E-Mail This Article to a Friend The young and the restful (continued) BY CHRIS WRIGHT

A Catholic FUNERAL service is a strange experience. "Christ died," we are told over and over, "Christ died." Indeed, there are times when it would be easier to believe we are at Jesus’ funeral than that of the person lying in a coffin in the aisle. Then again, the ritual does have its benefits. "He will destroy death forever," says the priest as the eternal Christ looks on. "You will live forever." It’s easy to understand why this message — that we are not just lumps of perishable matter, that we all have a stake in eternity — affords a measure of comfort. As the priest puts it, "This is a change, not an ending."

"Most people desperately need that stuff," says Van Beck. "Christianity is very clear about what happens to you after you’re dead, and it is a hopeful message. I think we’ve lost some direction in using ritual and ceremony as a method of healing and finding meaning in life. When words fail, we use ritual."

Van Beck goes on to note his concern that too much emphasis on celebration may cause people to lose sight of what a funeral is for — coming to terms with the painful fact that someone close to you has died. "I have no objections to the new mode of memorialization," he says, "releasing balloons, passing around champagne and caviar. I have nothing against that to the extent that people understand the meaning of what’s going on, that this is not just entertainment. I went to a funeral where bunnies were released into the wild. What did it mean? I think everyone thought it was cute, but things have to be more meaningful than cute."

Thomas Lynch, a Michigan-based funeral director and the author of The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, puts it more bluntly. " ‘Celebration of life’ has become the buzzword du jour for the memorial service," he says. "A funeral should allow for the entire range of human emotions — the untidy ones, the ugly ones, the dark ones, the bright ones. With the celebration, the suggestion is, ‘Here’s how you’re supposed to feel.’ If you come with anything other than a grin on your face, there’s something wrong with you. The celebrations are notable for up-market finger food and uplifting music and, needless to say, life-affirming speeches. Closure usually will be proclaimed — usually just before the merlot runs out."

As far as Lynch is concerned, the "baubles and doodads" associated with modern memorial ceremonies are all too often little more than an elaborate form of escapism. "Our culture is always trying to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative," Lynch says. "The fact that there’s a dead body represents, for most people, a bad day. So they go out of their way to eliminate it as quickly and cleanly as possible. What I’m opposed to is having a ceremony without the dead guy there. I don’t care whether a body is buried, cremated, or blown out of a cannon, all I care is that the living are there to witness. If you don’t go nose to nose with the fact of death, it’s not a funeral."

Keohane, for his part, insists that this criticism is unwarranted. "When someone dies, someone you love, then you don’t need anybody to make you feel bad about it," he says. "You don’t need anybody to tell you you’ll never see that person again. You’re in grief. The things we do here are meant to begin the road to healing. When someone dies it’s not just about death. The family is still living, and they are living with this loss. So it’s more about their lives than it is the death. That’s the big shift."

For anybody who works in a funeral home, of course, there is no avoiding death. It is all around you, all the time. One morning, an old woman lies unattended in one of the viewing rooms. She is on a table, at the far end of the room, in an open casket. The odd thing about caskets is that their interiors are made up like beds. The woman lies tucked into hers, her head resting on a pink pillow, her face turned toward the door, a rosary in her hands. The woman’s thin lips are curled slightly at the ends, a half smile accentuated by a coating of red lipstick. Her cheeks are a waxy, paraffin pink. The overall affect is that of a person asleep. Unsettlingly, you find yourself waiting for the eyes to open.

Dennis Keohane scoffs at these kinds of notions. "People always say that," he says. " ‘What if she opens her eyes?’ The myths that go around, do they ever move, blah, blah, blah. If someone moved, I would run away and never come back again. When people are dead, they’re dead. It’s over." Strangely, perhaps, the only part of the funeral home that truly spooks Keohane is the little basement showroom where they have the empty caskets on display, lined up along the walls, their tops open, their pillows plumped. "I don’t like to go in there," he says. The embalming room, meanwhile, doesn’t bother him at all.

