She played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” on the organ at a cremation.
“When I’m doing some of these things, I try not to make fun of the people, even though sometimes it gets hilarious. But it’s not my job to get judgmental. I just do what they tell me,” she says. “The songs mean a lot to people–it was their relative’s favorite or had some major significance in the person’s life. Often they don’t see the irony in the requests. So I accept it. I feel like I’m contributing by helping them through this dark time.”
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Kosik, who employs several other people to do the same kind of work, hired Garvin after Garvin’s mother bragged about how good her daughter was on the piano. She had started piano lessons when she was six years old. “I just love music, and could just hear songs and go play them. It just came to me,” Garvin says. At 14 she was the pianist at her father’s church in Hannibal, Missouri. She received a bachelor’s degree in music education, and then taught for a while in the Maywood school district. For 30 years she has also been a pianist at the Church of the Nazarene in Oak Park.
The widow walked up to Garvin after the service and said, “Oh, Charlie would have loved it.”
