“Your father’s mustache” is a good-natured, old-fashioned expression which means “You’re full of baloney,” “Go jump in the lake” or “Pshaw.” You never hear it used anymore, but it was around when I was a kid 60 years ago (I’m 72).

Let me tell you about my father’s mustache, which he had all of my life, or until the funeral parlor shaved it off in 1992.

Oh, they claimed they didn’t do that, that it must have been a nurse at his sickbed, but I suspect it was the funeral parlor. People don’t like to admit irreversible mistakes, and a missing mustache on a corpse, 10 minutes before visitation hours begin, might seem pretty irreversible.

Not so.

I had worked with my hometown Connecticut funeral home 10 years before as a graduate of Yale Divinity School, performing funerals for people who had no survivors and no clergy nearby, so I knew some of the cosmetic steps undertakers can perform on a corpse.

They had even put a slight smile on my mother’s corpse that changed the entire mood of visitation hours, and especially the mood of my father, who was heartsick.

But now it was my father’s turn and coming up with a missing mustache is a lot different than gently adjusting a blank face into a discreet smile.

My father’s mustache was a very thin line of hair hanging ever so minutely over his top lip. I had never seen him without it in my 48 years. Of course, it was dark when I was a kid, but in 1992 my father had beautiful white hair and a pencil-thin white mustache.

I knew the undertakers by name, because of my work there before, so I said, “Charlie, I don’t know what you can do, but I know you can do something, and the viewers will be here in a few minutes.”

Charlie and I looked at each other and he directed an assistant to get some scissors. We gently raised my father’s head and cut a small patch of white hair off the back which rested on a silk casket pillow.

Then with what looked like old-fashioned Duco cement from a tube, Charlie squeezed a thin line of a transparent glue across my father’s upper lip.

With tweezers, we took each strand of the cut white hair and placed it side by side on the line of glue. It looked like a white picket fence. Not good.

The hairs were way too long, like a white-haired walrus, not suited to a distinguished old man, so we took a tiny pair of sewing scissors and gently trimmed the “fence” until it exactly resembled the pencil-thin mustache my father had sported all of my life.

He was ready to be viewed just in time.

My father, by the way, hated funerals and especially calling hours. He thought they were barbaric.

So I took particular relish in telling the visitors the mustache story as they came through the receiving line. It never failed to bring a smile or an occasional gasp.

Everyone — even the gaspers — went back for a second look. And because my father had on a navy blue suit, an occasional tiny mustache-length white hair had floated off the scissors and landed conspicuously on his suit, evidence that my story was not a fabrication.

The whole somber affair took on the mood of a contest: Who could discern the deception right under their noses — and his?

My father would have smiled, mustache and all.

Paul Keane lives in Hartford.