The funeral was short the people reflected. Short and sweet, “that was the best I guess” thought the mother of the deceased

“No need to make a production out of him.” He wouldn’t have wanted that. He left no Will, no money, although he worked his entire life.

He would always gamble his money away; as a result his family would be left with not much more than they absolutely needed, more often than not though it was less than that. He was married young

His wife married him out of necessity; her mother always told her, “marry young while you still have a chance.”

Everyone at the funeral carefully thought to themselves, but would not dare say aloud, that the family should have saved everyone the time and just thrown the old man into the incinerator.

-But of course no one said that.

He always was a “quiet person” A woman said looking at his cold emotionless face in that shallow casket, “he never really lived” said his sister.

Oddly enough, no one thought it peculiar that nobody was crying or lamenting his death. The only sign of sorrow that anyone showed was through their blank stares at the deceased.

Nobody seemed to ask or care about how the man had died but there were ones who already knew that he had a stroke in the middle of the night. His father came in the morning to wake him and found him lying there.

The people walked slowly in front of the box, looked down at him, and then gently walked away. Towards the end of the ceremony the family said their goodbyes.

His only son, nineteen years of age, looked down at his father. At his lifeless corpse pinned to a lonely coffin.

They had made him look nice, he thought, with make-up; perhaps so that people wouldn’t be aware that his body was slowly rotting away with every second that ticked by and that within a week this sorry sack of meat would begin the morbid process of putrefaction.

After a time his only son said quietly, “I didn’t really know the man” he walked away. Then the family quietly dumped him in the ground; covered him with six feet of ancient dirt and drove home so that they could act as if they were mourning–as a result they would get a couple of days off of work.