INTO THE ROUNDHOUSE AND OVER TRE STYX TO GRANDMOTHER'S GRAVE WE GO
O'Rourke, David K.
INTO THE ROUNDHOUSE AND OVER THE STYX TO GRANDMOTHER'S GRAVE WE GO DAVID K. O'ROUHKE No one who has buried the dead for a dozen years has any right to be surprised by the bizarre. The...
...We looked until we found a door designed for human passage--peeking through the oven doors seemed inappropriateand opened it, startling a group of grave diggers on their coffee break...
...A few years ago I went to a Catholic cemetery for a burial following the funeral Mass...
...Our attitudes toward death are becoming more realistic and emotionally more healthy...
...May your holy angels keep the Commonweal: $89 label wRh name and plot numbered from failing off...
...Again we were in Resurrection Chapel same wagon, same man, same clipboard...
...We are better prepared to bring the body of a dead friend oi" relative to be buried without denying the reality of death, a realify our Catholic liturgy has always faced...
...The prospect of death brings on an inventiveneSS that would do credit to the Marx Brothers...
...Before long the dead man's colleagues were helping with the burial, highly polished cordovans shoving the spades into the soft soil...
...A man came in carrying a clipboard...
...and faced well...
...Riding home with the family in the weary silence that often follows upon death and funeral my mind began recomposing the graveside prayers...
...Somehow, reciting this prayer in a funerary roundhouse, over a hydraulic wagon, prior to committing the body into the hands of a man with a clipboard seems inappropriate...
...The new ritual for burials, drawn up in the course of renewing the liturgy, provides a large selection of quite decent prayers, and with thought and planning it is possible to present a burial service that is genuinely religious and emotionally helpful to the people present...
...Again, the same answer, "Oh, we don't do that anymore...
...Well," he said, "now we know...
...Then may he see the light of your presence, Lord Jesus, in the kingdom where you live for ever...
...Soon it was over...
...It used to be a commonplace around here that Catholics never came in with problems about their dead being unburied...
...may the martyrs keep the gravediggers:alert and bring them to the right grave...
...With something less than consummate, pastoral skill I went to one of the family members and asked him, "What do we do now...
...The need to cope with the finality of death, to give a sense of completion to the process of burying the dead, a process that historically has been well assisted by our Catholic funeral rites which do not hide from the reality of death, was being undermined by this new system which interrupts the burial process prior to its completion and leaves the emotions of the survivors in a state of limbo...
...On more than one occasion I have led mourners away who were distraught at the need to leave their dead unburied...
...be watched-over until they are placed in their graves or tombs, and see the degree of compliance with these demands as an indicator of the survivors' respect for the deceased...
...Or I thought I had concluded it...
...Mourners who leave a body in the roundhouse need never feel the effects of a gravediggers' strike...
...Oh yeah...
...The sod was patted back into place...
...And, let there be no mistake, the effects are indeed harmful...
...This can, and does, prove especially distressing to those of our Catholics whose cultures demand that the bodies of parents, spouses, etc...
...The origins of this new practice are not to be found in any liturgical or pastoral directives--that bad we've never become--but more in labor-management disputes between cemetery workers and the cemetery administrators...
...and may all the saints guard this body until it should be laid to rest and buried...
...But by now the coffin was on the wagon, and I had to figure out then and there how you commit a body to a hydraulic lift...
...Ours was called Resurrection Chapel and, as Winston Churchill said, "If that depicts the bliss of the resurrection, then I can face an eternal sleep with equanimity...
...Lord God, as you watched over and guarded the bodies of the patriarchs until they could be brought to rest in the land you had promised, so we ask you to watch over the body of our brother as it enters upon its own unknown voyage from here to its grave...
...I had prepared what I thought would be an appropriate graveside service...
...Resurrection Chapels and hydraulic wagons become substituted for Christian burial...
...This is one advance we could really do without...
...We were brought in to a group of folding chairs surrounding a brown, metal wagon apparently capable of being raised and lowered hydraulically...
...At the end the man with the clipboard came over, scotch-taped a numbered message on the foot of the coffin, and guided the wagon over to low, oven-shaped doors set into the inside wall of the roundhouse...
