No time to stop to let a funeral drive on by
/The Boston Herald
Beverly Beckham
I cut her some slack, the not-so-young woman who gave me the finger and mouthed the companion epithet. I thought, OK, maybe she's from another country and doesn't know the rule about funeral processions having the right of way. Maybe this cortege of cars with headlights on in the middle of a sunny day, funeral flags on each roof, was a new experience for her.
Hey, maybe she was hatched from a pod the night before.
Except that there she was driving, which meant she had to have a license and had to have studied the Registry handbook. And the handbook clearly states: "If you meet a funeral procession on a roadway you must yield the right of way until all vehicles in the procession have passed… It is illegal to cut through or disrupt any vehicles in a funeral procession."
This wasn't a lengthy procession, maybe 15 cars, and more than half had already passed when the light turned red, but she pushed her way through anyway.
Why? Because of a minute's delay, a tiny inconvenience?
Most motorists did what they were legally supposed to do, but still they were visibly impatient.
"You see it all the time, people throwing up their hands," when they have to wait for a funeral to pass, said Brian Fitzgerald, owner of Dockary & Thomas Funeral Home in Canton. "People today are in a hurry and when something inconveniences them, they let you know it. Occasionally you see someone bless himself and that's nice. But it doesn't happen often."
My Aunt Lorraine had only a few good memories of her father because he left the family when she was young. But a memory she shared regularly was about being with him in Cambridge one morning when a funeral passed by. She was a little girl and they had been talking and walking. But when he saw the funeral cars, he stopped walking and stood silent and took off his hat and waited for the procession to pass.
"Why did you do that?" she asked, when he put his hat back on his head.
"Because that's what you do," he told her. "It's a sign of respect."
Respect for the living is so rare today, it's no wonder there's even less for the dead.
"It used to be that people working on the street would stop working when a funeral passed by. Men would tip their hats. Women would bow their heads. Police would come to attention," remembered Al Thomas, a 50-year veteran of the funeral business in Milton. "The police are still good, but people working on the street? They just keep on working. The courtesies are not what they used to be."
The courtesies are so lacking that Fred Dello Russo now tells visitors to his Medford funeral home what to expect during the drive to the cemetery. "I tell them that if there is an attempt by someone to cut through the line to allow it," because, he said, when mourners are not forewarned "they get upset and try to block passage. We've had fender-benders and people swearing at each other and even a couple of people taking a wallop at each other. It's bad enough that people have to suffer and die. But this?"
"This" - the finger-giving, the flouting of the law, the swearing, the head-shaking, the dirty looks, the arms raised in frustration - it's all disrespectful, rude behavior. What would it cost - a minute? Two minutes? - How hard would it be to do the right thing when a funeral goes by?
