Overheard

Two old ladies sitting over their pub lunch, a bottle of wine between them, the level well down.
They are discussing the funeral of a mutual friend of theirs.

"Nice turnout and plenty of good hymns. I enjoyed that. I like a nice funeral."

"Yes, me too. Molly had a good life, 92 and not a day’s illness.”

"She was never the same again after that time she went to visit her family in America and crashed her car on the way home from the airport.”

"That was only two years ago, game old girl, wasn’t she? Do you remember the time she got on the wrong plane? That was in America too.”

"Or the time we were supposed to meet her in Mellington and she drove all the way to Newtown, after she’d missed the turn-off?”

"Yes, she was a one, that Molly. But coming home from the airport, crashing her car on the A49, and then opening her front door and finding the place flooded, that was too much for her. She never really got over that, you know. I’d have died of shock there and then."

"Hadn’t she forgotten to switch the boiler off before she left?”

"Yes, she told me herself. Always cheerful and head like a sieve, our Molly."

The ladies lift their glasses in tribute to their friend and smile.

"Didn’t she have a marvellous death, though? Simply went to sleep and never woke up. Marvellous.
That’s the way I’d love to go. It was lucky her daughter came round to see how she was. She found her dead in bed, all peaceful. Marvellous."

The ladies sip and smile again.

After a while, one of them says, "yes, a marvellous death. That’s what I’d like for myself too. Mind you, I would hope they'd find me before I start to smell."

For some reason the ladies find this remark hilarious. Spluttering and flushing bright scarlet, their faces low over the table, foreheads almost touching, they collapse into uncontrollable giggles. All subsequent words are drowned in laughter.


I was tempted to ask if they do funeral orations.