"How are things?!"

As we were driving from a funeral to the burial on Saturday, I mentioned to Andy that earlier that morning I had overhead one of his cousins greet one of his aunts at the funeral with "Oh, hello!! How are things!!??" A few things were running through my head, but the one thing that I was really wondering was, "how is she (the aunt) supposed to respond to that?". Should it be "Oh, I'm just fantastic, my brother has just died, and we had to cut our vacation short to rush up here to MN from FL, thanks for asking!"??

So, really, we hadn't seen many of these people since Christmas, and some it had been even longer, but really, when you're at a funeral, should you greet someone with "how are things?!"?