Unlikely Entrepreneurs

Danny Walsh’s week had begun badly and, in a rare twist, he had managed to make it worse.

He stared at the crumpled paper in his palm: a bill for electricity he couldn’t pay, not unless he somehow collected two hundred dollars and three miracles by Friday. There was a condensing stain on his ceiling—like the landlord hired a poet to do the plumbing—that threatened to become a second, wetter apartment. His phone, screen cracked in a spiderweb so complete that it could be considered abstract art, buzzed on the sticky Formica table.

“Let me guess. Unemployment again,” said Ginny, not looking up from her practiced act of melting into the thrift-store couch.

Danny glanced at her. Ginny’s hair had achieved new gravity-defying patterns, possibly from sleeping off last night’s small bottle of gin or comfort-eating toaster waffles. Both were probable. She wore Danny’s old AC/DC t-shirt that had, over many washes, faded to read ‘A _ _ D ’, which was arguably more honest.

“It’s the electric,” he said. “Another friendly reminder that I should’ve married rich.”

“You? Please. You can’t even spell ‘prenup’.”

He half-grinned. Ginny, looking like a raccoon on her second night raid, gestured loosely at his pile of envelopes. “Just burn the bills for warmth.”

He rolled his eyes and checked his phone. A news alert flashed: Professional Mourners: The Surprising Trend at Modern Funerals. Below was a thumbnail of a woman, mid-sob at a gravesite, in heels that screamed ‘someone’s getting paid’.

Danny snorted. “Listen to this. People actually get paid to cry at funerals. Paid.”

Ginny, now vaguely animated, grabbed the phone. “That’s a job? That can’t be a job. Professional what, bereavers?”

“Professional mourners,” Danny corrected, reading aloud. “There’s an agency. For when your family is too busy, or too... alive? Whatever—it’s a gig.”

Ginny gave him a look that suggested either deadly seriousness or gas. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“That if I fake-cry at a funeral, it’s all downhill from—”

“No,” she interrupted. “That we can actually do this. Like, be funeral people. Paid to mope and eat tiny triangle sandwiches. I was born for triangle sandwiches.”

Danny’s mind whirred. A business… He had about four business ideas a week. Most of them involved eBay and poorly forged Bob Ross memorabilia. This one, though, seemed less illegal and even less likely to land him in immediate small claims court.

“Think about it,” Ginny said, enthusiasm growing by the second. “We’re nobodies! Who’d look twice? It’s all about blending in, right? Sobbing when appropriate, nodding sympathetically. I can do solemn.” She attempted a face somewhere between ‘bereaved aunt’ and ‘person smelling sour milk’.

He snorted. Then he realized she was absolutely right.

“I mean, there’s gotta be an art to it,” Danny said, warming up to the code. “Dress up, stay near the back, don’t ask for seconds at the wake, keep your mouth shut unless someone needs a tissue.”

Ginny swatted his arm. “See? You’d be great—so dry and morose! And I’ll do the emotional heavy-lifting. Plus, I still have my cousin’s black dress from her caffeinated goth phase.”

He nodded, trailing off into imagination.

“First step,” he said. “Research. We need to learn how these gigs work. Protocol, rates,—”

Ginny snapped her fingers. “We crash a funeral.”

Danny blinked. “Isn’t that… a little… sacrilegious?”

Ginny’s tone turned sly. “Danny. Would we really get haunted by a bunch of strangers who never RSVP’d us in the first place? We’ll be ghosts. In and out. Invisible. Like somber ninjas.”

Danny stifled a groan. “Fine. But if anyone asks, you’re my cousin from Winnipeg and I’m mute from, uh, grief-induced laryngitis.”

Ginny grinned, victory glowing in her eyes. “Operation Ghost Guests. I love it.”

He already sensed how bad an idea this was. But rents, like regrets, have a way of refusing to go quietly.

He stood, collecting the stiff blazer from the back of a chair. Ginny dug up a purse coated in glitter from an era neither acknowledged. They rehearsed tragic faces in the bathroom mirror. Ginny’s practiced teardrop look made Danny cough with suppressed laughter.

“Okay, operation sober sadness,” Danny said.

She pumped a fist. “Let’s crash a funeral.”

---

They sat, twenty minutes later, in the crowded pews of St. Augustine’s, a funeral in progress. The dearly departed, they gleaned from the crumpled program left behind, had been a retired dentist named Clive. Danny attempted a solemn, ‘I may have known this man’ nod as the first hymn began. Ginny, eyes darting, surveyed the room. She nudged Danny subtly as a particularly enthusiastic mourner wailed.

“We need to up our game,” she whispered. “That’s next-level.”

Danny rolled his eyes. “Keep it together. We’re not auditioning.”

But as the service dragged, they watched. Took notes. The pacing of sobs, the muffled sniffles. Ginny, with a handkerchief, delivered a subdued dab to her eyes at all the right intervals. They snagged only one suspicious look—from a boy in the second row who seemed more interested in Pokémon than the dearly departed.

As they left, shuffling grimly past a spray of lilies, Ginny clutched his arm, whispering, “I think I just nailed my eulogy face.”

---

Back at the apartment, armed with half a tray of wake sandwiches (acquisition: covert), they hammered out a plan, fueled by stale coffee and shaky adrenaline.

“Craigslist ad?” Ginny asked.

Danny grimaced. “Too obvious. We need a website. Something… official. Tasteful.”

Beneath a fresh Google search—‘How much do professional mourners make?’—Ginny declared, “We need names. Something classy, but not, you know… morbid.”

Danny racked his brain. “Mourning Glory?”

Ginny considered. “Sounds like a regret from Catholic middle school.”

“How about—‘The Undercover Grievers’?”

She made a face. “More like spy novel than funeral service.”

A pause. Ginny smirked. “Why not just call it what it is? ‘Funeral Crashers’. It’s honest. Ironically. Plus, people love honesty—until they don’t.”

He grinned. “Funeral Crashers it is.”

They high-fived. The beginnings of a website began to take shape. Danny drafted a mission statement with professional-sounding platitudes: ‘Providing presence, compassion, and a discreet touch of humanity in your time of need.’ Ginny found free stock photos of sad-looking people who, on closer inspection, were probably actors faking ennui.

“How much do we charge?” Ginny said, pulling open a spreadsheet with a flourish.

Danny shrugged. “Going rate is fifty to a hundred a service. Make it a hundred and throw in a eulogy for an extra fifty.”

Ginny nodded, then hesitated. “You sure about the eulogy?”

He hesitated, then shrugged. “Worst case, we ad-lib. Half the people never even heard of the dead.”

“Only half?”

He snorted, and they clinked to-go coffee cups in a solemn wedding of desperation and opportunity.

“So?” Ginny said, finally, swirling the spreadsheet toward him like a tarot omen. “Are we really doing this?”

Danny, glancing at the bills and the cracked phone, thought about the peculiar dignity in pretending to care. “Let’s do it. Worst case, we die of embarrassment.”

She grinned. “I can live with that.”

They pressed ‘Publish’ on the world’s first honest site for professional funeral crashers—and with it, tumbled into a business venture that would prove only slightly less awkward than death itself.