Over the course of the sixteen years I’ve served as a pastor, I have officiated at close to 150 funerals and committal services. A few weeks ago, on a cold Saturday morning, I was back at Union Cemetery. The cremated remains of Don Kloetzke were sitting in an urn just three or four feet away from me as I began to read. Every now and then, I glanced up to look at Don’s family and friends as the words of Psalm 90 and 1 Corinthians 15 sank in.
As I think about the many funerals and committal services I’ve presided over, there is one moment that stands out above the rest. It was a brief conversation I had with a funeral director before a service began. We were the only two in the sanctuary at the time. I mentioned to the director that I couldn’t recall meeting him before. The man, whose name I forget, and whom I’ve never seen since, said that typically he’s not involved with funerals. His main job with the mortuary was picking up the corpses of the deceased after a death notification. Evidently, he had been doing this for some time.
It was that point that I said something stupid. I mentioned to the Mueller Memorial worker that, by this stage, he must be used to his job. He looked at me for just a moment before responding. “You never get used to it,” he said.
This brief conversation took places years ago. It has proven to be unforgettable for me.
Biographies have long been my favorite reading genre. For the last decade or so, memoirs have moved to the top of my list. I don’t care for celebrity tell-alls, or the tales of the high and mighty. Instead, I’m drawn to the stories of more ordinary folk. Here are three of my favorites:
There is one more memoir that stands out for me. I read it years ago. It has proven to be unforgettable.
Here is how the publisher describes the book:
Rachael Hanel’s name was inscribed on a gravestone when she was eleven years old. Yet this wasn’t at all unusual in her world: her father was a gravedigger in the small Minnesota town of Waseca, and death was her family’s business. Her parents were forty-two years old and in good health when they erected their gravestone—Rachael’s name was simply a branch on the sprawling family tree etched on the back of the stone. As she puts it: I grew up in cemeteries.
And you don’t grow up in cemeteries—surrounded by headstones and stories, questions, curiosity—without becoming an adept and sensitive observer of death and loss as experienced by the people in this small town. For Rachael Hanel, wandering among tombstones, reading the names, and wondering about the townsfolk and their lives, death was, in many ways, beautiful and mysterious. Death and mourning: these she understood. But when Rachael’s father—Digger O’Dell—passes away suddenly when she is fifteen, she and her family are abruptly and harshly transformed from bystanders to participants. And for the first time, Rachael realizes that death and grief are very different.
At times heartbreaking and at others gently humorous and uplifting, We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down presents the unique, moving perspective of a gravedigger’s daughter and her lifelong relationship with death and grief. But it is also a masterful meditation on the living elements of our cemeteries: our neighbors, friends, and families—the very histories of our towns and cities—and how these things come together in the eyes of a young girl whose childhood is suffused with both death and the wonder of the living.
Over the weekend I read a truly haunting essay. It’s one that I imagine will prove to be unforgettable for me; as unforgettable as the conversation I had with the funeral home director or Rachel Hanel’s memoir.
I will step aside now and let Daniel O’Neill tell you his story: