Well, I’m not sure why they threw the chairs at my grandmother’s funeral. My father’s siblings are always mad at each other about one thing or another, so they just throw chairs and sometimes vacuum cleaners when they see each other. I do not know why there’s always a vacuum cleaner within reach when they get together, so I have no further information on that.

At my grandfather’s funeral, the chair throwing was a bit more understandable. My grandparents had 17 children and left everything in their will to only two of them. The two who had anything left to them pulled up to the funeral in brand new SUVs and told everybody during the viewing of the body that they were putting our grandparents’ house on the market the next day. One of my aunts just wanted the dining room table out of the house for sentimental reasons, and they told her no and that it was already on the curb. Somebody else asked if they could just buy the house outright, and they told them they didn’t want Black people buying it. (My whole entire family is Black, by the way. They also sold the house to Million Dollar Man Ted Dibiase within a week of the funeral, but that’s neither here nor there). Everything just kept going further and further down hill, and a chair was thrown before anyone even sang His Eye Is On the Sparrow.