Funeral arrangements

We listened to ceremonial music during music class, including a video of the funeral cortege for JFK in 1963, a funeral march as the bier was pulled by six white horses, with views of the National Cemetery’s rows of white stones. The youngest of my students exclaimed, “I know what those are! When someone dies you put a rock and it has their name on it. Why are some of them really big and some really small?”

I know why some are big and some are small, and why when another man died, his widow held fundraisers “to put John in the ground”. My husband died quite suddenly, leaving me with life insurance money and children to raise, not what I expected. We were blessed by his preparations. He had a will signed and sent to a family member for safekeeping. He had two life insurance policies, which provided enough money to allow me to stay home for a time before I would have to get a job.

There was also enough money to pay for the coffin, embalming, and two visitation periods at a funeral home, plus transportation in a hearse to the National Cemetery in Marion, Indiana, an hour away. They provided a limousine for a few family members. Everyone else drove themselves there. The cost was over ten thousand dollars, taken out of the life insurance funds right off the top, before I ever saw that money. I trusted that they would forward the rest of the insurance funds to me. My financial advisor, bless him, had a banker sit in with him and they walked Geri and I through the process of transferring funds from the life insurance checks into mutual fund investments, with enough set aside in savings for immediate expenses.

My husband’s plot in the cemetery, with whatever vault they use to hold the coffin, was provided by the military, since he was a veteran of the Iraq war. Otherwise I would have had additional expenses, possibly several thousand dollars more. I decided what words to put under his name and dates, but the stone itself was provided. We waited several weeks for it to be installed.

This young girl in my class doesn’t know, couldn’t know, that the stone only comes months after all these other things.