When someone dies there is a tremendous amount of planning that goes into giving them a funeral and burial.  There so many decisions that have to be made and all of them need to be made right! Now!  It can be incredibly overwhelming.  After endless phone calls had been made, and countless plans planned, my folks made just one more call to the cemetery which graciously offered to re-open my grandmother's grave and bury Erin's ashes in with my grandma for free.  That was a very nice offer because just cracking the ground for a burial can cost $500.  Mom asked how many people you can stuff in one hole because we have a large family and that was a darn good deal.  He said two people per grave, or however he said it, and this was really funny to my mom.  But she couldn't quite remember how the man said this to her.  So later that evening my oldest sister GeeGee and my youngest sister Penelope sat in the living room planning what songs they would like to hear at the funeral, while I cleaned the kitchen listening to them.  Penelope made a song suggestion and asked my mother what she thought about it, and all the sudden my mother sits bolt upright and excitedly exclaims "Two corpses per hole!!"  Which got my sisters to laughing realizing that mom is no longer with us.  I chimed in from the kitchen, ever the wiseass, with "Doesn't Neil Diamond sing that?" 

My sisters now realize they should just run things by dad and leave my mother alone with her thoughts.  So my sister GeeGee asks my father, who was sitting in a chair with his back to everyone watching TV, what he would want to hear.  Very quickly he spins his chair around to face everyone and says to us "do you know what commercial I think is funny? I think that Sam Adams beer commercial with the guy dressed in the..." and he explains the whole commercial to us.   He then swings his chair back around to face the TV and goes back to watching his show, leaving us girls to giggle.

 We pretty much knew that at this time we might as well start smoking cigarettes and drinking beer because nothing more was going to get decided that day.  Both my parents had officially left the building.  So if you are ever wondering how you can tell when someone has hit their limit of stress overload, random calling out facts that have nothing to do with what everyone else is talking about pretty much is the biggest clue you could hope for.