My First Funerals
When I was studying to be a Minister of the Gospel my student churches were two adjacent wooden churches in the inner slum areas of Melbourne at Newmarket, a centre surrounded by the Melbourne sale yards, the boiling down works, the abattoirs and Flemington Racecourse. For seven years during the 1950’s and 1960’s the people of those inner slum areas were my parish.
In a most unusual chain of circumstances I was asked by the church to be their student pastor before I even went into theological college. I had been conducting a number of city‑wide youth rallies and preaching at every opportunity. Some members of the church felt that this young preacher, who showed so much enthusiasm for young peoples work, would be what their church needed in spite of his inexperience and extreme youth.
So, just having celebrated my 18th birthday, and before I had even started my theological course, I became a temporary fill‑in student preacher over the Christmas holidays for the Newmarket Church of Christ.
The congregations were small but the people wanted to do something to witness to their faith.
It was in this interim period before I commenced my theological studies, and had been officially appointed as student minister to the congregation, that I had my first funeral.
A call came in the middle of the night. A tearful voice asked if I could go immediately to visit some girls from the Sunday School whose father had just died. There was a note of urgency in the voice of the church member who lived nearby, and he asked that I immediately leave home and ride my black BSA 500 motor cycle the 15 miles or more in the middle of the night to visit this family.
The Rogers family were a mainstay of the small and struggling kindergarten. There were five daughters, all alike, looking like a descending order of peas that had come from the same pod. They were each half a head shorter than the other. They were all thin girls with poor clothing and long straight hair. The girls were quite shy and withdrawn, rarely saying anything. But they were regular at Sunday School and that one family of five daughters together made up about a quarter of the Sunday School in that little wooden church.
The mother, Mrs. Rogers, never came to church, or at least had not been in the time I had been the student pastor. In the few weeks I had been there I did not even know there was a Mr. Rogers. I went to the home where the lights were all blazing with many people coming and going. I introduced myself to strangers that were standing around from the undertakers, and to the police and other people who seemed to have some official authority and indicated that I was the student minister. I was ushered into the front room of the narrow weatherboard house where Mrs. Rogers sat back in an easy chair staring ahead. The five girls sat one beside the other on a threadbare couch, each with their hands clasped upon their knees and all of them staring ahead saying nothing.
I introduced myself to Mrs. Rogers who nodded and said nothing. The girls showed by the look in their eyes that they recognized me but nobody said anything.
This was the first time in my life I had ever visited a family in grief and as I had not yet started my theological college studies I was at a complete loss to know what to say or do.
I stumbled out some words of sympathy and care. Mrs. Rogers stared at me without saying a word, then started talking. Once she had started she would not stop.
“It’s all right for him. He is out of it now and he’s got no worries. But what about the rest of us? We’ve still got the problems. It is not as if he did anything to make them better, he’s just made them worse.” I nodded in agreement although I had not the faintest idea what she was talking about.
“We have never had any money and he knew that but we have always managed to get by. If he would only stop going to the horses and the dogs we would have been able to manage all right. I never spent a penny on myself and these girls have always been willing to accept hand‑me‑downs. It is not pride you know. There is no pride in this house. We just made do with what we had and we did not worry about what others might think. It was those damned horses and dogs that was really the problem.”
I nodded in agreement. I was beginning to get the picture. Mr. Rogers was unemployed and the family was extremely poor. What income they had, he used to gamble on the race horses and upon the greyhounds. He had died at a time of real poverty in the family. My heart began to go out to the man who must have been so troubled about his family that the strain was too much for his heart.
“Come with me and I will show you where he is”, Mrs. Rogers said, and before I had a chance to answer she was up walking down the narrow passageway through the curtains that divided the front of the house from the rear. I really did not want to see him but as she was going down the hallway I meekly followed behind. There were several men standing talking in hushed tones in the hallway and a policeman standing at the door of their bedroom. He looked at her and said, “Now ma’am, you’ll not be wanting to go in there again.” She looked at him and said “You’ve got no need to worry about me officer. This young man is our minister and he wants to see Mr. Rogers.”
The policeman removed his arm and I walked into the bedroom. Nothing had prepared me for what I was about to see. Mr. Rogers was lying on the floor with only his legs appearing from under the quilt. The bedroom was a dreadful mess. There was a hole through the ceiling two feet wide and the night sky shone through the shattered asbestos sheeting roof. All around the walls and on the ceiling were splatters of blood and pieces of human flesh and hair. Along the side of the bed lay a double‑barrel shotgun.
Suddenly the picture became clear. Mr. Rogers had sat on the side of the bed and putting both barrels of the shotgun into his mouth, blew his head off. The awesomeness of the sight completely overwhelmed me. I held Mrs. Rogers arm as much for support for myself as for her and quickly led her out of the room and back up into the front room with the five girls. I was totally inadequate and at a loss for what to say. I had never even considered the possibility of suicide let alone be suddenly faced with it. One thing I knew: that the God of love and compassion who came to us in Jesus Christ was still available to support us and comfort us even in such a dreadful experience as this. I spoke to the five girls in words that I now cannot remember save that they were words of assurance of God’s care and abiding love.
