This weekend, I flew to Pittsburgh for a family funeral; my 92-year-old great aunt passed away last week. This was the good kind of funeral, if there is such a thing, the kind of funeral where mourning the deceased means laughing until you cry about that time that you and your brother nearly got into a fight in the restaurant parking lot because neither of you wanted to ride in the front seat if Aunt Ish was driving.

That sort of thing.

My aunt was a beautician (does anyone even use that word any more?) in a small town outside of Pittsburgh. For years, she did the hair on the corpses at the funeral home, before they were laid out for the viewing. The mortician (is that word still around?) told my mother that Ish would come to the funeral home for a 20 minute job and sit around and visit for an hour afterward. He also said she used to joke with him: “When I die, you’d better make me look beautiful.” They did.

Ish left my mother a diamond ring; the men at the funeral home remembered Ish wearing it, all those years ago. “You know where she got the money to buy herself that big diamond?” they asked my mother. “Working here!”

Funerals are like traveling through time; you spend a day or two reviving this just-ended life, talking about other long-dead family and friends, and piecing together one story, about the deceased, which of course is really so many different stories, all tangled up together. This weekend the story was about my mother’s aunt Ish, but then of course it was also about Ish’s brother, Huck, who was my mother’s father and who died when she was nine, and about Ish’s husband, George, who helped my grandmother raise my mother and her siblings after their father died, and about my mother’s sister, Sue, who lived through all that with my mother and then died very suddenly nine years ago.

This weekend was also like traveling back in time because Butler, the little Pennsylvania town where my aunt lived for so many years, has the air of being frozen in the past, somewhere in the 1950s. The funeral home looks like something out of a John O’Hara short story, with floral wallpaper and white wainscotting and elaborate crown molding. On Saturday, before the funeral, my brother and I walked up Main Street, to pass the time before the viewing (a very 1950-something tradition, I think) and we stopped in an antique store, him in his jacket and tie and me in my Audrey Hepburn LBD, and browsed furniture and pictures and nick nacks as though we were just out for the day shopping and strolling, but all dressed up for church. We must have looked like something from the 50s there, too.

I have some funny stories from the weekend, because my family is always good for the funny, but I’m tired from going all the way back to 1950, to my aunt’s youth. It was a long trip.

And a sad one, in the end, although in a good way.