I'll never forget when my grandfather died. We're at the funeral home at the end of the funeral and my grandmother wanted to go stand at the coffin in the room alone while my foster brother played "The Old Rugged Cross", which was my grandfather's favorite hymn.
We were all pretty ragged about the death because we loved my grandpa tremendously. We're sitting in the "family room" and listening to the organ playing. Now my foster brother was a very, very good organist (he was blind) but he tended to wander over into his Liberace personna at the drop of a hat. He started out light on the song but pretty soon started adding crescendos and trills and fol-de-rols. It was like a musical roller-coaster (by the way, Grandma LOVED it). It got louder and wilder.
One of us started giggling and then we all started. We'd stop and get ourselves under control and then make the mistake of looking at each other and it would all start up again. My mother is hissing at us to stop before Grandma came back into the room, but we couldn't. We just couldn't. The emotional strain of the past few days caught up with us and we cracked.
Finally, we had to all go to the restroom and splash cold water on our faces to calm down. It's amazing what grief and strain can do to your emotions. Grandma would have been beyond upset if she had seen us, but we weren't doing it to be disrespectful........we couldn't help ourselves. Luckily, we looked like we had been crying when we came out, so all was well.
I can't help but feel Grandpa would have thought it was funny. He had a great sense of humor.