oh, well, can’t win ‘em all, right?

So, what’s this social commentary and rant all about, then? Just that, as food for thought, consider the next time you are in a position to plan some activity on the behalf of another’s accomplishment/celebration/grief, that perhaps, just perhaps, since this day belongs to them, it is they that should get first choice at what transpires. Oh, and take your birthday gag gifts, embarrassingly sexual wedding presents, etc. and stuff ‘em where the sun don’t shine. Donate that money to some charity in the honorary’s name instead. We’ll all feel better then, m’kay?