Want a Flawless Funeral? Get Thee to the South Where You'll Get a Proper Send-Off.

However, that policy for ladies to use clear bags was an affront to our aesthetic. Even though we don’t wear gloves anymore, we always try to match our bags to our shoes. Before security concerns trumped fashion and etiquette we used to be a proper country.

Everyone shows up for the deceased, even the folks who in life were your fiercest business competition. We saw that at both of Graham’s services. In S.C., Rep. Jim Clyburn, a Democrat who was no fan of Lindsey’s staunch conservative views, read the Twenty-Third Psalm. Remember, politeness rules all at a Southern funeral. We save our gossip for after the service when well-trusted friends gather. 

It’s the receptions before and after that bring out the best in our Southern hospitality. Because I wasn’t a friend of the family, a former staff member, or otherwise connected to the Grahams I didn’t rate an invitation to any. (Sigh) I’m sure they followed all the old-fashioned conventions as delightfully set down in Being Dead is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral by Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays. I bought it years ago and everything in it is spot on plus easy enough for a Yankee to duplicate. Two Mississippi matrons recorded the unwritten rules all Southerners have known about how to put together this most solemn event. They end each chapter with their best recipes from deviled eggs to rich bourbon desserts.

As the authors write, “A wedding takes six months to plan and put on, but a funeral – which is almost as big a deal in the Delta – must be done in two or three days, tops, even though many of the same logistical challenges apply. We devote ourselves to the ritual of the church, the food, and the visiting with the same intensity as for a wedding, only speeded up – and funerals are often bigger than weddings.”

Whether you will have to foot a liquor bill for numerous guests on short notice depends on your denomination. Catholic, Episcopalian, Anglican, or High-Church Lutheran? Yes, your guests will enjoy a drink. Baptist, Methodist, or non-denominational? You will have to content yourself with the “house wine of the South,” sweet, iced tea.

Back to the food, the one thing so many people look forward to at the reception. The minute the news of a death hits the grapevine, Southerners start cooking their favorite funeral dish to take to the family. In no time at all, the family doesn’t have to worry about making meals or providing for the guests who appear bearing food and stay to visit. When my grandfather died in the late seventies, the number of casseroles, hams, biscuits, cakes, pies, and cookies my grandmother received took over all the kitchen counter space and spilled into the dining room.

Often the ladies of the church—formed into a pastoral care committee or a funeral committee – swing into action and prepare lunch for the family before the service. If you’re not a member of a church, I do not know how you get through a death. It’s not just the spiritual comfort but the fantastic comfort of good home-cooking that gets you through the first week of shock.

And what a comfort it is! Funeral food is good old-fashioned carb loading in the form of a gooey casserole. Take any kind of noodle, short, long, or hollow, pair it with a protein and some shredded cheese, and mix it up with a basic cream of mushroom soup. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. You may regret it two weeks from now, but there’s nothing better. A funeral is NOT the time for keto. As Metcalfe and Hays wrote, one niece flew in from California to attend a funeral back home. After a few days of Velveeta cheese and cream of mushroom soup, she asked for a Cobb salad. A salad! Her aunt wrote her out of her will, because “Somebody so un-Southern wouldn’t have the foggiest notion what to do with the silver.”