5. Papa’s Young Protégé

During the forty-five years of my life between ten and fifty-five, I probably attended more funerals than anyone else of your acquaintance, unless he should be an exceptionally busy mortician; and it is my considered opinion that of all the practices which organized Christianity performs badly the typical funeral service is by far the worst. And this goes for all the churches that I know anything about. At the one hour—of all hours—when Christian faith is put to its severest test, the Church mumbles, falters, stands helpless.

More often than not, the clergyman reads dismembered passages of Scripture. Here is a sample:

“For though after my skin Worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.”

Just what does that mean, if anything at all?

Then follows St. Paul’s explanation of what was to be expected on the Last Day. It was his belief that the world would come to an end in his own time. He and his fellow Christians, who were still alive, would be “caught up” to meet the Lord. As for those already gone, it would be Resurrection Day: the graves would be opened and the sea would give up its dead.

Despite the fact that Paul’s timing of the Last Day was a miscalculation, we still read it supposedly for the comfort of the bereaved. Perhaps you will be asking me if I have any suggestions to offer for the improvement of our poor performances. Indeed I have; but I fear they are impractical. Perhaps the Mormons could do it. Maybe I shall tell you about it later, if there is time. At the moment, we must get back to these memoirs.

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My papa was in great demand for funeral services; and, if the weather wasn’t too bad, he would take me along. Nearly all funerals, at that time, were held in a church, and the graveyard was always an important part of the church property; an appropriate place for it, I think. The “funeral parlor” and the secular, commercialized, noisily advertised cemetery were yet to appear.

Well within the scope of my lifetime there have been fundamental changes in our general attitude toward the dead. I hope it will not depress you if I speak of them.

Today, if there is a death in the family, by natural causes, the physician or the nurse or a neighbor phones a mortician who arrives in an ambulance with a promptness exceeded only by the Fire Department. The family, still upset emotionally by their bereavement (for, no matter how long the loved one had been ill, the immediate relatives are never quite prepared for the shock), have been herded into a room where they will be unaware of proceedings. The mortician’s men quickly and quietly tiptoe out of the house with the so recently vacated tenement of clay; and by the time the family strolls back to the bedchamber, everything has been put to rights. It is as if father or mother or sister Mamie or little Jimmy had never lived there.

And that night, and the next one, sister Mamie (we will say) who had been sick so long that she dreaded to meet strangers, shares communal lodging with a dozen or more in a sort of public dormitory for the dead.

Now I fully agree with you that the real Mamie, who was Mamie, is gone; and that her frail little body is not our precious Mamie at all. But this modern practice of permitting our dead to be grabbed up, while still warm, by total strangers, and hustled at top speed to a place of business, to be impersonally operated on by embalmers and beauticians, is the most cold-blooded performance that our era of efficiency and assembly-line production has achieved.

Of course the old way of handling these sad affairs was immeasurably worse. There were a couple of days when mortality had much the best of it over any calm consideration of the spiritual Life Eternal. The home was full of the confusion of distant relatives, friends of the family, neighbors, and comparative strangers who had come out of curiosity, expecting to be shown the corpse, preferably by the next of kin, who was thoroughly worn out before the torture was ended.

I think it would be a good thing if every church had a little chapel where the remains of our departed could be taken, after having been embalmed in the privacy of the home. That might help to solve the dilemma. As the matter stands today, the Church, which should be prepared to offer the physical equipment and spiritual counsel so urgently needed on such occasions, is missing a great opportunity to be of service.

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