Only Sleeping
My grandfather died. The funeral was a solemn affair, as these things usually are. My grandmother, naturally, was distraught. They'd married during the war, he'd been captured and sent to a POW camp, they then spent over fifty blissful years together.

We were chatting about my grandfather with her - laughing, crying, reminiscing - when entirely out of the blue she said, "One thing I won't miss is sleeping next to him. He always rolled over and nearly pushed me out of bed!"

A few years later she died as well. It's hard to carry on when the life you knew for half-a-century has been ripped apart.

As per her wishes, she was to be buried next to her husband. We dutifully trudged down to the cemetery, held a small ceremony, and escorted her body to the grave.

The double-headstone had already been half-filled with my grandfather's details. Underneath the blank half, a six-foot deep hole lay waiting. We slowly lowered my grandmother's coffin in.

It didn't fit.

There wasn't enough room in the grave for the bloody coffin! Despite being dug on the correct side of the grave, somehow my grandfather's coffin had conspired to shift under the earth and encroached on my grandmother's side.

The mourning party excused ourselves from the graveside while "adjustments" were made. All of us giggling about how granddad had rolled over in his sleep again.

Well, it was preferable to thinking the gravediggers were too stupid to dig a correctly sized hole in the ground!
(terryeden, Fri 12 Apr 2013, 9:20, 1 reply)

:)

( drimble he'd been white, he'd been black, Fri 12 Apr 2013, 11:27, closed)