Nowadays, when someone passes away, we gather together and have what we sometimes call a memorial service or going-home celebration. It’s a bittersweet time to remember a life well lived in the service of Jesus. I’ve noticed in the last few years that the gatherings take the tone of the people who are no longer here. If they were Christians, their legacy continues in friends and family, and part of them lives on. It’s a time of heart-swelling pride in knowing their lives are not over and never will be.
That stands in stark juxtaposition to the funerals of my childhood. I grew up in a small church and a Christian college town in a family of singers, and we were asked many times to sing at weddings and funerals, mostly funerals. Because Dad was a preacher for an even smaller country church, we sang for many country funerals.
When most of the kids from college were not in town during summer break, my family spent probably one day a week singing. Funerals back then were not hallowed festivals of rapturous remembrance and tribute. They were dismal, agonizingly morose requiems of lamentation and sobbing. Especially in the country, where nothing significant ever really happens, funerals were the grandest and most pretentious form of entertainment. Funerals were distressing and bleak. It was as though the deceased didn’t just die; they ceased to exist, perhaps because the mourners never had heard what heaven is really like. Paul clearly says in 2 Corinthians 12 that a guy he knew was caught up to the third heaven but was not allowed to say what he saw there, so obviously, some thought, we shouldn’t be dreaming about what heaven is like.
For most people, it seemed heaven was a place we looked forward to only because it meant we were not in hell. I couldn’t imagine heaven being much more thrilling or energizing than endlessly jumping in a bouncy house or eating really good food whenever I wanted it, with the occasional drop-by visit of Jesus when he was making his rounds.
I think that’s the reason funerals in those days were so devastating and even scary. Burials were only mentioned by our parents after they were sure we were intimately acquainted with the idea of death. This practice was clearly designed to be used as a punishment for bad behavior.
When my family sang at weddings, Mom would lean over, poke me, and whisper, “You’re next.” She thought it was cute and funny, until I started doing the same thing to her when we sang at funerals.
I’ll never forget one summer after finishing my freshman year of college. All my college friends from the music department were away from campus for the summer. Some acquaintances in Floyd, Arkansas, asked Dad to preach for a funeral.
Dad asked if I could gather some local choir friends together to sing hymns. Without thinking, I said, “Sure.” I began asking around and discovered the only people available were some friends still in high school. I enlisted them, even though almost every one of the eight was entirely unaccustomed to funerals.
I wasn’t too nervous. After all, we’d all sung out of the same blue songbook our whole lives. I knew they would know the hymns. However, I’d lost my tuning fork a while back, so I borrowed one from my high school choir director. It might be relevant to note I grew up in a church that didn’t use instrumental music for any church function. It was strictly forbidden.
I talked to Dad the day before the funeral and told him who was coming to sing. I strongly informed Dad that these kids were novices at singing at funerals. I wouldn’t put them in a position of being uneasy. I told him he was to tell whoever was in charge that we would sit in the back of the church, far away from the casket. I also informed him we would leave before the final viewing. He said he would make sure the director knew my rules.
On the day of the funeral, I drove around to gather up all eight kids in the family Datsun station wagon.
Our big orange Datsun station wagon had been a gift to my sister, Jacqui, on her sixteenth birthday. Our dad had paid $170 to have it painted orange—really orange. We swore the vo-tech beauty was actually the front half and back half of two different cars soldered together and then spray-painted orange. It was a standard shift station wagon, and the back end had a decal that said, “Fully automatic.” It looked like a dog loping with its hind legs slightly angled to one side as it ran toward you.
Dad gave me directions to the little country church, and we were off. As we turned down the well-traveled road to the church thirty minutes later, I thought it could not have been more picturesque. The small clapboard church with a white steeple rising just above the nearby trees seemed the most serene place I could think of for a funeral service.
Rain, pouring in torrents nonstop for three days before the funeral, had rendered the ground completely soaked. I drove down what used to be a dirt road, which was now slippery from the constant rain. The tiny church sat to my right. Directly across the street, to the left of me, was the cemetery, peaceful, quiet, and pastoral. It seemed a serene and undisturbed location for repose. I parked on the road directly between the church and the cemetery.
Dad was there ahead of us. As I walked to him, the other kids followed behind me, vainly attempting to avoid mud pits. Another gentleman ran out and took my hand. He was the funeral director and would show us where to sit. I glanced over toward Dad but saw him deeply engrossed in conversation with a mourner. As I passed through the front door, I noticed all the flower arrangements lining the back wall of the church instead of surrounding the coffin at the front of the small auditorium. Odd, I thought.
