"There's Got to be a Mourning After..."

I officiated, once more, at a funeral, just this past weekend. Sadly, it was a necessary "closed casket" affair. I've had a few of those in the past.

In this case it was because, the deceased - a farmer from near Waterloo, Michigan, Johannes Ruehle, who was just 59 - had died shortly after being kicked, squarely in the face, by a horse.

The coffin was plain and visitation but for a few hurried hours in his home. The burial in the family plot in the field behind the farmhouse.

Mr. Ruehle's internment had some practical urgency. The body had not been embalmed and the summer weather had been quite warm.

He died on June 26.



In 1863.








This was another, yet heretofore untapped, part of my reenacting impression of a Civil War Yankee chaplain - and minister. It was a elaborate feature of the Waterloo Farm Museum's full weekend of exhibits and demonstrations - along with an encampment of both Union and Confederate soldiers, working blacksmiths and so much more from farm life of the early 1860s. The farm looks like time hadn't touched it in a 150 years. What a jewel for those who love history!

The Michigan Soldiers Aid Society are a wonderful group of women and men civilian reenactors of the Civil War era, and it was their efforts, along with the Farm Museum, to put on the very educational, if a bit unsettling, "Mourning on the Farm" portrayal. We in the 21st century tend to try to keep a long arm's length from death. But a century and a half ago, death was a frequent and incessant visitor to most families and communities. And with the war, all the more so. Most children died as infants, women in childbirth, and all from a myriad of, now treatable, diseases and injuries.

A Victorian wife would have mourned the death of a husband or child or parent for a year... with an option for additional time... even for ever (consider Queen Victoria with her Prince Albert - in the can), and would slowly come out of mourning in ordered steps to a normal life. A husband, who lost a wife, if need be (i.e. to secure a new mommy for young children asap), would be allowed to remarry before his year was up... but the new wife would have to dress in total black and mourn the first wife for the balance of the 12 months.

I'm guessing that must have cast a bit of a cooling shadow on the old honeymoon.

The social etiquette for mourning was elaborate. And I won't pretend to be an expert from a weekend. But, through a mourning fashion show, the ladies of the MSAS showed wonderfully the stages of mourning. Further, the coffin laid out in the home's parlor (the forerunner of the funeral parlor), the black wreath on the door, the covered mirrors, stopped clocks and all, truly gave a wonderful lesson of the mourning practices of the day.

A few tidbits I didn't know before the weekend: the deceased, unless a closed coffin was the order of the day like Johannes, would lay right on the table, in the open... sans coffin. Again, I am thinking a little creepy to think that his dead and albeit clothed backside had laid literally right about where you were having breakfast the very next day. Also, before coffins became common place, the body would lay on a cloth... and six men would carry the body on the cloth then to the grave and lower it into the ground. With one at each of the four corners, and one on either side, in the middle, these men would bear the body holding the cloth. This cloth would then wrap the body and was known as the "pall".

And the men as the "pall bearers".

Pretty neat piece of trivia.

One other thing I learned, that is creepy in my book - and I would hope yours as well, is that the practice of "sitting" with the body until the funeral... dealt less with comfort and condolences... than it dealt with the very real need to shoo away gnawing rodents and other varmits until they could get the guy under the hidden protection of six feet of sod.

I've done enough funerals in my day, that this felt very much like it was real (despite the empty coffin). And with the setting, and the many people in Civil War era clothes, I felt as if I had been transported back to 1863.

Most of the above pictures need little explaining, perhaps. But, the gentlemen, gathered around me in front of the porch and then the one sitting with me in the parlor, Ken Giorlando (passionforthepast.blogspot.com), are the aforementioned pall bearers.

The final time at the grave, Sunday, while I read the very familiar, and always comforting, 23rd Psalm, the grieving pall bearers stood quietly, yet shakily, behind me. Later I was told, when I got to "Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me...", the rotund gentleman (who had campaigned earlier for the Senate) took the flask hidden in his walking stick and shared its contents with the others.

If they were Confederates, I would assume it was Southern Comfort.

But either way, I doubt the Psalmist had the comfort from a politician's walking stick in mind when he wrote of the rod and the staff.

www.waterloofarmmuseum.org

www.msas1860.org