Many people reading this column have “people watched” along the way, some more than others. Some folks also may practice “people reading,” which I will define as developing a character description of someone from whatever visual clues they give. I often take people reading one step further and practice what I’ll call “people writing,” which I think of as coming up with a storyline for whatever the person I’m watching is doing at that moment.

Sometimes I find the story I’ve written in my mind is spot-on, or pretty close to reality, and other times I learn that my narrative is pure fiction.

I mentioned in an earlier column that I spent a good chunk of my twenties living in Boston and working what I called “jobs of work,” while being mostly undisciplined and unproductive with my freelance writing. One of those intermittent jobs was spending an autumn cutting grass and raking leaves on the 275 acres of Forest Hills Cemetery.

One day as I was going about my work, I saw a small gathering at a graveside burial service. One of the mourners at the service was physically separate from the others. Besides being apart from them, she looked different. Her mourning clothes were exactly appropriate and of a fine cut, as opposed to the mix-and-match outfits of the other mourners.

The first story I wrote in my mind was that she was a daughter of the deceased who’d risen to a higher socioeconomic status than the one she’d been born into, and in which the other mourners remained. I decided that wasn’t the story I’d settle on, because her holding herself physically apart seemed less subtle than the way class distinctions would play themselves out among family members at a funeral. To put it bluntly, what crumb wouldn’t stand amidst their relatives at a burial service because they considered themselves belonging to a higher social order?

My next story was that she was a family member ostracized because of a pattern of misbehavior on her part. But that narrative didn’t seem quite right, because such outcasts do not typically appear to be “better off” than the flock that has cast them out.

I then fine-tuned the story to be that she’d had a relationship with a family member that was problematic. At that point, I kicked it up a notch, took a leap, with a scenario that she’d had an illicit affair with the deceased and had bravely and/or boldly come to the service, even though she knew she’d face antipathy and shunning.

I should note that the journey I’d taken in my head to arrive at this tale of “The Forbidden Romance” had taken no more than a minute, and it was written on the inner walls of my skull while I stood out of sight of the mourners.

I would also note one of my earliest writing heroes – the group that replaced my childhood athletic heroes – was the playwright Eugene O’Neill, who is buried at the selfsame Forest Hills Cemetery. The plot I’d written seemed to me worthy of an O’Neill drama. Read, for instance, his “Mourning Becomes Electra” trilogy.

I got my reality check when the committal words at the gravesite ended and people began disassembling. The woman in question began coordinating leave-taking protocol. It dawned on me, slowly but surely, that she was (drum roll please) the funeral director. That explained her being separate from the clump of mourners and her professional-looking mourning attire. If the truth be told, one reason I missed her role was, no doubt, my own bias. In those times there were very few women funeral directors.

So much for my channeling Eugene O’Neill that morning.

I went back to my cutting and raking, still on alert for any drama, real or imagined, that might present itself to me.

Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.

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