wfn.org | Pastors begin memorial services - with no bodies to bury

[PCUSA NEWS <PCUSA.NEWS@ecunet.org>]

Note #6870 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

28-September-2001
01354

Pastors begin memorial services - with no bodies to bury

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE - The Rev. Jon Walton will do two memorial services tomorrow.  

	One for the husband of the church secretary, Peter Wallace, who was at work
on the 105th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center when it was
hit; the other, for a woman-member, and a mother.

	On Oct. 15, he's to do another; this time, a mother of two young children. 
In November, he will do a fourth. This time for a police officer, whose body
was one of the first to be pulled from the rubble, and was carried to his
grave by a police honor guard - but his family wants a service surrounded by
their religious community at the First Presbyterian Church, which sits just
blocks from the site of the attack.

	He's also scheduled to do a service for the father of one of the children
in the church's nursery school who disappeared when the Towers collapsed,
and whose mother is an Israeli.

	Walton thinks there will be, at least, one more - since, nearly three weeks
after hijackers destroyed Manhattan's two tallest skyscrapers and killed
over 6,000 employees - families are giving up hope of any more rescues.
Maybe hardest of all, they're giving up hope that bodies will even be
recovered for burial.

	So ministers are memorializing the dead now.  Just not burying them.

	"These people have made a conscious decision to say that it is time for a
memorial service.  Early on, there was a lot of conflict within each family.
Some are saying, 'We've got to keep hope going;' while others were saying,
'Let's be realistic.' For some, it has been an impossible situation: When
there's one daughter who wants to wait, while others are saying they've got
to come to closure," said Walton, who began initiating conversations about
memorial services with families after two weeks elapsed without any more
rescues.

	"This," he said, "is a grieving process that's different than anything I've
ever seen before. There's an actual term for it:  ambiguous grief.  It is
when there is no body present. When there are no visible remains ... to
focus the family's grief."

	It is an odd phenomenon.

	After weeks of hesitating to address the fact that there may be no more
survivors, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has announced that every family will
receive something from the demolished site. "We hope," he said on Sept. 26,
"that we can recover remains.  But we will give every family something from
the World Trade Center, from the soil, from the ground, so that they can
take it with them."

	What's more, the city has apparently made it simpler for the thousands of
families who are missing loved ones to obtain death certificates. Hundreds
of volunteer lawyers are filing papers and judges are ruling missing persons
dead at the request of families who file. It is a way of cutting down the
waiting period so that an official notification of death doesn't drag on for
years. Instead, the certificates are issued in two or three days.

	"Getting closure is extraordinarily difficult," says the Rev. William
Forbes of Westfield, N.J., a commuter suburb that lost 8 residents in the
Sept. 11 terrorist attack.  "Any pastor will tell you that coming to grips
with reality after a death often happens at the graveside.

	"But this makes closure very difficult."

	Forbes' own congregation lost no members, but two families lost loved ones.
 A relative of one member was attending a meeting in the offices of Cantor
Fitzgerald, a company that lost over 700 employees when the skyscrapers were
destroyed. She attended the funeral where people spoke of her
daughter-in-law's brother as a memory. But there was no casket. "That story
has been re-enacted probably 5,000 times now," said Forbes.

	The Rev. Craig Rule of the Tenafly Presbyterian Church is doing two
memorial services this weekend for a 38-year-old member whose body has not
yet been found - one service at the church, the other on Fire Island, where
the family has ties.

	So far, there's been no mention of a grave marker.

	"It is still hard to believe this has happened," said Rule, who added that
two other members lost family:  a son and a brother-in-law. "We haven't
discussed grave markers.  I don't know that anyone has thought that far
ahead. The thinking here is almost, 'What are you doing for the next day and
then, the day after that?'"

	How this loss is faced is particular to the grieving relatives.  Some are
waiting still for remains. Others are scheduling memorial services that
follow the format of typical funerals.  What's hardest, most ministers say,
is tending to kids. "It is just very hard," said Rule, who pointed out that
the deceased man in his congregation has two children, aged seven and four. 
"It is especially hard for the oldest child that there is no body.

	"There's always the hope that he's going to come thru the door."

	At First Church, there are five children among the grieving families and
who are struggling now to relinquish their hopes for a rescue, or, maybe
even a miracle.  "Parents are in a desperately difficult situation of trying
to support the children while trying to deal with their own grief.

	"What's happening is that some parents are putting their own grief on
auto-pilot in favor of taking care of their children," said Walton.

	Professional staff, too, are beginning to sort out their own kinds of
shell-shock.  At First, for instance, the staff opened the doors of the
sanctuary immediately after the explosions. And dust-covered,
scared-to-death people poured inside. Walton said he's called two
Presbyterian ministers who served in Indian Nations Presbytery when the
Oklahoma City bombing occurred, just to talk.

	Folks who are recovering from the attack are trying to find ways of getting
back to normal without offending those who aren't quite there yet. The Rev.
Elliott Hipp at Central Presbyterian Church on Park Avenue and 64th St.,
said that parishioners are struggling to "get back to real life," which is
hard to do when others are still hurting. "It is just how surreal this whole
thing is," said Hipp, whose congregation and whose neighborhood lost no one.
"It was surreal from the first day.

	"Now, we know this enormous thing has happened, but it seems to have
disappeared.  It doesn't feel right to say we're back to business as normal.
 But there 's nothing to latch onto ... our direct connections are
shriveling up.  It is very bizarre."

	Bizarre is a term that is poignantly real for Walton's experience. He,
literally, just began serving First church.  "People said to me when I
began, 'This is such a young church you'll barely have three to five
funerals a year.'  In my first month, there's five.

	"This is not exactly the beginning I expected," he said.
------------------------------------------
Send your response to this article to pcusa.news@pcusa.org

------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send an 'unsubscribe' request to

pcusanews-request@halak.pcusa.org