Tim Grobaty: Why we like funerals better than weddings

PUTTING THE FUN IN FUNERALS: The daughter of one of our most esteemed colleagues is getting married this month - on the date of the anniversary of our marriage to our current wife, Mamie Eisenhower.

We aren't going to the wedding. Happily, we have the whole anniversary thing working for us as an excuse. If one of our most esteemed colleagues were to, sadly, pass on, and there was a funeral scheduled for the same day as our anniversary, we would happily attend because, at the very real and likely risk of sounding creepy, cynical and joyless, we're gonna go ahead and say we like funerals more than weddings.

Your immediate impulse is to disagree with us 100 percent. But allow us to change your mind.

First, we need to say that it's not true across the board that funerals are more enjoyable than weddings. You're not going to enjoy yourself at a child's funeral or, in many cases, your spouse's funeral. We're talking about a natural-order-of-things funeral.

And, of course, we're comparing the two ceremonies from an attendee's point of view, not the participants'. Participants will always take a wedding over a funeral. Unless they can see the future.

When you're at a funeral, you're fairly relaxed. You're with friends and family, many of whom you haven't seen in years. They are fine and good people. It's a time of happy reflections and agreeing about politics.

At the after-party, or wake if you will, you have a few cocktails. You chat about how great the deceased was in real life. You catch up on things. You don't dance. You don't listen to a crappy covers band or an idiotic DJ. You swear to keep in touch and you go home.

At a wedding you need to go to a couple of wedding showers (we, in fact, never go, but one is supposed to go), you need to buy a few gifts, you need to sit through an invariably mawkish ceremony, then you have to wait an hour or two and go to a reception where you will sit for a long time eating something you wouldn't order or make yourself at a table with people who, if you're lucky, you feel ambivalent toward.

You're fairly likely to get in a fistfight. You don't know 50 percent of the people there and you're fairly certain you don't like them. They just sort of rub you the wrong way.

And you have to dance (we don't, but you pretty much have to).

Funerals are dignified and thoughtful and cost about $7,000 for a traditional, fairly basic one.

Weddings are artificially opulent and go for about $27,000 these days if you don't overly frill it up.

Funerals are forever. When you're at a funeral, you're thinking, "This is a death that will last. Jack will always be dead, for better or for worse."

Marriages are, statistically, temporary. When you're at a wedding, you're thinking, "This marriage is doomed. I should've just kept the crockpot for myself. This is like throwing it down a rat hole."

Similarly, marriages start out with weddings that are crazily overoptimistic. Life, we are to believe, will be nothing but cake and dollar dances.

Funerals are realistic. You're dead. Your death, post-dying, isn't going to get any better or any worse. Promises aren't going to be broken. You're not going to get weary of your death and breach the contract and come back to life. Probably.

Weddings are a huge imposition on the attendee. Your whole day is shot and it's usually on a Saturday. You need to buy gifts that the bride and groom specify. It's like a little kid's Santa list but more obnoxious.

Funerals can be on any day of the week, and more often than not you can get off work to go to them rather than botch your sacred Saturday. The music is better, generally, unless the deceased has made arrangements to go out with a tape of Willie Nelson singing "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys" or anything by John Denver.

We didn't have a lot of fun even at our own wedding. We were in a daze much of the time. Most of the guests were friends of our parents. We did have a lot of cocktails, so that part was nice. But we had to dance (to Boz Scaggs' "Harbor Lights," which was a tactical error; we hadn't realized that the song starts with about 90 seconds of ambient harbor sounds, so Mamie and we were out on the dance floor just standing there for the longest minute and a half that's ever been, listening to the cry of seagulls and the clanking of pulleys on masts while the crowd began murmuring discontentedly).

But we've just had a blast with our marriage, which hits the 33-year mark on Aug. 18. And we apologize here to whatever grief we caused to those whose day we messed up on a glorious summer day in 1979.

We promise our funeral will be better.
