Friends gather for the wake and funeral of a late member of the group in The Big Chill. One character observes, “Amazing tradition. They throw a great party for you on the one day they know you can’t come.”
The cruel irony of that bon mot softens a harsh truth about our own mortality and the way our death affects the people in our lives. Keeping a vigil for a recently deceased loved one is a touchstone for Appalachian communities and how they come to terms with death.
Recently, scientists have discovered that crows, elephants and killer whales exhibit behaviors that indicate that these animals recognize the reality of death. Crows hold funerals and follow rituals of mourning. Elephants make trips to their graveyards, where they can be seen using their sensitive trunks to fondle and stroke the skull and tusks of elephants they remember. Interestingly, only animals who live in highly organized social groups have shown recognition of death.
The people of the mountains do not walk through the valley of the shadow of death: They live there. Death crouches stealthily, ever ready to pounce on its next victim. Paradoxically, the Grim Reaper that tears communities apart also binds them together in the tradition of pre-funeral visitation.
Friends, acquaintances, and family members are expected to attend the vigil if only for a few minutes. Failure to do so tarnishes one’s standing in the community. My favorite aunt was recovering from an old-fashioned gallbladder surgery that incapacitated her so badly that she could not attend the visitation or funeral for her brother, who was killed in a logging accident. She was a devout Baptist, a paragon of Christian virtue, but people whispered snide comments about her absence until she died 16 years later.
My first memory of attending a visitation or a funeral was one held for an elderly relative of my father, Aunt Rose Crabtree, even though I was only 10 and had never met her. By the time I left home to attend college, I had buried dozens of friends and family members whom I did know. Though I attended many vigils and funerals for friends and relatives, my family was blessed because we never lost any members of our immediate family.
The news of the passing of a community member spread like wildfire, and in less than 24 hours, everyone knew about the death. By lunchtime the next day, community women would have prepared home-cooked meals they delivered to the home of the recently deceased. This practice showed the family they were valued in the community, freed the grievers from having to cook in their emotionally frazzled state, and fed the crowds of well-wishers who visited to pay their respects.
Visitations were held in funeral homes, churches or the family home. The majority of buildings were not air-conditioned, and people attending in the warm days of summer used paper fans donated by local funeral homes, churches or other local businesses.
I have attended vigils in rural and urban settings, and although they were respectfully somber, there were some differences. Many male visitors in urban settings wore suits or at least blazers with a tie, and women were dressed to the nines. Male mourners in rural settings seldom wore suits, and women refrained from overdressing, opting for cotton dresses.
Visitations afforded people the opportunity to see friends and relatives they seldom saw and to swap stories, and jokes about the deceased.
A clergyman delivered the eulogy at the funeral and a short reflection on the virtues of the deceased. In rural communities, pastors often used the occasion of a death to exhort people to get right with God before they die.
Hymns and elegiac compositions provided opportunities to use music in the service. Nearly every funeral I have attended has included “Amazing Grace” for mourners to sing in unison. Occasionally, someone was paid to play the mournful dirge on bagpipes.
The mourners said goodbye one more time by filing by the casket. Then, six pallbearers loaded the casket onto a wheeled transport vehicle and took it to the waiting hearse that would carry the body to the burial site. Vehicles that were part of the funeral entourage turned on their headlights as they drove to the cemetery. A touching custom in rural communities was for cars driving in the opposite direction to pull off the main road until the procession had passed. In Kentucky, interfering with funeral traffic is a Class B misdemeanor. These lines of traffic could be long, depending on the deceased.
Once the casket was delivered to the gravesite, the pastor offered a few last words, and the funeral director passed out roses or other flowers as keepsakes.
Small family cemetery plots are sprinkled liberally over the topographic quadrangle maps of the United States Geological Survey. The rough terrain and poor roadways of the Appalachian region forced many to bury their dead on plots on their property. Many of these graves were marked with crudely inscripted stones that had aged so badly that they were just slabs of limestone and sandstone.
On an excursion to take photographs of lady’s slippers and other spring wildflowers, I happened upon the small Massengale Cemetery in Tuggle Holler (Wayne County), where some relatives of my maternal grandmother were buried. Among the two-dozen tombstones, I found the graves of three little boys who were born and died the same day one year apart: William, Thomas and Silas Denney. Undoubtedly, there are scores of other such graveyards long obscured by the inevitable march of time encroaching on the graves.
In older cemeteries, the inscriptions had eroded so badly that they were indecipherable. Poor folks who could not afford tombstones marked a grave with only a sandstone or limestone marker. Some of these had poignant misspellings. A family had buried a stillborn baby and erected a small tombstone surmounted by a small lamb. The inscription read, “Our Little Angle.” The parents may never have seen their child take a breath, but he was still their little angel.
In the mid-19th century, funeral directors had perfected a method of including a small black-and-white photograph on the tombstone, but few mountain people could afford it. On a visit to my uncle’s grave, I saw a stone with a picture of a couple who were buried side by side. The husband was a rough-hewn mountain man sporting new denim coveralls, and his wife was a typical hill woman with her face tanned by the sun and wearing a freshly ironed gingham dress with a dog’s tooth pattern. The inscription below the picture declared unequivocally, “We Will Meet Again.”
In the final analysis, I guess that is the dream of all people—rich or poor, urban or rural—and all races of humankind: that we will be reunited with our loved ones in the afterlife.