Goodbye, farewell, amen.

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Thank you for coming today to the funeral to celebrate the short life, and to mourn the early death, of our good friend TeeBeTee.

I know some of you seem upset, but she’s gone to a better place, a place where she will be at rest and no longer troubled by such problems as having to restrict herself to eating a normal  person amount of food, or having to work and support herself for a living, and lets hope she’s gone to a happier place where whatever god she believed in will offer her the afterlife she deserves.

A short word about her death is inevitable in such cases as this, when it was so spectacular. You will have read the newspaper reports but maybe what you don’t know is the herd of wallabies that bounced her to death was finally tracked down and gathered up by the authorities – they now reside in a nature reserve where their homicidal tendencies will be held in check and carefully monitored with a regime of play and moderate feeding.

It was certainly the most unusual death I’ve had to eulogize on. I read the police reports with distaste. You’d have thought that those deceptively gentle creatures would have stopped bouncing after administering the killing blow and the cries of pain stopped (seemingly they were bent on blood lust revenge!) –  but the herd seemed to be driven by a divine hand bent on total destruction of not only the body but the soul of our dear friend.

I hear that her body was almost totally flattened – when they retrieved it from the dam that the head wallaby flung it in, it was unrecognizable as it was more spread out and squashed looking than it even was in life.   The Hazard sign is still up in the dam after all those yabbies that had nibbled on the body were found to contain toxic levels of both cream cake, hair, and human sebaceous fluid. The toxic chemicals report shows some hope for the future of that whole district, I’m pleased to report, the evacuated town were allowed back after only three days. Though they were warned not to touch the groundwater around 50km of the affected area for at least three weeks.

But lets not dwell on the freak death of our dear friend, I can see some of you are crying over there in the third back row – it’s interesting isn’t it how in our grief it can sound like we are chocking with laughter when really it must be tears and wracking sobs.

Her life was…well, it’s over now, isn’t it? She can get that rest and that love she craves, cradled in the bosom of her lead lined haz-chem stickered coffin.  A fully mature and aged woman, never a mother of children, she was however quite a successful mother of sorrows, giving birth to many people’s despair and tragedy, which blossomed behind her almost like drops of menstrual blood flowing from her womb as she ran on and on to plant more sorrow to more fertile grounds.Who knows what would have happened if her life had not just suddenly been put to an end?

She was student of sorts, but never a teacher – other than teaching others the true nature of how foolish it was to trust in the words of someone who was not on good terms with sincerity. She had a life lived so shallow that surely the deepest she ever got was to the bottom of the dam that was her temporary grave. She affected the people around her in many ways, borrowing and never returning,  and taking what she felt she deserved, knowing in her soul that she was deserving of a peace and harmony she never afforded or gave to anyone else.

Love was constantly on her lips and in her loins, and she perused this ideal of love with single minded determination and stubbornness that would have been admirable –  if only she’d been able to understand the nature of what selfless love was.  It’s not a bad thing to love so often and then move on so often, really; at least she got that bit of comfort out of life, and those around her learned valuable lessons of their own in what it meant to truly love and be loved. She brought communities together by living her life as she did and she provided at least a lot of entertainment by her tumbling, fumbling decision making processes.

Really, she will be missed by those few who had yet to discover her true nature, and that’s all right now, isn’t it. At least she felt cherished to the end as the paw strike that finally ended her vision and the Macropian bites that carried off her nose and ears struck her – she died knowing she was loved, even if she died deaf, blind and dumb to the last. But might i interject that she lived deaf, blind and dumb and the only difference were the physical injuries which the assaulting wallabies plied her with.

We will all move on from our grief at the passing of our dear beloved friend – our wounds will heal, even if they were wounds inflicted during her life and not her death. Time will be kind to our friend, just like photographs of people in the early days of photography seem funny or strange to us now, maybe those endless blurry, unflattering photographs of her that seem funny to us now, will fade in our own future to become poignant,  and will be stamped by time into something showing dignity and real human emotion, long after everyone who knew the genuine article are dead.

I wrap up this eulogy with a warning. Do not eat a cream cake in field where there are marauding attack wallabies – this is a lesson in safety that sadly we didn’t know needed to be learned, and we have in fact learned it in the most non abstract way possible now.

I also wrap it up with a note on the nature of moving on. It is time to bury the past and stop dwelling on it, no matter how amusing a grudge is an how much it can afford you, i urge you to find a place of peace where it no longer matters, and to move on.

Let whatever deity that you believe in bless you or else let the universe smile it’s suns down upon you and be at peace.