After countless funerals attended over the last few years, I'd already told myself that I wouldn't attend another funeral except my own, but Padma insisted that I see off her friend Rosie's husband who'd passed away only weeks after he'd been moved into an aged-care home.
Through Padma's friendship with Rosie, I had met Bill a few times at their home, and also kept bumping into him during shopping trips to the Bay where they lived just above the shopping centre so that Rosie could indulge in her favourite pastime of shopping for daily specials at Coles.
The one thing Bill and I had in common was that we had absolutely nothing in common as he was the total opposite to me. The son of a potato farmer from Gippsland, he had joined the A.C.T.'s Parks Service at an early age as a greenkeeper which he stuck to until his retirement. He'd been cutting a lot of grass without ever smoking any of it.
What made this funeral different was that they opened the coffin for a last "viewing". Through Padma's addiction to the American TV series "NCIS", I had become inured to Donald Horatio "Ducky" Mallard's constant handling of corpses but I thought I would draw the line at seeing the embalmed body of someone I had known "in the flesh". Dragged along by Padma, I took just one fleeting glance of Bill's face covered in rouge.
Needing a stiff drink after all that, we stopped at the Catalina Country Club for lunch and then, before driving home, also dropped in at my favourite op-shop. There, almost as if by design, I found Robert Larkins' book "Funeral Rights - What the Australian 'death-care' industry doesn't want you to know". Maybe I don't want to know either but I picked it up in case I have enough time left to read it before I really need to know.
