Three Stevedores and Never-ending Funerals
Olive (Mo) and Harley (Dee Dee) Semple ______________________________________ W HEN I WAS 10, Mo, my grandmother, started dragging me to viewings and funerals. I dreaded going, especially when I couldn’t figure out why I was there. Like knowing the corpse would have been helpful, but I rarely did. I was too young to care about elderly dead people I didn’t know. Did she flip through the obits every day to troll for juicy prospects, ones that would most likely serve a major spread afterwards? The truth is, she attended every funeral at St. Boniface, whether or not she knew the deceased – I suppose she regarded every parishioner as family, no matter personal connection. And then there was that peripheral connection – the cousin of an acquaintance was a good enough excuse to mourn, even if the person was (gasp!) a Protestant. She once dragged me to a viewing of a grossly overweight man, dead at 40-something from Diabetes complications. “If you don’t stop eating like...