"Ouais, il a l'air mort quoi"
I’ve known my mate C. for years, we met in our first year at university. At the time we met he had very little contact with his old man, due to the fact the his parents divorced when he was 8 or so, ‘cos his mum considered catching the dad coming out of a cinema with his latest mistress to be somewhat of a last straw. So they moved far away soon after the divorce, and C. had a very strained relation with his father after that.

But a couple of years after I met C. at university, he started to get back in touch with his old man, meeting up now and again for extended boozy meals, and they started to put the past behind them, even though the family on his mothers side didn’t quite like the idea, seeing as they’d spent the past 20-odd years putting him down and stuff.
So things were looking up.

One day C.’s old man gets this weird pain in his back, so he goes for tests. Long story short he’s got lung cancer, a massive tumour, not long to live, a couple of months at most. So C. gets to see his old man fade away after only having started to have a real father-son relationship.

Cut to the funeral about six months later. For some reason they decide to have an open casket. All of C.’s family turn up, including the people who would never have given the old man the time of day, never checked in on him while he was in hospital, and weren’t very supportive during the whole time.
So the funeral goes ahead as funerals do, and at the end they all line up to pay their respects to the deceased, and then on to C. who’s sort of waiting at the end, trying to put on a brave face of whatever, just about holding it together.
I know they were basically there to support C., but after a while of hearing what he considered at the time to be a bunch of hypocrites trying their hardest to convey in his mind to be a whole load of bollocks, he snapped.

After hearing for the umpteenth time one of these people come up to him and go “He looks peaceful”, “He looks serene”, “He looks…”, C. goes “…yeah, he looks dead”.

Now, maybe in writing this doesn’t quite sound that amusing, and I am translating the exchange from it’s original French, but when C. told me the story a couple of days later, it was hysterical, but in a kind of bittersweet, happy-sad-tears-of-joy-and-pain way.
And it helped, bizarrely.
(Alaning, Mon 3 Mar 2008, 9:54, Reply)