Posted on

Beginning at the end

Wedding photo of Asian couple in a coffin.
Couple celebrate their wedding in the family funeral home.

We look forward to the day when an especially weird couple chooses to tie the knot at the Museum of the Weird. (We can totally make that happen with an in-house officiant!)

However, until that happy day, we always like to look at the bizarre ways that people celebrate their unions. Earlier this month, a couple in Ohio had their wedding in her family funeral home. According to this article in The Huffington Post, Chelsea and Barry Lesnick exchanged vows at the Brunner Sanden Deitrick Funeral Home & Cremation Center which has been run by her family for years.

“We really didn’t think of it as weird, for our mindset, because we deal with death all the time. It’s the family business,” Chelsea told Huffington. “But talking to other people about it, like friends and Barry’s family, they were a little weirded out by the idea. They were a little skeptical, thinking, ‘How is this going to work? Are there going to be dead bodies everywhere?'”

Having made the acquaintance of a lovely Austin funeral director, I have seen her approach funerals as a celebration of life. That would make it a very fitting place for a wedding.

Of course, there are those who take a darker view. An Austin cake maker, Natalie Sideserf, created a most unusual cake for her marriage to husband, David. Being horror fans, they celebrated with cakes depicting their own severed heads. See this video.

 

https://youtu.be/bCoSS1YgDqo

Isn’t it wonderful when weird people find each other? Weird weddings are proof that a couple belongs together, with a celebration as unique as they are. We raise a toast to all of you lucky couples. Of course, if you are looking for a perfect way to start your weird life together, we always have some room to celebrate amongst the mummies and shrunken heads.

Posted on

Do you take this corpse…

By greyloch from Washington, DC, area, U.S.A. (The Corpse Bride) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
In Tim Burton’s film, Corpse Bride, Victor Van Dort finds himself unwittingly married to a woman who has been dead for years. Weird fantasy stuff, eh? Not necessarily. The practice of marrying the dead is quite real and more common than you might think.

Called posthumous marriage, the practice of marrying the deceased is legal in France, with similar customs in India, Sudan and China. In France, the custom dates back to World War I, where a few women were married by proxy to soldiers who had died a few weeks earlier. The living party must be able to demonstrate that there was clear intention for the couple to be married. The Guardian reports a posthumous wedding in France as late as 2009.

It’s not just women. The Daily Mail reports the wedding of Thai TV producer, Chadil Deffy, who married his girlfriend, killed in a car accident.

These stories are touching and heart-wrenching all at once. Such a ceremony could provide closure to someone who has been left behind, completing an important part of life that would otherwise have been left unfinished. Of course, it might go deeper. In my travels I had a fascinating conversation with a widow who told me she was still in regular contact with her husband’s spirit who stayed around her house and continued to participate in her life.

Posthumous marriage is not recognized in the United States, though there are cases where people have tried it anyway. Kirsten Smolensky examines Rights of the Dead in the Hofstra Law Review.

Have you been to a strange wedding? Share it with us.