After a tumultuous car trip to Deerlick, Pennsylvania for the funeral of the husband of Maggie’s best friend (Serena), Maggie and Ira have finally arrived at the church where the funeral is to be held. A brief conversation with Serena results in Maggie and Ira soon being forced to sing “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing” in front of the entire funeral procession. They sang this song at Serena and Max’s wedding many years before. Serena also asks some of the other attendees of the wedding to sing renditions of songs from the 1950′s and 1960′s.
While it may seem commonplace to get an orchestra or choir for a funeral, Serena decides to skip that detail and get the guests to provide their own music. She tells all of the guests that also attended her wedding that they must sing the same song at her husband’s funeral.
” ‘I don’t expect anything professional,’ Serena said. ‘All I want is a kind of rerun, like people sometimes have on their golden anniversaries. I thought it would make a nice touch.’ ” (Tyler, 57).
Thus, Maggie and Ira would be singing “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing” as they did at Serena and Max’s wedding, and other guests would be singing “My Prayer” and reading from “The Prophet.” Serena shuns all the traditional funeral rites and creates her own, not caring about what everyone else seems to think.
Maggie is obviously jealous of the connection that Serena had to her late husband. Even in Max’s later days, as his health started to go, he and Serena were still perfectly happily together.
“Every stage of their lives, it seemed, Serena had experienced slightly ahead of Maggie; and every stage she’d reported on in her truthful, startling, bald-faced way, like some foreigner that didn’t know the etiquette.” (Tyler, 54)
Max and Serena’s relationship symbolizes everything that Maggie wishes her relationship with Ira was. She wishes that she could see her relationship from the outside looking in, like Serena did when Max’s memory started to go. She wishes Ira would care more about her feelings and why she acts the way she does. Serena and Max didn’t have family issues with their children like Ira and Maggie did. They were perfectly content to live in the moment and take life as it came to them.
