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Last Sunday at 3:05pm at the funeral of Providence resident Stephen Cavendish, who died of lung cancer at the age of 78, all those in attendance suddenly and simultaneously realized just how odd the practice of burying the dead really is.
Of the 200 in attendance—friends and family of Cavendish—not a single one found themselves able to watch the quizzical scene unfolding before their eyes without asking themselves a few questions, as the oak coffin was lowered into the rectangular hole in the ground and dirt began to be piled on top of it.
Jeffery Quimby, ordained minister of 26 years, drifted off mid-sentence to stare blankly off in the distance as he struggled to remember if it was for religious reasons that society dresses up corpses in their finest clothing before enclosing them in a box and stuffing them in the earth along with the billions upon billions of others who have passed away. Quimby later elaborated that it may have made sense in the past, but at this time he was unsure and would need to think about it more.
Cavendish’s nephew Mark fidgeted with his coat buttons as he wondered if there might be a point when there was no more room for the large, unwieldy boxes and if we might have to start “doubling up.” The frown that Cavendish’s widow Margaret wore on her tear-streaked face showed that she may have been debating a similar question.
Cavendish’s son Thomas, who had been sobbing inconsolably only minutes before, leaned over to whisper to Margaret as Quimby fumbled through the words that somebody decided thousands of years ago as appropriate for the situation. “So weird.”
When asked to take turns shoveling dirt onto the coffin, as is custom, each funeral attendant instead took an extra moment to peer quizzically down at the oaken box.
“What’s the point of putting cushions inside?” asked Cavendish’s daughter Stacey to nobody in particular. “Actually, what’s the point of even having a box? It only takes up more room.”
At the reception service back at the funeral home, Quimby called a fellow minister, who seemed to be just as confused as he was, while the guests debated the pros and cons of burning corpses and throwing their ashes into large bodies of water.
