A change in plans

I’ve changed my funeral plans. It used to be that I wanted to be buried in a Catholic cemetery near Dermont, Kentucky.

Bishop Francis Cotton, the first Bishop of Owensboro (my hometown), was the first person buried in that cemetery. Both my parents are buried there along with several relatives.

Thank goodness I didn’t go ahead and buy a plot, though. I want to find another place.

The reason I’ve changed my mind about the Owensboro cemetery is because it’s one of those places where everybody has to have the same kind of tombstone.

These cemeteries came into vogue several years ago. They seemed to make sense. Everything was nice and even and Romanesque and easy to mow. Then I visited an old-fashioned, cluttered cemetery over Memorial Day weekend, and something snapped inside me.

This was the old kind of cemetery where there are a million different tombstones. No ugly, forbidding signs said: No artificial flowers allowed! There was no list of rules at the entrance telling all the things you couldn’t do. In fact, at this cemetery, you could do whatever you wanted. People had planted every kind of flower there, and marvelous trees of every description. Graves were adorned with shrubs.

The place was busy, owing to the holiday of course. But here were people expending tender loving care upon the final place for those they loved, instead of being forbidden to touch a thing.

As we visited, I became touched with the idea that graveyards are very much for the living. To visit a gravesite and to plant a rose bush, or trim a hedge or put in perennials – these things are purgative and helpful for those who so dearly miss the ones they have lost. These activities help the living spend time with the dead in a way somehow deeper than just putting down a bouquet.

I’ll not soon forget seeing one heavy-set man in his T-shirt as he stepped back from his gardening at the grave of his loved one. He had just stepped back and looked, his hands out from his sides and covered with dirt, like all people do when they have just planted something. The look on his face, however, went way beyond the flowers. His eyes were full of great love and great sorrow. He was an ordinary man, a simple man; but he was at a point of contact with all the meaning any life ever holds: the point at which one person loves another.

So give me one of those kinds of cemeteries, please, when I die – one construed for the benefit of the bereaved and not for the convenience of the caretakers.

Also, I’ve decided I don’t want the Dies Irae sung at my funeral. You remember that, don’t you? “O Day of Wrath, that dreadful day. The sins of man before the Maker lay – As David and the Sybil say.” I thought I wanted that, but now I’ve decided differently.

I don’t want to offend anybody, but now I want a funeral procession headed up by a New Orleans street band playing a little Dixieland jazz. I just pray I’ve made enough black friends by then to join the procession and help my stiff white friends let go a little and dance. Nothing puts me in a happier frame of mind than Dixieland, and I plan to be one happy dude the day I die.

What more glorious, happy, joyous, exciting thing could ever happen to a person than to go be with Jesus? –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on June 14th, 1987