...To some, perhaps this attitude may seem flippant and somehow to be making a mountain out of a molehill...
...As a pastor I am sympathetic to the stresses any administrator must cope with...
...He was a prominent scientist, a good man, and a real philanthropist...
...As family member, religious and priest I have made many a trip to the cemetery in the past forty years...
...I admit that I began wondering just what they did do, and the first image that came to mind was the Mike Nichols and Elaine May $15.00 funeral--"Two men come in a green pick-up, and God knows what they do...
...The doors opened, ,the wagon:with-coffin disappeared inside, and the doors closed...
...And it was completed...
...Checking back we discovered that it was at that same time that the roundhouse was opened...
...But a new practice that threatens to become common in Catholic cemeteries could go far to place our burial practices alongside the wackiest of Southern California excesses...
...Good timing has not always been one of the American church's stronger suits, but the bad timing in this new practice is really extraordinary...
...and even .though their bodies lie in the earth they trust that they, like you, will rise again...
...Now we can go home...
...But we can't do that...
...The little bronze box looked lost on the hydraulic wagon so we packed it through the oven doors and placed the box on a small stand...
...So what happens...
...What have you Catholics done to your funeral practices...
...But for the last six months we've had a stream of Catholics who haven't finished up with burying their dead...
...And, warming to the battle, added, "And the grass put back on top...
...To my surprise we were ushered into a new building, shaped somewhat like an old, locomotive roundhouse, divided into a series of "chapels...
...Give our brother peaceful rest in this grave until that day when you, the resurrection and the life, will raise him up in glory...
...Within what seemed like a matter of seconds we were walking, single file, up the grassy hillside to the near-by grave---relatives, bronze box, clipboard, shovels over pin-striped shoulders, startled gravediggers running to catch up...
...Decidedly rattled I adapted the prayers to the new context, at least to the extent that you can adapt a burial to a freight station,' and concluded the service...
...We were looking into the round room at the center of the roundhouse...
...Alternatives might run in the following manner...
...I don't leave here until I see my brother-in-law's ashes put in the ground...
...But as one who also, and vividly, remembers Cardinal Spellman sending the seminarians out to dig graves in order to break the gravediggers' strike I dislike seeing pastoral considerations sacrificed in favor of labor-management maneuverings...
...And despite the emotional difficulty inherent in burying the dead I have often experienced a sense of completion in seeing the coffin set in its final place...
...15 September 1978:590...
...But for all that it still comes as a shock when old Holy Sepulcher becomes as freaky as new Whispering Glades...
...Oh," he said, "we don't do that anymore...
...Naively I asked him, "Aren't we going to the grave...
...In it were a collection of garden tools, several wilted wreaths and, arranged like the spokes of a wheel, a half dozen wagons each with its coffin on it...
...And the distress endures...
...At the end of the service a sister-inlaw, still quite feisty despite her eighty years, asked "Well, when do we go to the grave...
...YOU can't do it," she shouted, "but I can, and I'm gonna...
...Not too long ago I returned to the cemetery first mentioned above, bringing the ashes of a non-religious man who had requested and received permission to have them interred in his Catholic in-laws' family plot...
...The man with .the clipboard smiled at us and left...
...Flippant it may be, but it is occasioned by a practice whose roots are as unworthy as its effects are harmful...
...I don't know about you," he replied, "but I want to see what's behind those doors...
...The man's colleagues were smiling...
...One of the prayers I frequently use runs: Lord Jesus Christ, by the three days you lay in the tomb you made holy the graves of all who believe in you...
...Elizabeth KiiblerRoss's writings on the processes of dying and grieving have proven remarkably popular...
...One of my friends, a priest who was working on the staff of the crisis clinic maintained by the psychiatric department of a major hospital, was approached by one of the clinic's psychiatrists...
...Our curiosity was satisfied, but our rather deep-seated and Catholic desire to see a friend and relative laid to rest was not...
...And the sister-in-law said, "Good, we've finished...
Vol. 105 • September 1978 • No. 18
