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Talk Around the Urn
In our Sunday best, on folding chairs,
We solemnly talk around the urn;
A tear, a sniffle, show who cares
For the loved one who will not return.
No box is there with dressed up corpse,
But mostly wood burned into ash.
The mourners show the same remorse.
For dead remains gone in a flash.
From the departed, memories flow,
But grief can only take you so far.
So when comes the time to go,
Each gets into his polished car.
The departed chose this worthy site.
It’s old, less talking everywhere.
It was restored. Not much in sight:
A final goodbye, maybe a prayer.
And last the mourners go to lunch.
Reunion takes them from sad to delighted,
And now they are a chipper bunch.
Who honor that guest who’s not invited.
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Frank Rable is a poet living in Pennsylvania.
Morose and melancholy, I can feel the love for the guest revered, loved, and unseen. I can imagine the beautiful urn and then the departure for a revivifying reunion.
Thank you for reading my poem and your comments. I’ve attended funerals since my sister passed away when I was five, They were all open casket affairs, until recently when cremation became more the norm. I worried that somehow it wouldn’t be the same, but it’s close enough, and better in some ways. It’s the attendance of the loved ones that makes it a celebration of one’s life. Comments like,”The undertaker did a good job with him”, or “He didn’t look like himself” can be dispensed with. Instead, the urn, a visual representation of the deceased’s soul, is the center of attention and inspires memories of the the deceased.
The jocular meter and rhyme belie the sadness of the event and leave the reader with a smile on his face for a life well remembered.
Thanks for the read, Frank.
Thank you, Paul. The event is a sad one but it has a purpose. The practice of Ceremonial Burial has been with us for thousands of years and reflects our hope for an afterlife as well as a farewell to the deceased. And, as I realized as a child and tried to portray in my poem, you go to the funeral in sadness and finish it happy somehow.
To me the ending of this poem is ambiguous. It may be that the mourners are callous to be laughing so soon after the burial. Or it may be that the usual protocol has been reversed. Traditionally the funeral followed the wake. At the wake everyone got as drunk as at a wedding and they swapped funny and endearing stories about the departed as if to bring him back to life in all the ages of his life at once. They laughed more often than they cried. They hugged the memories goodbye. So much better than a eulogy at a funeral.
It’s especially poignant for me because when I was in medical school in St Louis in 1960-64, there were two City Hospitals—one for Blacks and one for Whites. The Blacks were very proud of their hospital, strongly supported by their community and their churches. But there was a difference between the medical and the surgical wards. The community expected that an admission to the surgical ward might save your life and many surgical patient were in fact cured. But there was a self-fulfilling prophesy that no one came out of the medical wards alive. It was self-fulfilling because no one would let themselves be taken there until it was too late. So the medical wards were a dying house. But they were anything but grim. The beds were lined up unusually far apart so that there would be room for the families. Because they actually held the wake (non-alcoholic) before the patient died. They brought picnic food and partied and told all the stories and laughed and cried with the dying patient included in the party. It was very touching and made me think that in ways we white folks have a lot to learn.
Thank you Dan for your comments about my poem. I am Irish on my mother’s side and have attended many funerals since my first in 1957. We had a very large family. Funeral generally went as follows: A viewing for three days in a funeral parlor, during which time respects were paid to to the deceased, and condolences to those who needed the comforting. Children attended, and ran around laughing in the outer hallways.
Then there was a funeral procession by cars following the hearse to the church, then another one to a graveside service. Mourners were then invited to a luncheon as a sort of thank you. Sadness was properly left behind with the deceased at the cemetery. The luncheon was a celebration of the departed’s life, a reunion, and even a party. There was laughter, if perhaps slightly subdued. Along with food and coffee, beer was sometimes served but nobody was getting drunk.
As to eulogies, I was asked to give one on several occasions. I would limit it ten minutes at most and I would tell my three favorite personal memories of the departed. One example was the memory of my Aunt joyfully showing me her fingernails that had been painted a bright yellow by her caretaker. She never complained about how twisted, swollen, and arthritic her fingers had become. She knew how to enjoy small things and endure what she must. I was told that such memories were a comfort to loved ones and inspired their own stories.
Dan, I have listened to some horrible, overlong eulogies myself. I tell myself that the eulogist meant well. We’re all amateurs at that sort of thing anyway
“Remorse for dead remains gone in a flash” is the ambiguity I find here, since Dan Pugh suggested an ambiguous ending. To me, it’s still horrible to burn the body of a departed loved one. This may be true at some level even where cremation is much more the custom than in America. A member of my extended family married into a Japanese family, and lives in Japan, where she went to the funeral for her husband’s grandmother. Close relatives attend the cremation; the son of the departed pushes a button to start burning his mother’s body in a space separated from the living by a thin wall. They could feel the heat and hear the sounds. The American granddaughter-in-law reports that this was accompanied by screaming from Japanese female relatives, who all acted like they had gone berserk.
Frank, you’ve managed to show how grief and memory are expressed in other ways. Of course the process of grieving soon comes to an end, at least for most funeral attendees, whatever the ritual–and your poem offers a good description of how that may occur. I agree with you that eulogies can be more about the speaker than the deceased, and therefore maybe they should be limited to a comfortable length like that of your poem!