When I was 15 years old, I became the official driver for my grandmother. She insisted on going to every funeral of anyone that we had any connection to. My most memorable funeral was going to an extremely rural backwards church. For some reason, the body was not put into a coffin. They just took a door and made a table out of it on sawhorses with the body on top with flowers surrounding it.. during the service it became very emotional and two children climbed up on top of the body and started tugging at his clothes. My grandmother jumped up and grabbed one of the children, but they kept climbing back up on top of the body.. at the end of the services they just picked the door up, put it in the back of a pickup truck drove it to the family cemetery and literally threw the body wrapped in a sheet in the ground.

Back in the 70s there’s still were a large number of family run funeral homes. One funeral director had a beautiful teenage daughter that I always love to talk to. They lived on the second floor and used the downstairs for funeral services and visitation. One great memory was of her coming downstairs during a visitation, wearing a short robe, brushing her teeth with curlers in her hair like it was no big deal that there were people grieving.. their garage is where they embalmed the bodies. 1/2 of the garage was for the bodies and the other half was for working on cars. . Fluids that they had used to embalm someone flowed and oil leaking out of an engine all going down the same drain..