5. Papa’s Young Protégé

During the thirty years of my own ministry, great changes came to pass in the conduct of funerals. Now, at the appointed hour, a limousine calls for the family. At the mortuary, the casket, surrounded by floral gifts from friends, is already waiting for the service.

The officiating clergyman is ready, too. Perhaps he pauses, before entering the small chancel, to shake hands with the mourners who are tucked away, out of the view of the friends who have come to pay their respects. The funeral service is brief and usually impersonal. When it is ended, all the friends of the family go their way, and the relatives are quietly sneaked out a rear door and into the limousine for the ride to the cemetery. There the earth has been carted away. Rugs, in imitation of green grass, cover all the raw spots on the ground. The stave is lined with some screen fabric. The casket is waiting on a mechanical chassis, well covered with flowers. If it is an inclement day, a commodious tent has been erected to keep the weather out.

The minister reads from a little black book, and the casket, almost imperceptibly, apparently of its own volition, begins to descend. (When these gadgets first came in vogue, they frequently got stuck, refusing either to complete the job or back up. On these embarrassing occasions, a male relative would remain to see the matter through, while the rest of the family was packed off home at 30 mph.)

But, assuming that everything is working properly, the casket begins its descent while the minister reads from his liturgy.

When he arrives at “Earth to earth,” the mortician lets a handful of rose petals flutter down.

Everybody is spared the shock of seeing shovels in action. The bereaved may have wept quietly, but there has been no emotional release; much less emotional collapse.

That is still to come! They take all their unrelieved grief home with them. They take it to bed with them. It may darken their days. It may make them a perplexing problem to their best friends. It sometimes takes them to the psychiatrist.

No; I’m not recommending a return to the old way of dealing with this most painful of all the dilemmas faced by lonely people who have survived their best-beloved. I am sure the old way was much too heart-rending. But the modern way, which refuses to permit any measure of relief and hides away the sorrowing ones from so much as a handclasp and a sympathetic pat on the shoulder, is wrong; all wrong, and nothing less or else than wrong.

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