I attended an unexpected funeral this week, along with maybe two hundred guests. For me, it was a mostly dry-eyed affair.

Little else can make you feel alien to the human experience as sitting in a room of sniffles and suppressed sobs while you are only thinking about how you forgot to mute your phone. Is it better to do so now, and risk getting caught looking at your phone during a funeral? Maybe you just live with the low-level anxiety it might go off at any minute. But what if you could manage to stealth get away with muting it? Perhaps during the prayer? Theoretically. everyone else will have their eyes closed. The perfect crime, right? But oof, if they catch you. And they might catch you, because honestly, once you get on your phone, you might have to check twitter just to break up the dreariness of funeral thoughts.

To prove I’m not a monster (or maybe prove I am a monster, I guess, depending on your overall sense of decency) I knew the star of the show for about four years, and lost contact over ten years ago. She was not quite old enough to be my mother, and we met through a church group. So although I knew her well in some sense, my knowledge was specific and narrowly defined. Dearly Departed was deeply ensconced in the Christian Rancher lifestyle, which around here has a visual and verbal style clearly denoting who is a member of the group (spoiler alert: I am not*).

To set this stage with further uncomfortable honesty, in the past month, I’ve had two separate encounters with middle aged white women in my area, who cozied up with small talk peppered with yellow flags until inevitably red flagging into what I perceived to be white supremacist bullshit.

Two in one month has left me feeling like Young Goodman Brown. Only instead of witches, it turns out bigots are crawling out of the woodwork. And the part I can’t let go of — what scares and disgusts me — is how they must’ve thought I was one of them, to have felt comfortable saying what they did, in such nudge-nudge and wink-wink tones.

So at the risk of offending some of you, I also took a gander at the swath of funeral goers, with their button down western wear and big belt buckles, and assumed I was in the land of (majority 50+ year old) Republicans, probably more Trumpians than I’d care to hang out with, and perhaps an unknown (but obviously larger than I had believed two months ago) amount of coming-out-of-the-closet-loud-and-proud racists.

All this to say I was not feeling particularly safe to be vulnerable and tearful, so much as on my guard.

The memorial service started out pretty standard fare. Eulogy, guitar hymnal, lights dimmed for slide show set to spiritually toned country music. About 45 minutes in, a call for open mike statements.

Which is when it became the Most Interesting Funeral I have EVER Attended. **

At the mention of open mike speakers, a burly, shiny-headed-balding man flagged his hand in a commanding way that insisted on being called upon. But when he got selected, it was his wife who stood. Crisp white tailored button down with subtle embroidery over the breast, oversized belt buckle adorned with sparkle, dark denim, full face of make up, heels.

She appeared to be near the same age as Dearly Departed, and wavered behind the podium at the beginning, like she might drop. She started with the stuff you might expect in such a setting: The deceased had helped her connect to Christ’s Eternal Love, and because of that, we all knew the deceased was ‘good people’ who even as we wept was in the loving arms of her holy father.

The speaker identified Dearly Departed as her best friend. And in recounting how the two first became friends, things got… a little sexy. Which was oddly contrary to the way in which the speaker recounted this tale. Straight forward, minimal, and with direct quote dialogue, her voice flat and unaffected. She was a woman numb with shock, but also determined to take all of us on the wild ride of how she knew the deceased. As strange as it sounds, instead of being a cringe-worthy or rambling account, the chemistry between these two women came through in the speaker’s story. I was not the only one in the audience sitting forward to hear the next thing that was going to drop outa this lady’s mouth.

Disclaimer: All these quotes are paraphrasing, because I wasn’t clever enough to take notes during her eulogy***:

It was a cowgirl’s camping weekend, but unexpected rain left the small group of women holed up in a camper, where they got to drinking and playing games.

“I got out the Baileys, because I was that kind of girl back then. And I started playing backgammon with this other girl. (Deceased) sat above us, in the bunk, just watching my every move. I offered her some Baileys. She said, ‘I got something,’ and went out to her truck. Came back with Jack Daniels, and (here the speaker made a gesture, showing three fingers held together), ‘I need three fingers.’ I said, ‘I thought Jack was only two fingers.’ You know, of whiskey. (Deceased) smiled and said, ‘I’m gonna need three if I have to watch you play backgammon all night.’

At this point, I was wondering about the three fingers comment, the subtle maybe-flirtation of it all. But also wondering if perhaps I was just bored at a funeral and with a brain rotted by the internet.

But the thing was, this eulogy was completely filled TO THE BRIM with commentary that could be taken to have a sexual connotation. Right up to the point where the speaker recounted inviting the deceased to come to bed with her:

“Eventually everyone else went to bed. We stayed up all night, (Deceased) offering me sips of Jack to keep me awake while we played backgammon. Eventually, I got drunk enough she even won. It was still raining hard, so I told her to come sleep with me in my camper. But (Deceased) grinned real slow and told me, ‘I’m a cowgirl, I sleep outside like one.’

