My Little Town by David Tipmore;

Author:David Tipmore;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588384348
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2021-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

And the touching expressions of familial love at these funerals! I do not recall seeing in the North—not at funerals in New England, not in the Midwest—a family arrayed in a half-moon around an open casket at a “viewing,” smiling into the lens of a camera for a scrapbook photo, but I saw one in my little town. I also heard at another viewing an a capella shape-singing quartet, composed of four brothers of the deceased, each weeping as they rendered “In the Garden.” I have seen a coffin careening down a summertime country road, pulled by a sweating boy on a bicycle. I have even conversed, in a graveside chat, with a man who was planning to reload his favorite shotgun with buckshot molded from a dead relative’s cremated remains. Presumably, as a tribute to the deceased’s passion for firearms, the shot would later be released in a treasured spot of the loved one, emerging from the muzzle in a puff of holy smoke.

In fact, living in such a close community has allowed me to embrace its funerals to a degree far more intimately than when I lived anonymously in large cities. I have been literally engaged by the funerals of my little town. I have hoisted to my shoulder caskets at military funerals and remained motionless during the ten-gun salute at the graveside. I have staggered to load the heavy coffins of friends into the back door of a 1992 Cadillac hearse. I have been moved by funerals of local celebrities, such as that of Mary Ward Brown, a superior writer of short stories, when the little Episcopal Church was so crowded that the many people there to honor her were forced out of the sanctuary and had to wait in the adjoining Fellowship Hall to pay their respects to the family during the “visitation.” I have attended funerals of black friends, in black churches, when I was the only pale face in the crowd, admiring the hats and flowers, listening to testimony after testimony about the bereaved, and verse after verse of passionate singing, all amplified to a thunderous degree.

Despite the deep divisions in my little town, and some predictable stylistic distinctions, funerals permit a contradictory, reassuring truth: death is blind to color. Its “sting” recedes when confronted with the shared tears and hugs at the back of the sanctuary, the casseroles left quietly at the back door, the sympathy cards, the prayer lists and heartfelt mentions across all sorts of worship services. As a result, the outreach of death accomplishes what so much of life in my little town cannot: it includes our citizens in exactly the kind of communion most needed for healing.

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