Sometimes the journey and the destination become one. Thus it was on a recent family trip to a family funeral for a cousin with a beautiful woman with a beautiful heart and a beautiful voice. She’d sung at my sister’s memorial almost three years ago and at my mother’s graveside service about a year-and-a-quarter ago.
This is a big funeral inside the fully-packed country church, plunked down in the middle of agricultural land. I recall fanning myself here as a girl with a fan provided by a funeral home as we sat listening to a sermon and then rising to sing a hymn. Today there’s air-conditioning, recorded music, and barely a dry eye in the full house of the Lord. The town drunk made something beautiful for God inside this renovated Sugar Grove Church.
Our funeral cortege is a long one and our journey to the Gillette Cemetery takes us past a long stretch of gnarly construction. All the Illinois Valley Paving construction workers standing beside the road take their hats off as we pass.
We step over cowpies in the cemetery separated from a neighboring pasture by a low wire fence and there’s a cornfield next to that. I sit on a stump and watch
The current custom of no longer lowering the casket into the ground at the close of the graveside service bothers my father. The lack of lowering the body to a final resting place feels incomplete to him. Pop says he took it up with a funeral director once who explained that they don’t even own the lowering equipment anymore. Perhaps it’s unionized with a separation of services and duties? Did this change come from a cultural change? Is it a shift in our way of death?
Beautiful floral arrangements cluster around the casket underneath the green tent providing shade on this hot day. Family members sit in folding chairs covered with green plush to soften and comfort them at this moment of leave-taking. A grandfather explains to his grand-daughter that the casket sits inside the gold-colored vault and points out her grandmother’s name on the end of the vault’s top.
Then I witness a custom I’d never seen before: family members wet their thumbs and press them against the casket, so their beloved one can take this ephemeral imprint from their bodies to the grave and the next world. I think of handprints on caves and how basic an act this is—to leave the swirls of our unique identity as a final message, a final link and connection between worlds we cannot traverse.
Back at the Sugar Grove Church loving friends, neighbors, and church members have prepared a funeral feast for the returning mourners, mostly family now, but we still fill the church basement. Pop’s legs don’t hold him up as strong as they used to, so we sit and listen to more stories while the line dwindles.
Our journey of reunion at a time of parting is complete, and we head home, gazing out towards the river and the white cranes.
Visit Janet Grace Riehl’s blog “Riehl Life: Village Wisdom for the 21st Century” (http://www.riehlife.com) to share more of her thoughts on connection through the arts, across cultures and generations, and within the family. Janet is the author of “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary,” a downhome family love story beyond death. You can read sample poems on her website http://www.riehlife.com.
Tags: country church, death and dying, family, funeral customs, journey, old-fashioned