“After a while, I heard something outside, and went out. Sure enough, an animal had gotten loose in the storm. I went around, checking on all the horses. I saw (Deceased)’s truck out there, the camper light on. So I walk over there. And when I look inside, (Deceased)’s got her boots and hat on. I said, ‘Why you dressed?’ and she says, ‘You’re the type that takes care of things, so you and I are going to be friends. I was getting dressed to come help you.’ I said, ‘Are you sleeping?’ and she says, ‘Nah. This camper leaks.’ ‘Come sleep with me.’ She said no. I told her, ‘I’m going to stand in this rain getting soaked, until you agree to come back with me to the camper.’

“So she came inside.

“The camper had a second bed. But it was so small my children hardly fit on it, and (Deceased)’s… well you know. She’s this tall, blonde bombshell. She had legs like…. (here the speaker trailed off, muttering something that sounded like ‘razor blades’) So I said, ‘Come share the bed with me.’ That’s when she finally said, ‘Well, I snore.’ I said, ‘So does my husband.’ (Here everyone laughed and the husband waved from the audience) ‘So I’ll feel right at home. In fact, don’t be surprised if I make a pass at you in the middle of the night, thinking I’m with him.’

The speaker sniffled here, and said, ‘(Deceased) got into bed with me, and when I said that, she turned her back to me and said, ‘I don’t know about that. But there are times I could use a hug.’”

The speaker’s voice broke, and that section of the story ended with a FADE TO BLACK. And honestly, there were quite a few sniffles at that last line. Because who among us hasn’t needed a hug now and then? The vulnerability of Dearly Departed saying it in response to a joke/come on seemed genuine to my recollection of her, and in that moment, I felt a strong sense of loss. Plus, it was a damn good romance story. In another setting, I might’ve paid to watch this whole scene at the end of a tear-jerker movie.

I won’t detail the rest of what she said, except to say 1) This was not the only story she told about getting away for a sleepover with Dearly Departed, and 2) she spoke forty minutes.

After she was done, a family member grabbed the mike and announced there would be no further open comments, but invited everyone to refreshments following a closing hymnal (for those of you following on FB, this is when the guy got up and jammed Amazing Grace to the tune of House of the Rising Sun).

Here is a version of that mash-up for your auditory enjoyment:

Now here’s the thing, and why I am kind of laboriously explaining the degree of intimacy expressed in this eulogy. Besides, of course, because I need to confess to you WTF, I was slightly turned on at a funeral, and I’m not sure how to deal.

I cannot figure out if the speaker actually realized she’d gone completely Brokeback Funeral, if this was some beautiful acknowledgement of a private love affair, at last named in the face of loss.

Or

the whole thing was a nonsexual retelling of a close friendship.

On one hand, this is 2018 and California, and nothing should be shocking about being gay/bi. On the other, I live in an area with a pretty large and vocal contingent who voted against gay marriage. And as I mentioned, the crowd was set to conservative.

If I had a third hand, I’d fill it with the puzzler of the husband cheering her on, because I kept thinking, “Wow, these people are either really open minded, or so close minded they have not even entertained the possibility something gay was going on here.”

Which? There is a theory that in cultures so homophobic that citizens generally don’t believe being gay is even possible among its members, there is conversely more freedom of same sex expression of affection, such as openly holding hands or kissing. (See subsection, “Homohysteria”) Is that what I witnessed?

Or perhaps I have some wildly prejudiced beliefs about the general viewpoints of conservative Christian ranchers in the 50+ age bracket? They perhaps are way cooler about gray area romantic relationships than I’d given credit for? I’d be kind of open to accepting this, if accurate.

Finally, I had to wonder if I was witnessing a person so at odds with herself that she was compelled to tell us all how much she adored the Dearly Departed while perhaps at the same time, remaining ignorant of her true feelings. I mean, whether or not these two were lovers, there was no denying Dearly Departed was one of (if not THE) great loves of the speaker’s life. It made me wonder how many of us (me included) are perhaps driven by great loves that utterly shape our lives, that we are unable to name, perhaps unable to even acknowledge in our secret hearts for what they are, or could have been had we been different people.

Prior to the speaker’s eulogy, Dearly Departed’s daughter had spoken, and in a lighthearted moment, said, “Going through her stuff, I found a box of rodeo buckles my mother won, and she’d never even told me about. She was like that, never bragging about how good she was.”

When the speaker stood behind the podium, she stared the daughter dead in the eye and said, “I knew about that box of buckles. I knew.”

D’awww!

*Aware my visual and verbal style stereotypes me as well: hippy-dippy, suburban housewife with mild to moderate fashion and social illiteracy.

** I’m a little nervous about this post, as it seems somewhat invasive to retell someone else’s personal story. On the other hand, she told this story to 200+/- people, some of whom (like me) were total strangers, so I also feel like it’s OK to recount something someone did in a public setting, as the speaker couldn’t have had an expectation of privacy. Lemme know if you feel strongly one way or the other.

*** While I am recounting what I witnessed as best as I remember, with no attempt to color/shape the speaker’s statement or intentions, a story told from memory may contain all sorts of errors, misquotes, or misinterpretations.