Word: casket
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...average Mount Olivet funeral comes to $1,100 compared with $2,500 elsewhere. That includes coffin, the use of two limousines, death notices in two Denver dailies and even a motorcycle escort. Those who want a more stylish send-off can choose a top-of-the-line bronze casket for $3,682.25, much cheaper than the private equivalent sold for $8,900. For the truly cost conscious there is also a no-frills, Boot Hill model-a stark pine box covered with gray cloth...
...death threw the whole nation into mourning, including, at least publicly, the leaders of the repressive Marxist regime that had once tried to gag him. Even the government press praised the fallen Cardinal as a "great patriot." While thousands of mourners filed past Wyszynski's flower-covered casket in Warsaw's St. Joseph's Church, Pope John Paul II, the Cardinal's countryman and longtime protege, sent a telegram to the Polish people from his Rome hospital bed, saying that he shared in their "pain and prayer...
Boom! A cannon shot from the Society Jazz Band bass drum jolts the chattering crowd outside the Gertrude Geddes Willis Funeral Home into a brief silence. The casket is coming out. Boom! A second shot signals the stricken cadence of a dirge. The white gloves of the pallbearers flash in the morning sun as they float their burden to the silver-gray Cadillac hearse. The main party of mourners, a score or so, fit themselves into several cars waiting in line...
...deep church bell tolls. The casket passes into the decorous stillness of the vaulted interior, leaving the hundred or so second liners and the musicians outside. The organ plays hymns that would be favorites in any Baptist church: In the Garden, Just as I Am. A priest reads from Job and speaks of the "gift of music" that Albert Walters had. Funerals like Walters', as William J. Schafer fairly puts it in Brass Bands and New Orleans Jazz, are "public acts, theatrical displays designed not to hide burial as a fearful obscenity but to exhibit it as a community...
Boom! As soon as the casket emerges, a bass drum shot shatters the air. The dirge-playing band leads the way up the road toward the cemetery, then separates from the casket. At first it retraces its route by drumbeat alone. Then the trumpet screams forth, the drummers swing out, belted choruses of The Second Line assail the sky. The crowd, most of it, becomes a blur of fidgeting feet, twisting torsos, bobbing heads. A corpulent man in an orange shirt spins and dips. An elderly woman executes a scampering step with the help of her cane. An open-shirted...