The embalming room at Keohane is a small, stark, windowless area with a cement floor and the acrid smell of a chemicals in the air. The room is lined with cabinets containing bottles of purple, pink, and orange liquids: "Arterial Conditioner," "Tissue Texturizer." On one counter there’s a collection of tools — tweakers and prodders and scrapers. Beside these is a box of cosmetics, and a putty-like substance called "Surface Restorer." This is the material Keohane used earlier to rebuild the face of the woman upstairs, who had been so ravaged by cancer that she was, quite literally, little more than skin and bones. In the center of the room is a metal table with three black rubber blocks on it: one to prop up each arm, and one for the head. The middle block still has some hairs stuck to it.

As creepy as all this might seem to an outsider, Keohane is perfectly comfortable with his proximity to death. After all, in his 15 years in the funeral trade, he’s handled thousands of dead bodies. Indeed, the very idea that he might seek escapism in the face of death strikes Keohane as absurd. He is even comfortable, he says, with the prospect of his own demise. "I’m extremely well-rooted in my mortality. I know that death could grab me in two seconds, and I’m cool with that." He adds, "I don’t want to die — I want to see my kids grow up, but it doesn’t depress me, to think of dying."

And as for grief — Keohane has seen enough of that to last him several lifetimes.

The area of his work that he values the most, Keohane says, is comforting the families and friends of those who have passed away. He spends hours with these people, helping them choose caskets and flowers, burial plots and musical numbers. Sometimes he’ll just sit and listen to them. And sometimes he will cry with them. "I let myself get emotionally invested," he says. "Through the process, I get to know the family pretty well, so I really start to feel their loss. A few weeks ago, a baby died — I think he lived for maybe 10 minutes. The father got up and read this eulogy about how the son never really got a chance. It was just heart-wrenching. I was crying, like, you know, out of control. At the end of something like that, you can be really wiped out. I can go into a funk for weeks, I really can. But I never want to get to the point where I’m hardened to that, where I’m not able to cry with people who are in pain."

There can have been few funerals more solemn than that for Sergeant Charles Todd Caldwell, the Rhode Island National Guardsman who was killed in Iraq last month when his vehicle drove over a land mine. Held on a sunny September afternoon at Quincy’s Church of the Nazarene, Caldwell’s service draws hundreds of mourners, many of whom weep openly. The sergeant’s young wife, Margaret, whom he had married days before being deployed to Iraq, staggers into the church looking as if she has had the blood sucked out of her. At one point, she stands before the congregation and says, "Todd said he wanted a big party when he returned — well, baby, this is some party." The minister who is conducting the service cries, the military personnel arrayed behind him cry, even the press people cry.

And yet even this mournful occasion has an element of celebration to it. At the memorial service, anecdotes are told, quips are made. At the burial, comic relief is provided by a swarm of angry bees who buzz the congregation. The laughter all this provokes is not only okay, Keohane says, but necessary. "I don’t remember a funeral where there wasn’t laughter," he says. "Todd’s brother was laughing afterwards, telling stories about people coming through the [receiving] line, some of the crazy things they said. Even with the worst thing that could possibly happen to a family, they were still able to laugh. I don’t have any hang-ups at all about smiling and laughing with people."

There is — as Six Feet Under amply demonstrates — a lot of comic potential in the funeral business. The staff at Keohane, while solemn when they need to be, can often be seen bantering, swapping one-liners, making pratfalls. You get the sense that part of the laughter is a form of catharsis for the workers, but also that it is a sign of respect, a way of humanizing the deceased and comforting the bereaved. "People get standoffish with grieving people," Keohane says. "But they appreciate it if you treat them normally. Sometimes they need to joke and laugh."

In the days before Todd Caldwell’s funeral, Dennis Keohane met with Caldwell’s wife to hash out the final details of the funeral. Margaret said she wanted to release a pair of white doves at the burial, and Keohane had expressed concerns. "There’s going to be a 21-gun salute," he said as the funeral day drew nearer. "The poor things are going to have a heart attack." He paused and added, "We might have to tie balloons to them."

As it turns out, the doves aren’t released at the burial after all. "There were bees, though," Keohane says. "Did you see the bees?" He lets out a chuckle. "We had a bee release instead of a dove release."

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com