I heard the middle-aged man say to Dad as quietly as possible, “We had to physically pull her out of the coffin at visitation last night.” Dad just grunted and avoided eye contact with me. The gentleman’s comment left me a bit confused but nonetheless intrigued.
I kept walking as the funeral director ushered us down front and into a small, beautifully polished mahogany choir loft directly behind and above the podium, which sat straight behind and above the coffin. Before I could protest, the director scuttled off. I glanced back to see eight impressionable young kids looking down on the closed casket with eyes as big around as their open mouths. I whispered, “Y’all, trust me on this. In three years, you will have sung at so many of these, this will be nothing. I promise.” Not one of them moved or blinked. I’m not sure they breathed. I knew we were in trouble. We sat quietly as guests trickled in.
Finally, it was time to start. The family came in as a unit. The men were staunchly holding up the female family members, exactly as they’d been taught from an early age, and the women all held kerchiefs to their noses, just as it should have been.
Then I heard her—before she ever got inside the small auditorium. From my vantage point, I looked down the center aisle to the back of the church. Into the building she came, held up valiantly by two men: the brother I’d heard talking to Dad earlier and another close in age, obviously siblings. As the brothers all but carried her down the center aisle, I sat almost in awe at the visage before me.
I couldn’t decide if I was more disturbed by the mourning and wailing, which apparently emanated from Dante’s third level of Gehenna, or her funeral attire. She carried the body of Aunt Bea and the voice of Almira Gulch. She wore a pencil-style black vintage dress, which I was sure she’d bought somewhere around forty pounds ago. Appropriate for a funeral, it did cover her shoulders—barely. She wore shiny, pointy-toed black patent-leather shoes, but it was her hat that was spellbinding. It was a pillbox hat with a short veil, but stuck inside the velvet band around the entire circumference were some kind of bird feathers that were not easily identifiable. They were varying colors and lengths, anywhere from a couple of inches to a foot high, not species-specific. I got the feeling she probably renewed the plumage for each occasion. Poor birds! Everyone else seemed determined to ignore the nest perched atop her head. I purposely turned away to keep from staring.
The brothers struggled as best as they could, one on each arm, stumbling as they maneuvered her to the front pew. The entire time, she wailed, “Oh, Daddy! Oh, Daddy!”
The brothers’ futile attempt to console her included words of comfort. “Now, now, Auntie Christa. It’ll be okay. Sit down, and hush now, Auntie Christa.” At some point, I noticed the spiritual implications of her name.
Unfortunately, at that moment, one of the high school kids behind me discovered for the first time what it feels like to experience the embarrassment, guilt, and shame of uncontrollable and inappropriate giggling. At first, I thought she was just coughing. Then I realized she was trying to cover her wheezing snickers.
Fortunately, I saw the funeral dude signaling me to start. I grabbed the borrowed tuning fork out of my coat pocket, struck it against my index finger, listened to the hum of the fork, and gave the kids the pitch for middle C. I began directing the first hymn: “Oh, Lord, my God. When I, in awesome wonder, consider all the worlds thy hands have made.”
Wait. It sounded at least a fourth of an octave lower than it was supposed to be.
“I see the stars. I hear the rolling thunder.”
Even worse, all song directors know the fatal truth that no matter how fast you start a hymn, if you start it too low, it’s going to slow down. After feeling as if I were hiking through molasses, I finally made it to the end of the song.
I was furious and wanted to take it out on someone, so I glared toward the back, where Dad was standing. He averted my scowl and quickly glanced out the open entrance door as if trying to read a tombstone in the cemetery across the street. I looked back at the kids, and they were all looking at me with confusion and maybe condemnation on their faces. One of them actually mouthed, “What are you doing?” And there was still the chuckling girl. Her shoulders were shaking, and she held a tightly clenched fist against her mouth.
Someone mouthed, “Pitch it higher.”
I mouthed back, “I’m using the tuning fork.” It’s right!
Through all this, Auntie Christa was caterwauling, “Why? Why?”
I thought it best to go ahead with the next hymn. I pitched it in the correct key with the tuning fork and began. Somehow, it became an awkward duet with Auntie Christa. She would not be outdone.
“Low in the grave, he lay, Jesus, our Savior. Waiting the coming day, Jesus our Lord—”
“Oh, Daddy!”
“Up from the grave—”
“If I could hear him preach just one more sermon!”
“He arose!”
