“Whooping and hollering and fainting and falling out like they used to do at the old-time funerals,” said Simple, “has gone out of style now, leastwise in Harlem where the best undertakers has a nurse in attendance. If anybody faints at a funeral now, the nurses stick so much smelling salts up to your nose that you sneeze and come to right away. You better come to—else that ammonia will blow your wig off. They say undertakers’ helpers get paid by the hour now, too. They are very busy people, also expensive, so they have no time for nobody holding up a funeral by fainting. And these modern educated ministers do not like their sermons interrupted by people screaming and yelling. Modern ministers is all Doctors of Divinities and such, so too cultured for hollering. But I remember a funeral I went to once down in Virginia where all the mourners delivered sermons, too, and talked and hollered louder than the preacher. And the widow of the deceased asked the dead man why did he leave her.

“‘Why did you leave me, Thomas?’ she cried. ‘Why?’

“She knew darned well the man drunk himself to death, also that she had put him out of the house more than once, and quit him twice. Yet there she was crying because he had relieved her of his burden once and for all. You could hardly hear the minister who was preaching the corpse to heaven instead of hell, so much racket did his wife and relatives keep up.”

“Ways of grieving vary,” I said. “In India, for example, the widow in some communities throws herself onto a flaming bier and perishes with her husband.”

“Them widows must be right simple,” said Simple.

“In some countries widows wear black all the rest of their lives after the husband dies.”

“Which saves them cleaning bills,” said Simple. “Dirt does not show on black.”

“In Ireland they have wonderful wakes the night before a funeral and eat and drink all night.”

“I wish I was in Ireland,” said Simple. “I could really help drain a bottle.”

“And in Haiti they play cards at the wake.”

“No,” said Simple, “no cards! I would not want to lose my money gambling, not even for my best friend. I would not play no cards at nobody’s wake.”

“In some parts of Asia, they bury the dead standing up.”

“Which is better than being buried upside down,” said Simple, “or cremated—burnt up before you gets to hell.”

“Cremation is a sanitary process, I think. Besides, ashes takes up very little space. Just imagine all the acres and acres of land nowadays taken up by cemeteries. A person’s ashes in a jar can be kept on the mantelpiece.”

“What old mantelpiece? Where?” cried Simple. “Never no ashes of no deceased on my mantelpiece. Oh, no! When a person is dead and gone they should be where they belong, in the ground.”