Ever see an officiant mess up a memorial service?

When my wife's grandmother died the guy clearly forgot her named and just kept calling her "the lady".

Memorial officiants should be family members.

Yeah, my wife's step-grandmother was a Lutheran and when she died they had the Lutheran priest do the service. Pretty sure the step grandmother had paid for a sizeable chunk of what was in the church (her first husband owned a car dealership). The lazy arse minister mispronounced her name throughout. And it wasn't a one off...he went on and on, saying her name 15/20 times and wrong every one of them. Actually was funny on some level.

At my grandmother's funeral I was pissed that the minister didn't say anything about what she was like as a person. Years later I found her own handwritten instructions for her funeral and she specifically stated there should be nothing about her, only about God.

How about this one? My grandfather worked for the church he attended for 30+ years. When he died, my grandmother asked the priest whom my grandfather worked for to assist with the funeral. He had been retired for about 10 years at that point so he would just say a few good words and just assist the priest with the service.

He flat out said no.

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he went on and on, saying her name 15/20 times and wrong every one of them. Actually was funny on some level.

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This was on that level. He started naming the mother as the daughter and the father as the son, etc. and he was creating names no one had ever used. He obviously had no firm handle on the subject matter.

To be fair, the immediate family is probably extremely disorganized

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Memorial officiants should be family members.

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Some people don’t realize that it doesn’t have to be a minister doing the service.

I was the officiant and the best man at my brother’s wedding and I dropped the ring, which almost rolled into a drain. I was mortified but passed on the title of best man to the groomsman who stopped it from rolling into the drain

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Some people don’t realize that it doesn’t have to be a minister doing the service.

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Depends on the religion.

Good friend of mine became a priest. I asked him if he ever screwed up.

He said he did at a funeral when he flipped the wife and deceased names around. They were French names he was not familiar with. He noticed people flinching as he spoke.