I served as a pallbearer yesterday afternoon for a man in our Sunday School class, and the experience reminded me again of the interesting challenges that funeral directors face.<\/p>\n
The details aren’t important; let me just say that there were ten pallbearers, and the weight of the casket was close to 800 pounds. The casket fit into the hearse with about two inches clearance on each side, and it went through the doors of the church with less clearance than that.<\/p>\n
It took us almost five minutes to position the casket on the rolling cart (I’m sure there’s a technical term for it) to the director’s satisfaction before attempting to move it into the church; we made several adjusting moves of less than an inch. He was worried about it tipping over, an event which he’s seen before and which is, as he put it in a funereral understatement, “not a good thing.”<\/p>\n
Pallbearer safety was at the forefront. “If it starts tipping, boys, just let ‘er go. You can’t stop it, so get out of the way. We don’t want anyone hurt.”<\/p>\n
Fortunately, there were no mishaps (I can’t predict how all the pallbearers will feel upon arising from bed this morning; I have a couple of new aches in my shoulders). The paths at the church and the cemetery were relatively smooth, and the dignity of the occasion was maintained.<\/p>\n
I debated about the appropriateness of posting this, but decided it was OK since the man’s son referred in his otherwise moving eulogy to “the biggest casket I’ve ever seen.” I had just never before considered these kinds of practical issues.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Funeral directors have challenging jobs, to say the least, but I never before considered that engineering might be part of the package.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-society-culture","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3682"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6477,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682\/revisions\/6477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}