The song of celebration, still pitched embarrassingly low, became a funeral dirge, somehow oddly appropriate but not what I originally had envisioned. When it was over, I refused to even look back at the kids. I knew what they were thinking. It wasn’t until I returned the offensive fork to my choir director later that I noticed I had been given a G tuning fork instead of a C fork. I was, in fact, starting every song a half octave too low.
After we finished singing, Dad took his turn. He walked to the front, deliberately averting my deeply furrowed brow, and stood at the pulpit, between us and the coffin. He gave a heartfelt message about death, which he was forced to scream, trying to be heard over the rivaling howling from Auntie Christa. The family no longer attempted to quiet her. A few kids close by her bent over, gathering up occasional tufts of bird fuzz that flew off her head.
Finally, it was done. I felt sure the funeral dude would escort us out before the final family viewing, but he did not. I sat in horror as he and his minion helper marched—and I do mean marched—to the front and opened the coffin.
There we were, looking straight down into the embalmed face of a ninety-something-year-old Baptist preacher, who, I’m sure, to the kids, looked astonishingly like the Crypt Keeper.
There was an audible gasp in unison. I turned around and witnessed eight sixteen-year-old kids metamorphose from well-adjusted high schoolers into clinical case studies.
A couple of them averted their gaze downward to the floor, but the others looked as though they were half expecting and hoping that Daddy would jump up and say, “Just kidding.” Meanwhile, Auntie Christa was proclaiming to the entire congregation that she no longer wanted to live. At that moment, I was close to making her wish a reality.
I looked back and said, “Let’s go,” leading the procession of eager followers down the front aisle before the guests and family could parade past the open coffin. I felt compelled to get them out of there as fast as possible before they were forever mentally scarred. I would deal with Dad later. We passed him. I purposely avoided eye contact with him. He tugged my coat sleeve and whispered, “Um, the funeral director was wondering if the kids could carry the flowers to the grave site across the street before the family walks over.”
I whispered back, “Dad, I believe you have successfully turned eight bright, well-adjusted high school students into Children of the Corn. We’re going to do this one last thing, and then we’re out of here.”
At my direction, each kid grabbed a container of flowers, and we headed across the soggy, muddy street into the cemetery. The chuckling girl commented on the lovely white stones lining the walkway. I informed her that they were actually grave markers, and I walked ahead. Suddenly, I heard someone whisper, “Excuse me. I’m so sorry. Excuse me.” I watched as chuckling girl passed me, apologized to each grave, and then long-jumped across them, precariously balancing her vase of flowers in her arms.
Something inside me snapped. I set my flowers down and laughed. In fact, I laughed so hard I leaned across a tall tombstone and continued with my own inappropriate guffawing.
Then I heard an excruciatingly loud whisper, “Tim. Tim!” I glanced up, wiping tears from my eyes, and observed Dad leading the procession of mourners across the street from the church toward us. All of them were looking at me with utmost disdain.
Suddenly, a haloed dome of feathers poked out from somewhere in the middle of the group, apparently to see what the holdup was. Auntie Christa, chagrined that someone else might be stealing her attention, abruptly howled and flailed her arms. She ran toward the open grave and deliberately fell just short of it, hitting the dry plastic grass in a dramatic dead faint.
Her road-weary brothers, obviously exhausted from the emotional and physical toll, just stood there. Everyone stared at her. When it was apparent no one was going to rescue her, Auntie Christa slowly raised her bird head and looked around. Broken and bent pinions and the few plumes left on her head wafted in the breeze. She looked less like a phoenix rising from the ashes and more like a deranged, run-over peacock. As her brothers wearily began the four-hundred-mile journey to pick her up, I looked at the huddled kids and jerked my head toward the car.
This time, as I passed Dad, we both avoided eye contact. I all but ran to the car, jumped in, and started the engine as the kids piled in. I threw the car in reverse and heard the dreaded spinning of wheels against mud. There was a definite groan from all the passengers in the car as I tried several times to put the car in drive, reverse, drive, and reverse. Nothing. So three of my guys jumped out and bounced the orange station wagon.
Someone yelled, “Gun it!” so I did. The car was removed from the deadly clutches of the offending mud, and everyone let out a tired cheer. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw my three guys covered from head to toe in slimy red Arkansas mud. One wiped it out of his ears, one wiped it out of his eyes, and the other just stood there. I was sad he didn’t finish the tableau.
I glanced over and watched in fascination as the entire funeral company giggled along with all of us in the car, except, of course, Auntie Christa, who leaned morosely against her brother.
We drove off into the cloudy day.
In the years following
