“I Can’t Believe They Actually Said That”: 30 Shocking Comments Heard at Funerals

Funerals are typically somber, reflective occasions meant to honor a person’s life and memory. But as one netizen’s question revealed, these gatherings can also lead to some truly bizarre and unexpected moments.

#1

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Preacher was talking about my mom (the deceased) and how she was a woman of God, a God-fearing woman, and one who walked with Jesus in her heart and all of this religious stuff. The only time my mom set foot in a church was when she was getting married. She might have burst into flames if she was ever forced to go to a church service. She took my Grandma to church when Grandma was unable to drive and was happy sitting in a cold car in the parking lot rather than coming inside.

Me, my husband and my daughter had to suppress a case of the giggles when the preacher said that. We couldn’t look at each other bc we definitely would have started laughing.

#2

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Not so much weird but funny. When my grandmother passed, the priest sat with the family and asked for some fun stories about her to share at the service. My dad mentioned she “worked the polls,” referring to her working at the county during election season. The priest took “polls” to mean “poles”….

#3

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My grandfather with dementia at my grandma funeral yelled out “what the f**k was that all about” when the minister/ pastor finished his speech.

Not too weird, but it was hilarious at the time. Miss that ol guy a lot.

#4

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My good friend’s dad was an alcoholic. He shot himself after shooting his girlfriend in a drunken argument. My friend was to give the eulogy. “All my dad taught me was how to open a beer with a lighter” and walked away.

#5

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I was at a funeral recently for a friend who committed [self-harm]. Largely in part because he was gay and his family wouldn’t accept him. His dad was a seventh day Adventist and the preacher was saying that we all have a guardian Angel. That his guardian Angel could have saved him but he didn’t because it’s gods plan.
“And we thank god for the train that hit him, we thank god.”
We absolutely do not thank god, he was 20, I wanted to punch that guy in that mouth.

#6

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“Ah she makes a lovely corpse”
Gotta love old Irish women.

#7

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“We all know he isn’t going g to Heaven, he didn’t go to church ”
As a believer of Christ I would never say this at a funeral. It’s not our place to question or judge others.

#8

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Not said but felt really out of place when someone handed me popcorn..

My great uncle was an author who worked with Ripleys and covered alot of odd and spooky history. But his favorite subject was the circus so they hung old circus banners and handed out popcorn to everyone.

Hands down an amazing funeral full of laughs and interesting people.

The popcorn was the equivalent of Phoebe on Friends handing out 3D glasses at her grandmother’s funeral.

#9

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I used to play in a brass band that was booked for a lot of funerals. At one funeral when I was about 13 the mistress of the dead bloke came in wailing. His wife came in with an English mastiff (think big scary looking dog) and sang ding dong the b***h is dead and then left. According to the son of the dead man his dad was awful and he only came to dance on his grave and enjoy the inheritance money, why he was telling a teenager this, i have no idea. It was a f*****g weird one. We also had to play you give love a bad name and the theme from titanic.

#10

The minister decided to preach to us about how being gay is a sin that leads to hell. This was at my 83 year old, totally not gay, great aunts funeral. He mentioned all sorts of sins that lead to hell but didn’t mention a single time how my great aunt was a devout Christian and literally nothing he said applied to her. Guy forgot it was a funeral and went right into his insane bigoted Christian b******t.

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#11

We put a can of beer in my father’s casket. We’re pretty sure we heard it pop open at the cemetery, before he went into the ground.

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#12

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I think the lady giving the eulogy was trying to say that even though the mother passed away her love is still with us, or something like that. But she started that section of the eulogy with

“Now that you are officially orphans…”

I couldn’t believe it.

#13

My best friend died 5 years ago in a motorcycle accident. He was a fun-loving guy who always said “go forth, do cool s**t.” And that became the theme of his funeral. The pastor during the service was a bit uncomfortable saying it and when he did, he stammered a bit and nervously giggled which offered a slight laugh from all who were in attendance.

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#14

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The priest kept referring to the deceased as “Nanette”, but her name was “Ann”. Then went further, mentioning how unfair it was that she died at 20, but it was an open casket for a 94 year old woman.

#15

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At the end of her eulogy, the wife of the deceased introduced the girlfriend of the deceased, who then gave her own eulogy.

#16

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“Down I go!” a lady who was about to faint from the heat loudly exclaiming. Then THUD.

#17

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A woman kicked her husband’s coffin and spat on it, all while screaming that she hoped he was rotting in hell.

He [took his own life] and left her with five children to raise all by herself.

#18

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Priest: “the day (child’s name) died was the best day of my life”

He was trying to make a point about how god was teaching him a lesson through the child’s death but holy s**t what a way to phrase it. You could feel the oxygen sucked out of the room as everyone gasped at the same time.

#19

My parents told me about a funeral they attended where the man had [taken his own life]. The song the funeral home chose to play was Frank Sinatra’s I Did It My Way.

Talk about awkward.

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#20

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My BIL was a beloved redneck and Civil War Reenactor. At his funeral he had a Confederate flag and honor guard. My wife is black. Knowing what was coming I begged her not to go, but she gritted her teeth and suffered through it for my sister’s sake. As the service concluded they were going to play “Dixie” but luckily (for me) they couldn’t get the music to work. I thought I had dodged a bullet when some a-hole in the back stood up and yelled, “Come on folks, you know the words!”. Everyone in funeral stood up and sang “Dixie” in the church, even the pastor. We sat quiet and arms crossed on the front row. My wife and I laugh about it now but I’ve never been more uncomfortable in my life!

