You can pick your friends, but you can't pick your relatives. (two posts, read the second one first!)

The strange part of my being at this funeral is that this is the side of the family which I pretty much avoid. Being there made me take a good look at my position in this family, or rather my non-position.
It's my mother's side, and being the youngest in my family I was also one of the youngest cousins- my older cousins didn't ever want much to do with my brother and I when we were little, and the only ones left were the three girls in one family who were even younger than us. But we didn't have much in common with the girls, except that we were bored simultaneously at family holiday celebrations.
Over the years, my siblings and I have found good reasons not to attend those family functions, and the distance between us has widened. I think originally our family was thought of as real snobs because we didn't drink like the rest of the family did (we do now!) and we never did seem to enjoy the same type of humor that they did (lots of fart jokes and teasing and such). We, of course, thought of them as immature boors. Every Summer at the family reunion they start a big water fight, which goes on forever. We don't like it, and we don't take part- further cementing my siblings and I in our cousins' minds, I'm sure, as un-fun.
I think that for everyone, in every family, we all get frozen in each others' minds at a certain age, until we are convinced otherwise. My oldest brother, I think, always kind of had me at 7 (and a cute 7 at that, I always knew he was a big fan of mine when I was a kid), until we started spending time together as fellow grown-ups. I had my cousin Joanie frozen at a nasty mid-twenties state, but as it turns out she's actually really nice- My frozen Joanie wouldn't give me the time of day, but Actual Joanie seems to like me, even. How about that?
The thing that really gave me pause was that no one seemed to recognize me, at first. I moved over when the family processed out so that I could make eye contact with my aunts and they'd know we were there. But one by one my aunts, cousins, and uncles walked past me without recognizing me. I was kind of in the back and I'm sure they weren't expecting to see family back there, but still. After my cousin and her husband got to the back of the church a huge line formed to hug them, like a sad receiving line. We skipped over it, because I didn't want to make these poor people face another face. I found an aunt who I knew would know me and she kind of said "oh look who's here, everyone!" and then everyone knew who I was.
Maybe it's time to hit one of those family reunions and start fresh. But I still won't be water fighting.