"A co-worker, extremely hungover, passed out and fell into the grave."

"She did lovely makeup on a younger lady who was in bad shape. An older relative got very upset at the wake because the body 'was wearing too much makeup' and used her thumb to rub it off, pulling loose some of the corpse's skin and dislodging her eye."

"Six of us carried him up steep granite steps into the church. The casket got turned around in the church. Leaving, the body slid to the front of the casket as we went down the steps and took all six of us down. Broken leg for me and one other guy. A third guy with a serious back injury. Two ambulances. Total clusterfuck."

"I can tell you that I have been hit on more than once by the widowed husband during the funeral, I have had families try to fistfight while making arrangements, and for one funeral we had to have police on standby because we had a gang murder victim. I loved my job, but left the industry after nine years (though working during Covid should count as double the time)."

 "I will never forget the time that I went with him to transport a body about 300 miles to another state. This was in the pre-internet days, so as far as we knew the address we were given was for another funeral home. We also were not given a specific time to be there either. 

You might see where this is going, but we certainly did not expect to pull up to a mausoleum with a crowd of mourners waiting for the main attraction to show up. Said crowd had been waiting about two hours by the time we showed up. Now obviously there should have been better communication here, but in hindsight we also probably should not have stopped and eaten on the way either."

"One time we had a little girl, about seven years old, decide she did not like the reception room and sneak into the back and run up and down the hall, past the staging room with a dead body clearly on display but not ready for viewing. 

Also, the amount of people who would get mad at the shrimp cocktail running out when you only ordered 50 shrimps and then demanded more to be cooked. Like bro, there is only one oven here and it is not for food."

"We also got to ride in the lead car with the funeral director and the priest, and we would ask questions galore. His funniest story was about the funeral of an old lady being buried in the winter. Cemetery rules were to hold the graveside service in their chapel, then the family would leave and the cemetery staff would take the casket to the grave and bury it because of the snow and ice. 

The family absolutely threw a fit. They wanted a graveside service and they wanted to carry Grandma. So the staff relented. He said they showed up and of course Grandma's grave was at the bottom of a hill down from the only road. They pleaded with the family to use the chapel because there was too much snow. So these six relatives picked up Grandma. 

They were wearing good winter boots. They stepped over the kerb and proceeded down this hill, and after about four steps the lead two guys lost their footing and fell. This made the others fall and Grandma went down. The funeral director said he would never forget the sight of this beautiful wooden casket sledding down that hill at increasing speed while everyone watched in absolute horror. But the best part was that Grandma's sledding casket hit a rut, took a momentary slight flight, and landed nearly perfectly at her grave, about three-quarters of the way onto the casket lowering device. 

They all trudged down, got Grandma situated, and the funeral director unlocked and quickly opened the casket. Grandma was still perfectly in place. She had a nice last ride to her grave."

"Myself and the clergy, along with a couple of family members, helped to pull him out. Embarrassing to say the least. The family never found out about the hangover detail. It was chalked up to the extreme heat. They consoled him. He did not get fired or reprimanded, as his dad owned the funeral home. Good time, lol."

"A lady from their church showed up at the funeral luncheon with her own van full of food because 'our food wasn't made with love.' She had fried chicken, hotdogs, baked beans, a whole giant sheet cake, five massive deli trays, fruit and vegetable platters, a bunch of ice cream and toppings, mashed potatoes, chili, macaroni salad and potato salad, all sorts of cookies, chips and crackers, and about 20 gallons of Hawaiian punch. It was a wild amount of food. 

There had to be enough there to feed over 300 people, and this was a small funeral with about 50 attendees. She was walking around yanking people's plates out of their hands and piling them full of the food she'd brought, and chewing them out when they tried to say no thanks. 

She tried to throw away all the food we'd brought, then tried to tip over the table of sandwiches we had set up — luckily she was a tiny old lady and couldn't budge the table — and then she tried to claim my coworker had tried to strangle her. After that, she was finally told she needed to leave immediately, so she screamed a bunch of cuss words at everyone in earshot, then stormed outside and dumped all that food in a big heap in the middle of the church parking lot and drove off in a huff. The whole thing was just surreal."

"One thing recently that did make me go, 'Well, how about that,' was during a committal service when the family created what they called a 'potion.' Do not ask me the ratios, but it was Dr Pepper, Fireball whiskey, pickle juice, and hot sauce. They poured it into the deceased's mouth to bring him back to life, then passed this chalice around for everyone to take a sip. I did not try it."

Additional thumbnail credits: NBC, Netflix, Sony Pictures Releasing