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Final tribute to U.S. man includes funeral procession through Burger King

It wasn't quite the scene you would expect at a fast food restaurant Saturday as a funeral procession went through the drive-through at a Burger King near Route 30 in York.

When someone has such a pronounced passion in life, it’s not unusual for loved ones to pay tribute to that passion after death.

What is unusual: When that passion happens to be fast food.

But despite his love of all that artery-clogging goodness, David S. Kime Jr. lived to be a robust 88-years-old.

So when he finally passed away on January 20, his family made sure he got that last Burger King whopper on the way to his final resting place.

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As the York Daily Record reports, Kime Jr.’s funeral procession rolled through his favourite Burger King drive-thru in Manchester Township, Penn. en route to the cemetery.

Each mourner picked up a WHOPPER JR. in tribute.

"He liked his WHOPPER JRs.," Margaret Hess, head manager of the Burger King franchise told the paper.

Hess and her crew prepared around 40 sandwiches for the group – including one for the dearly departed, which was subsequently placed atop his casket amid dozens of lilies and roses.

Though the ritual may seem bizarre to the uninitiated, Kime Jr.’s daughter, Linda Phiel, told the paper it was simply her family’s way of honouring the things that made Dad happy.

And after suffering the loss of his wife 25 years ago, many of those things included burgers, subs, pizza and tacos.

"My mother kind of kept him in check," Phiel told the Daily Record. "When she died, for a while, he would eat with us. But he considered us health freaks because we ate things that were green, like broccoli."

Instead, the World War II veteran shirked all suggestions that he modify his diet and stuck with the junk that he craved.

Though he was a diabetic and eventually succumbed to heart complications, the combination of his genes and doing what made him happy kept him alive and ticking for an impressively long run.

"He would say, 'I won't live longer, it will just seem like it because I'll be more miserable faster,'" Phiel said.

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"I think his biggest fear was that he not be able to live as he chose… I'm so grateful he never had to," she added.

Though this lifestyle happened to work for Kime Jr., however, if you still have a chance to introduce a little more broccoli and a little less burger into your life that probably wouldn't be a bad thing.