"They sure did a good job with her."
"He was a good un.”
You will hear sentences like these at every Southern funeral, spoken low in the hallway or out by the cars, and if you listen closely, you will understand they are not just small talk. They are liturgy. They are the nearest thing my people have to a creed recited over the dead, and like most creeds, they say more than the speaker intends.
The first is a compliment paid to the person who embalmed the deceased. We file past the casket, look down at a face composed into a peace rarely worn in life, and tell one another she looks natural. She does not. She looks like the work of a careful professional, which is precisely the point. The artifice is a mercy. We would rather keep the face than the fact.
I have had occasion to ponder all this lately. First my Uncle Wesley went, too soon, in the way that makes a family recalibrate assumptions about quality of life and what to do with the time we have left. My cousin Darcy followed him, also before her time, and my brother and I helped carry her. There is no better education in mortality than the specific weight of it in your hands.
But before we carry anyone, we feed everyone. Days before the service I brought a pasta salad over to my cousin Randy's house, and many dishes preceded mine. The counter already resembled a covered dish supper organized by Southern women, which is to say it was impressive and faintly competitive. Someone always brings the congealed salad. And in the weeks to follow there will be a diaspora of Tupperware to be sorted and returned, dishes with masking tape on the bottom and a last name in Magic Marker, because grief in the South arrives with an inventory. We are a people undone by our own table, here for a good time and not a long time, having decided the good time is worth the tradeoff.
In thinking about food, I also thought a little about funeral homes. Funeral homes are doing their best to be one stop shops nowadays, and they do a pretty good job at it. The lone gap in their service appears to be catering. I remain convinced that Kentucky Fried Chicken stays in business on funerals and church homecomings alone. If they ever dream up a KFC funeral home, watch out, JP Morgan. The Col. Sanders Full-Service Memorial Gardens, with original recipe at the graveside and extra crispy in the fellowship hall, is taking over the South.
My friend Tom came to us from Liverpool, by way of Camp ASCCA in Alabama, where he met his wife before settling outside Carrollton, Ga., to be a police officer. One thing Tom appreciated was the quiet respect in the way our traffic stops for the dead. A procession rolls through, the oncoming cars pull to the shoulder, a few men still lift their hats, and no law on the books requires any of it. It costs nothing and silently communicates everything, which is more or less the definition of a thing worth keeping.
But something that we sadly haven’t kept is the cardboard church fan – the kind stapled to a flat wooden handle, a photograph of the sanctuary on one side and scripture on the other. They ought to have just quoted the prophet Isaiah and quit: "And there shall be a tabernacle for a shadow in the daytime from the heat." The prophet was describing the shade of the Almighty and accidentally composed the perfect advertising copy for a paper fan, which only proves the Lord thinks way ahead. I may have to take up a love offering just for more cardboard church fans. Maybe the Baptist Association should make this a cause, because if some Southern gentleman with five gravy biscuits on his stomach and a thyroid condition ends up outside in a black coat and tie for too long with no fan, the gravedigger may have to pull a double.
We have likewise retired the old custom of sitting up with the dead, of which my own knowledge runs no deeper than a Jerry Clower story. Yet the custom was never only the practical business of confirming the departed had truly departed. It was a vigil, and a vigil is for the people keeping it. The church service tends to the soul. The related gatherings, the porch conversations and the retold stories and the laughter that ambushes you amidst your grief, tend to the mind, which on the day of a funeral is in as much distress as the spirit and gets far less attention.
I suppose no one likes funerals. I have always preferred that my own one day be kept simple, in the Christian tradition of the people I came from, and concluded in Southern dirt. The older I get, the more I contemplate the axiom that funerals are for the living and not the dead, so I mean to leave my survivors a margin of discretion to tend to their needs. No drums. I’m still a Southern Baptist, after all.
What I will insist upon is the part that has nothing to do with caskets or catering. We are obliged to cherish the living while they remain in reach, to honor the ones who had a hand in the making of us, and to keep carrying them on the short walk to the graveside – and in our memory for the long walk.
They did a good job with Darcy. She was a good un. The rest of us are still on the clock.
Talmadge L. East is the sitting Republican Probate Judge of Tallapoosa County.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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