Hays Charlotte - Being dead is no excuse: the official Southern ladies guide to hosting the perfect funeral

Copyright 2005, 2012 Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 1500 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

eBook Edition ISBN: 978-1-4013-0574-1

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Cover art by Gina Binkley

First eBook Edition

Original hardcover edition printed in the United States of America.

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Somebody Is Going to Die if Lilly Beth

Doesnt Catch That Bouquet

Some Day Youll Thank Me for This

Being Dead Is No Excuse is sure to have Southern hostesses nodding their perfectly coiffed heads in unison.

USA Today

If you want a good laugh in this uptight, power-obsessed city, pick up a copy of Being Dead Is No Excuse. And if you are a Southerner, you will laugh until the tears come.

The Washington Post

[A]s sidesplitting as it is politically incorrect, as sincere as it is backstabbingly brutal.

Publishers Weekly (starred)

There are too few words and phrases to adequately describe this unique devil-take-the-hindmost approach to cooking and end-of-life ceremonies. Tongue in cheek? Maybe. Laugh-out-loud narrative? Definitely.

Booklist

The definitive guide to that most important and festive of Southern rituals and I love it!

Jill Conner Browne, author of The Sweet Potato Queens Book of Love

As Southern as cheese straws, as peculiar as the Mississippi Delta, and as irreverent as the books Crocheted Bedpan Award.

Curtis Wilkie, author of Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South

For a Trio of Belles

Anne Gayden Call

Julia Morgan Hall Hays

Josie Pattison Winn

After the solemnity of the church service and finality of the grave, the people of the Mississippi Delta are just dying to get to the house of the bereaved for the reception. This is one of the three times a Southerner gets out all the good china and silver: the other two are christenings and weddings. The silver has most likely been specially polished for the occasion. Polishing silver is the Southern ladys version of grief therapy.

Southern ladies have a thing about polishing silver. Wed be hard pressed to tell you how many of our friends and their mothers have greeted the sad news of a death in the family by going straight to the silver chest and starting to polish everything inside. Maybe it has something to do with an atavistic memory of defending our silver from the Yankees, but it does ensure that the silver will be sparkling for the reception, which almost always follows the funeral.

Friends and family begin arriving with covered dishes, finger foods, and sweets as soon as the word is out that somebody has died. We regard it as a civic duty to show up at the house and at the funeral because what we call a big funeral is respectful to the dead and flattering to the surviving relatives. After the cemetery, people go back to the house to be received by the family. Sometimes we talk bad about the deceased between the grave and the aspic, but we straighten up and are on best behavior the minute we get to the house.

During the reception, we gossip, tell stories about the deceased, and maybe indulge in a toddy or two. (Our county used to be dry, but all that means is that we drink like fish, though we do make a special, if not always successful, effort to behave well at funeralssee I Was So Embarrassed I Liketa Died, into action without prompting. Almost everybody who attends the burial automatically stops by the house afterward, and its a social occasion. One friend, on being thanked for attending a funeral, blurted out, No, thank you! I wouldnt have missed it for the world.

The burial, which is solemn though rarely entirely devoid of humor, most likely takes place at the old cemetery on South Main Street. The old cemetery is one of the best addresses in Greenville, Mississippi. Being buried anywhere else is a fate worse than death in Greenville. The FFGsthats First Families of Greenvillewould simply refuse to die if they werent assured of a spot. Not that the old cemetery is strictly FFG. Not by a long shot. Lola Belle Crittenden, bless her heart, had to plant a huge hedge around her ancestral plot. Why? The neighbors. Theyre so tacky, Lola Belle huffed.

Although we always plan to have a good time at the reception, we revere the dead. Ancestor worship is as valid a form of religion as the Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Episcopal denominations in the Mississippi Delta. The cemetery is so sacred to the memory of our dead relatives that the whole town was up in arms when the local newspaper desecrated it. They did this by posing a high-school beauty queen in front of one of our most important graveyard monuments for a picture. Nothing has upset us quite so much before or since. For days on end nobody could talk about anything else, and the papers Letters to the Editor page was filled with aggrieved missives. Old ladies shuddered at the thought that similar sacrileges might one day be committed on their graves. The paper had to grovel for forgiveness in print or face a serious drop in circulation. The newspaper was owned by Yankees, and, being outsiders, they just didnt know any better.

Were people with a strong sense of community, and being dead is no impediment to belonging to it. We wont forget you just because youve up and died. We may even like you better and visit you more often. As the former Presbyterian minister used to say in his justly celebrated funeral oration (Id like to have a dime for every time Ive heard it), dying just means youve graduated.

Were good about remembering the dead with flowers on just about every holiday from Christmas Day to Groundhog Day. Theres one family that was so intent on remembering Mama that they insisted on having her photographed in her coffin. The photographer balked but was finally persuaded. Afterward, the family flatly refused to pay. The eldest son explained why: Mama looked so sad.

The old cemetery sees quite a bit of traffic, from the living and the dead. This is a hard place to get out of, we invariably chortle when navigating our way through the gates and back onto Main Street. Some people, no doubt attracted by the prestige and the quiet, bucolic setting, have added to overcrowding problems by moving to the old cemetery years after they actually died. When Adelle Atkins, a widow, married James Gilliam, a Greenville widower, she insisted on bringing her late husband, Harry, along. She asked whether she could re-bury him on the Gilliam family plot.

Adelles new in-lawsalas, already beginning to be packed into their plot like sardines in a canwere appalled. They were obsessed with who would go where when the day came. And, besides, they hated the notion of new dead people coming in and just taking over. But Adelle is a determined woman, and she would not back down. Luckily for her, the Miss Finlays, two maiden lady schoolteachers, livedor rather their dead relatives were buriedright next door to the Gilliams. Being old maids, they did not face the problem of potential overcrowding and were glad to have some extra cash. Adelle purchased half their plot and