Courtesy – It’s Not Common At All

This past weekend, a very sad thing occurred. My husband’s grandmother died. Now, she’d had a great life and certainly great family. She was not young, although no one really knew her exact age, so it wasn’t a surprise. But, what was surprising and also sad was the things that happened that day on the way from the funeral home to the church.

My husband and I got in our car with our 2 daughters. We were told to keep our headlights on, run our emergency lights and proceed through intersections with caution, but to keep going just the same. Oh, and we had that “drive as you please” pass on our car top – the funeral flag.

We left the funeral home without incident. But, the first intersection we came to was a disaster. Several cars injected themselves into our procession. The one who cut in front of us proceeded to stop at the next red light directly cutting us off from the procession. Now, in defense of the thoughtless young men in front of us – they didn’t have the “drive as you please” funeral flag on their car, so they had to stop at the red light.

We were stuck there behind their aging red car through 3 straight-ways, 2 left turn signals, and 1 long rant by my husband. Our procession drove out of sight. We didn’t know where the church was. There was one vehicle behind us from our procession, so we pulled over as soon as it was safe to see if they knew the way to the church. They did.

To wrap things up, we made it on time and all was well. But, I really wonder where common courtesy has gone. It was a funeral procession. What could possibly be more important in the lives of those guys than was in the death of a great lady who deserved respect even to her entourage?