#21

At my grandfathers funeral, when the rabbis had to come to us to tell us that they brought the wrong body.

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#22

Not me, but my father. When he was 16, his best friend drowned. The canoe they were in tipped over when one guy they invited decided to goof off and stand up. My father’s friend couldn’t swim and ended up drowning about 15 feet from the shore.

At the funeral, the jerk that stood up in the boat showed up. The first thing he did was approach the mother, father and sister of the deceased friend and ask them if he could have his vinyl collection.

Image source: TheBoomExpress

#23

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The thud of someone collapsing and dying.

A lady had a sudden heart attack and died at my grandma’s funeral.

#24

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Is there any food in the box over there? An old lady who pointed to the coffin.

#25

So, my uncle Joe passed recently, and in the haste of putting together a ceremony, a random officiant was hired off Craigslist. Think Carol Baskins from Tiger King with a sing-song voice and woo-woo-crystal vibes. Initially, the ceremony seemed to be going really well – a series of community members shared really lovely and heartfelt eulogies honoring my uncle, I’m crying, we’re all loving on this guy, and then.

Apropos of nothing, having literally zero connection to my uncle or the family, frickin Carol Baskins takes back the mic and decides that as officiant, she also needed to say her piece, to professionally set our grieving hearts at ease.

What follows was the most absurd ten minutes of my life – hot on the tail of lovely testimonies from people who actually knew and loved my uncle, Carol proceeds to describe what she imagined he might have been like. Namely, she strongly felt that he probably lived in the present moment, much as one does when they are walking down the stairs with a cup of coffee and they trip and fall (her exact words).

In that moment, she says, (rising into a tone of triumphant revelation) there is no time for anger, or fear, there is only joy and acceptance, because you are living in the present moment, just as she felt my uncle definitely probably did.

You see, she says, it’s sort of like one of her spiritual adherents once told her – they had been driving down the interstate in Wyoming, and they hit a slick patch at 70 mph. Wait, was it slick, or was it slippery? Nono, she thinks it was slick. And so the SUV – it’s an SUV, by the way – starts rolling, and in that moment time slows down, and her spiritual adherent feels a sense of serene calm come over them, and they have the presence of mind to stop their head from smashing into the windshield, and they pull their leg back into the SUV before – ah that’s right, the window was down, so it must have been slippery – pull their leg back into the SUV before it was snapped off as the car rolled.

“And you see, that’s what Joe’s life was like, she thinks. Just a beautiful, extended SUV rollover crash where he lived persistently, stubbornly, in the present moment.”

Now, all through this dada-esque scree, my partner and I are sitting on the hard wooden pew, our grief short-circuited into utter bemusement, and we are literally shaking with mirth at how surreal and inappropriate it was for this stranger to hijack a nice ceremony with her weird woo-woo worldview, and how inappropriate it was for us to be responding this way. And the thing about the wooden pews is they perfectly convey the vibration from the other person’s repressed laughter, and so we sat hunched over for the entire presentation, trapped in this cycle of inappropriate laughter reverberating back and forth between us, trying to quietly gasp for breath and thinking of anything that wasn’t this insane experience. At one point, we have to mask our gasping laughter as a quiet sob, which is equally inappropriate.

She proceeds, “I would have really liked to know Joe, and if I did, I think I would have thought of him as a comet, always moving forward, leaving bits of himself wherever he went. Dim the lights, please.”

This is the part where we pretty much black out from lack of oxygen.

The lights dim, the haunting melodies of Enya fill the small chapel, and up on the projector screen, the slideshow images of my uncle’s face are replaced with a four-minute montage of spiraling galaxies and nebulae and a single comet image, straight out of a mid-90s Bowl-a-Rama. This is clearly a video of her own design, she chose it for this occasion over her other greatest consolatory hits (waterfall.wav, sunlitmeadow.wav, SUVrollover.wav), and it means a great deal to her – she stands watching it intently for the full four minutes, and then turns to us with great gravity as the lights rise, and says, “To Joe, our shining comet. We miss you.”

The ceremony ends at this point, and my partner and I absolutely hustle out of the chapel, making no eye contact, and Quasimodo-ing away with our heads down to go scream-laugh in the back alley behind the funeral home.

Later, we apologized to my aggrieved uncles/aunts/cousins at the reception (horror of horrors, we had been sitting right behind them the entire time), and everyone assured us it was one of the more bizarre performances they’d ever seen. But dammit, Joe would have liked it, beautiful rollover crash/comet that he was.

To this date that funeral is the most uncomfortable I’ve ever felt. It was hilarious, but holy hell.

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#26

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My ex mother in law got up at her dad’s funeral and did a speech almost entirely about her own horse.

#27

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The widow accidentally confirmed what many had suspected for years; she had cheated on her first husband with her now deceased husband. She talked about how they met and going down to visit him in another country for several years; you could literally see people doing the math in their heads.

#28

My X wife’s family were the faith-healing type and some of them were convinced they were going to pray the recently deceased up out of the casket. People throwing themselves on the ground, weeping, having to be removed, slowly realizing he wasn’t going to wake up and actively experiencing the finality of death in real time. It was awful.

Image source: ceci_mcgrane

#29

Old woman saying “how is your father? I haven’t seen him for a long time. ” to the son who lost his father.

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#30

At Glenn’s funeral the priest said reluctantly, “And now we will recite the Lord’s Prayer…with edits by Glenn.”

There was also a prerecorded message from Glenn.

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