... my mother's gone to the funeral of a cousin today. This is a man whom she actively avoided during his life, and actually made snide comments about. A man who spent the last year of his life battling cancer, and whose heart was compassionate enough that his will (I'm told) states that his entire estate is to go to charity. My mother doesn't speak to 99% of her family, unless its to sneer and condescend about them. So. Why has she gone to the funeral? A few reasons. One is to try to guilt DB1 into talking to her if he and my SIL attend. Another is to have a go at her own elderly mother/sister if they attend. But mainly it's to make everyone know how successful she is, and how much more she has than they do. It's to rub their noses in it. To achieve this, she's driving a 400 mile round-trip - which is only because she knows no one will invite her to stay with them, so she has to pretend that she needs to rush off...
With her is my NPD daughter who inserted herself the moment she heard "funeral". She's going, I suspect, to post it all over her FB and Instagram sites in an effort to obtain pity/sympathy from her few followers. And will, if all other family events are anything to go by, make it all about them. She never met the cousin who died, hasn't met anyone else in the family who is known to be attending, and if DB1, SIL, Aunt and Grandmother turn up, then because she's with my mother, I have every inkling that she'll be ignored point blank, too (DB1 is NC with our mother, as is Aunt, whom Grandmother lives with).
So, in th timely case of my own family, it's to make themselves look better than they actually are, and to feel better about themselves, I'm afraid.
(I would have been in attendance, except for the fact that I'm not a hypocrite, as I'd not seen cousin since my Grandfather's sister's funeral in 2004, and I'm currently housebound with a badly mangled leg! I sent a large donation winging its way to a charity for the type of cancer which caused his death, this morning, instead, in lieu of allowing my mother to add my name to the ornate wreath she's spent a small fortune on, just for it to sit and wither away/create a mess for someone else to clean up eventually).