Final Resting Place

Final Resting Place

It might’ve been just another death in this small, aging congregation that I once served. We were averaging one funeral a month which was more than I was used to, but as an interim minister I was already used to not knowing the person who had died.

In this case there was no family in the area to meet with to plan the service and learn about the deceased—a woman in her nineties who had been in a nursing home for some time. One of the church deacons explained that the only surviving relative was due to fly in just before the service and depart soon after. So I outlined a simple service and chose the hymns. Then I sat down with the deacon and we went through the church record books to collect some facts about the person.

We read when the person had been baptized and confirmed in the church and at what ages, which were in synch with the date-of-birth on the death certificate. We noted when this life-long member had been ordained a deacon—making her one of the first female deacons in the Presbyterian Church, the current deacon informed me—and added up her many years of service on the Board of Deacons. According to the deacon, she had also been active in the women’s circle meetings, taught Sunday School, and knitted infant clothes for newborn babies born to poor mothers in the local hospital. After moving to the nursing home she had been regularly visited by former ministers and faithful elders.

The service was short and sweet and attended by the rear guard of the congregation. The grand-niece, fresh from the West Coast, and I made up the youth group. Immediately after the service she and I went to the nearby mausoleum for a private committal while the deacons got the lunch ready in the church hall and the rest of the congregation awaited our return. The relative and I rode in a limousine behind the hearse carrying the encased body, and we chatted about the usual things people chat about on the occasion of an overly-timely death: the weather (here and there), her flight (long but uneventful), and what she did for a living (I forget).

At the mausoleum, funeral staff in dark tuxedos escorted the body—the coffin on rollers—and the two of us down one long cavernous row after another formed by high walls of marble slabs. Each slab measured about four square feet—just big enough for the end of a coffin to be inserted—and they all looked the same: cold, hard, sterile. They finally stopped us at some point, and I spotted the name of the person: her first name and her last name carved in capital letters along with her date of birth and her date of death. I also noticed the slab above hers and the slab next to that one; they were obviously her parents, given their surnames and dates

“That’s her companion,” the great-niece said. She was pointing to the next slab, the one underneath the other parent. “My great-aunt took her in when she was a teenager—her folks had kicked her out, and my great-aunt was her Sunday School teacher. They lived together until she passed away. They both had jobs, a house, a dog, and they would take the dog on their vacations.” Her companion was only a few years younger than her and had died in her eighties. I made a mental note of the companion’s name.

The great-niece never used the L-word that day, nor did it come up in conversation when, a short while after the funeral, I asked the current deacon about the companion. I was told she too had been a longtime member of the church, served as one of the first female deacons, and was involved in circle meetings. From what I gathered, everyone in the congregation accepted them as two maiden ladies who shared a home together and took care of one another. Did their relationship include sex? The church record books don’t indicate one way or another. But the church cookbook leads me to hope so, for this couple submitted “Overnight Cherry Cream Cake” and “Good Chocolate Hot Dish.”