I’ve Never Been a Pallbearer Before

Actually, I’ve never been to a funeral where the remains didn’t fit into a shoebox.  And, by the way, I’m not fond of funerals. 

So my dad’s cousin Lillian dies.  Of course she chooses to go the day before my dad’s 70th birthday party, the week he has my brother Jeff, his wife Sherry and all five of his grandchildren down to visit, and two weeks before is three week trip to the UK on the Queen Mary II.  So clearly, he has a lot of free time to deal with this.

So my dad’s making the funeral arrangements and mentioned that he’d like me to be a pallbearer.  I’m imagining ceremonially carrying this coffin on my shoulders with five others from the hearse up the front steps of some church and down past the empty aisles of mourners to the alter.

I mention this to Kerry and she’s like “only famous people have pallbearers”.  Based on a recent news story in the Boston Globe I gather that gang members do too.  I guess on Long Island, the funeral parlor handles the physical act of moving the coffin.  They move it from viewing to church and church to the cemetery, where they are assisted with heavy machinery, like forklifts.  Of course, the careful use of scheduling keeps the mourners from actually witnessing the undignified logistics.

Anyway, we’re wondering if my dad’s gone a little overboard with this funeral thing.  Turns out however, that the prepaid funeral simply didn’t include the coffin moving labor.  There was no ceremonial march past the throngs of mourners.  No, it was more like helping your friend move his oversized sofa to his new apartment, including figuring out how to get it around the corner and out the door.  We were basically there to load it into the hearse at the funeral home and then unload it at the cemetery and onto the elevator into the ground…while a backhoe waited at a respectful distance.

By the way, I was a little shocked to learn that the coffin was going into a concrete lined hole.  Not quite sure what that’s about.  My cousin Kevin, who was nice enough to also be a pallbearer and also once had a job digging graves, informed me that some cemeteries do that, while others prefer the traditional six foot whole in the dirt.  Who knew?

Finally, is there some sort of rule that funeral parlors use the same interior decorators who designed Disney’s Haunted Mansion?  I mean really, some fake cobwebs, a couple of skeletons and some flickering light bulbs and this place would be an awesome location for a Halloween party.

Did I mention that I’m not fond of funerals?  More on that in another post.