Military Funeral

If you’ve never participated in a military funeral, it’s not something you can fully anticipate or know until you’ve been there. While there was not a full funeral for my husband, the ceremony for interring his ashes at the veterans memorial cemetery in Arlington, Texas last Friday was much more emotional and heart-touching than I expected it to be. Carl was an Air Force veteran, which entitled him to be put to rest in a military cemetery.

Even though it was eleven years ago that we had the funeral Mass, my husband’s death could have been just last week in terms of the wave of sadness and loss I felt on Friday afternoon. It was a lovely sunny day, but not too warm, and there was an atmosphere of quiet and peace as we drove through the rows and rows of white headstones marking grave sites of other veterans. The setting is a miniature version of the National Cemetery in Washington D.C. and is treated with the same level of respect by the military guides that led us to the covered pavilion where the actual ceremony took place.

Right away I knew this was going to be a lot more of an emotional experience than I’d expected.

An Honor Guard placed the urn with the ashes on a pedestal, then the Airmen ceremoniously opened an American flag, held it open for a few moments before folding it back into the standard triangle. When one of the Airmen men brought the flag and knelt before me, handing it over while asking me to accept the flag and the condolences of the President of the United States and the Air Force in this symbol of their appreciation for my husband’s service, I thought my heart would explode.

As those of you who read my blog regularly know, in recent years I’ve been struggling to regain that strong sense of patriotism that has been a part of my core since I was born on the Fourth of July. The whole experience of last Friday helped to fill the void. Maybe not to full capacity but to some. 

In addition to the military honors, we had the official Catholic Rite of committal. Monsignor Larry Pichard, a long time friend, agreed to come to do the service even though he was retired. It was a lovely service, with Fr. Larry stressing what a gift my husband had been to the church in his 35 years of service as a Permanent Deacon. 

With the exception of one daughter and three grandchildren, the rest of my family was there, and the next day we had a dinner at a German restaurant. We all had a beer, even the non-beer drinkers, and raised a glass in honor of Carl. He had always wanted to go to Germany for Oktoberfest. He had German roots in his family and he was always fascinated with the country and the language, studying it in high school and college. He never made it to Oktoberfest so we did our own little Oktoberfest party. It was a wonderful way to end the weekend.

On Sunday, after all the company was gone, I had one more chore to do, filling out the paperwork for what will be inscribed on the permanent marker at the grave site. Knowing I was going to have to do that, I’d been composing something in my head for several days. Under his name and dates of birth and death, I wanted:

Loving Husband, Father & Grandfather
Servant of God.

Carl’s family always came first, but his love of God, church, and service was always important, and the ministries of serving the poor and preaching were very life-giving to him. Because of the space constraints, only 15 spaces including spaces between words, that first line had to be altered. It will now read:

Husband & Father
Servant of God

But in my heart it will always be the wordage I had to cut.

Thank you dear readers for always letting me go on and on and reading my posts about my husband with compassion. Those of you who have lost life-partners know that we never get over it. We just learn to live with the loss.

Have a wonderful week ahead.