Funeral Customs – Old Fashioned Woe Being Replaced

1903

Funeral Reforms Needed

Old Fashioned Parade of Woe Gives Way to Better Customs

It accorded with old beliefs, remarks the Brooklyn Eagle, that a funeral should be a scene and occasion of gloom — absolute, hopeless gloom. The front room, with its dismal ornament, its black hair cloth furniture chairs and "sofy," its framed wedding certificates, its wreaths of flowers preserved from other funerals, was reduced to darkness by the lowering of the shades and closing of the blinds, so that guests fell over one another's legs when they entered and fumbled their way to the chairs. The deceased was dressed in black, nailed into a black coffin that rested on a black bier, and all the company dressed in the blackest things they could dig up from their wardrobes. No light, no air, no color, and from the minister little comfort. His voice creaked for the occasion. Then the company went away in darkened carriages to a bleak burying ground where the last rites were as dismal as might be.

This was the Yankee way. Some other people did differently. The wakes held over the remains were comforting to the survivors and added much to the reputation of the departed for hospitality. And the German fashion of going to a hotel after a burial and ordering unlimited beer proved that there was still a few solaces left on earth. Americans reverence their dead too much to make a funeral a scene of festivity; but they are mitigating the gloom of these occasions to a degree. Flowers and music take the edge from grief, and it is no longer necessary to darken the windows. White is more and more used in place of black for dress and decoration, and in placing the body in the casket — or, better, on a couch — there is avoidance of the stiffness of attitude that suggests a pose before the old fashioned photographer.

Reform in these matters comes, in part, through the holding of funerals in other places than the home. Some undertakers have mortuary chapels as part of their establishments. Cemeteries have buildings for a similar purpose. Mount Auburn, in particular, has a beautiful little chapel, near the gate which replaces the gothic structure in the middle of the grounds, now become a crematory. In this chapel, with its organ, carved oak roof, stained windows and electroliers in the form of funeral torches, the bier is so easily movable that it can be turned by a single hand: hence much of the struggle to place and carry away the casket is foregone.

But what especially marks the difference between the funeral here and the home funeral, between the now fashion and the old, is the lack of mourning emblems and the presence of plants and palms. The chancel is a mass of green — kentias, rubber trees, oleanders, and smaller plants, in rows and groups, so that the casket, with its usual burden of flowers in the center, suggests a great bloom itself in a whorl of leaves than the depository of a dead body. The clergyman delivers his address from a pulpit at one side, and if he is a wise clergyman it is a hopeful and encouraging address; in preference to the old fashioned threnody. When that is over there is music form the organ — a fine instrument — and the company files out into the sunlight. It is far better than the old fashioned funeral — that type of absolute woe.