Sixteen Black neighbors buried Dorothy Levenstein, "Aunt Dolly," to them. Dolly died at 73 in the same house she grew up in, on Hughs Street in Chester, Pennsylvania. She was a homebody who rarely left Chester. She was an only child who never married. She was born in...

A son, in his 60s, stands at his father’s graveside to offer a eulogy. He begins by describing his dad's wallet and what he found in it after his dad had died. Beside the credit cards and a few dollars, he found a folded notecard with 10 punchlines. Just the...

I was assisting Paul, one of the funeral home's embalmers, in the prep room. It was a Jewish funeral home, though Paul talked openly about his Christian faith. He was devout and also, in many ways, naïve to the world around him. I was helping him dress a deceased...

At this point, I've worked enough funerals to know that if a speaker pulls a typewritten speech from his suit pocket, I'm probably not going to cry. I knew I was in trouble when the son began speaking without notes. Several things about today's funeral were oddly out...

Three generations, men and women, all dressed in white, had gathered to say goodbye to the family matriarch. Three generations of women had asked to have private time with the deceased and I arranged for them to go to a room on one side of the chapel. After they...

Email and texting have changed a lot of person-to-person communication, but in the world of funeral homes, the telephone still rings. In funeral home terminology, when someone calls to report a death, that is a "first call." The person who calls is "the informant." On...