The funeral was a dreadful affair, and my first experience of a funeral and a death close at hand was a shattering one for me as the minister.
In a strange sort of way it was liberation for Mrs. Rogers and the five girls. I guess Mr. Rogers must have thought of that. The church gathered round them as a family providing all members with new clothing, with food, and a supply of people who came in to help with the cleaning of the house and the repair of the bedroom and the roof. The church members gathered around that family in a supportive warm way and Mrs. Rogers and her daughters became regular attenders in the church. Over my next seven years of ministry I saw all of them come to faith and membership in the church. His death was for her liberation. From that time on her personality became open and outgoing and her daughters each became free from a life that had been dominated by the tyranny of a drunken, gambling, unemployed, aggressive husband. If ever there was a case of a family being better off after the death of one member, that was it.
My second funeral was totally different. Mrs. Margot Cleaves had started to attend our church. She had a delightful little child, Monty, or Montgomery to give him his full name. She had started to come to our church when she approached me to christen the child. I explained to her that we conducted ‘services of dedication’ for children, and that baptism was reserved until the child, of his own initiative and free will, made a commitment to Christ as Lord. The theological niceties did not mean anything to Margot. All she wanted was to have her son “done”.
It was important to her that the birth of her child be recognized and we had a marvellous service of thanksgiving to God for the safe birth and arrival of this special boy. Margot Cleaves was in her thirties and had been married for some time to a very short, thin, anaemic looking man who worked in the boot trade. He never said a word. Margot was outgoing and pleasant with a cheerful laugh and frequently wore a big fox fur around her shoulders. They had given up all hope of ever having a child when years after marriage she became pregnant. Monty was their special only child. The doctors made it clear to her that she never again could conceive, and so young Monty was the apple of his mother’s eye. His father, much older in years, was probably in his middle forties although the passage of years makes that rather unclear. Throughout my years of knowing them, I found it very difficult ever to have a conversation with him. To every question his reply was usually in one, or two words at the most.
It was a joy to see Margot and young Monty coming to church. We had week by week descriptions of the coming of his first tooth, the saying of his first and second words, and of his crawling across the kitchen floor.
Then out of the blue, the telephone rang one afternoon and a neighbour told me the shocking news. Baby Monty had crawled over to a small ornamental pond that Mr. Cleaves had built in the backyard and had fallen in and drowned in less than four inches of water. It was an absolute tragedy. It was also unbelievable that a child could fall into such a small pond, not much larger than a dinner plate and drown in four inches of water. But that had happened.
I flew round to the house as quickly as I could. Margot was beside herself in grief. Her shrieks and cries split the air. She could not believe it, and when the undertaker came to remove the body of the little boy to the morgue it set off a round of uncontrollable anger and shouting against the undertaker, the police, the neighbours, God and everybody in general.
The doctor eventually gave Margot a very heavy sedative injection and for the next two days she was unable to stir from the bed. She insisted on coming to the funeral and I realized that it was going to be one of the most difficult experiences I had ever encountered in my young life.
Right throughout the service Margot screamed and sobbed hysterically. I finished up the service as quickly as possible and we got in the coach to go to the cemetery. Driving along the road following the tram tracks to the Fawkner cemetery, she suddenly realized that there was no hearse in front and that she had not seen what happened to the tiny little white coffin that bore the body of her son. Leaning forward she shouted out at the driver of the mourning car in which she and her husband and I were sitting, “Where is Monty? Where is my little boy? What have you done with my little boy?” In one of the worst replies I have ever heard over the years from someone within the undertaking business, the driver looked back over his shoulder casually and said “He is all right. We have put him in the boot. With these little fellows we do not have a separate hearse and we just carry the coffin in the boot of the car. He is right behind where you are sitting.”
The awful truth came home to me and I could do nothing but lean over and put my arms around Margot to comfort her sobbing heart as she broke out into a fresh outburst of uncontrollable screams. “They have put my little boy into the boot of the car”.
Everything that happened at that funeral is one dreadful memory. It came to an awful climax as I stood around the open grave and committed the little white coffin to the earth. The coffin itself was only 18 inches long and it seemed so minute as it was lowered down into an overly large hole. As the undertaker lowered the little white coffin, Margot broke loose from the restraining hands of a couple of ladies from the church and her husband, and dashed forward to throw herself into the open grave. Seeing what was happening I sprang across the grave and met her right on the edge. We both teetered, almost losing our balance, as I pushed her back and into the arms of some friends and church members.
Her grief was just terrible to witness. I closed the service immediately and we had to almost drag the poor lady back to the car. Her only child and her only hope for children were left behind us.
The only happy memory in all of this sad affair was that about a year later Margot, who had commenced coming to church once more and who had fled from church on many occasions because of the memories of her lost child, came to me with utter bewilderment in her face saying, “You will never believe this but I am pregnant.” It was true. She was pregnant despite all of the odds and the medical impossibilities. Nine months later she gave birth to a delightful curly headed little boy. At this time my wife and I were also expecting our first child and in that little church in the slums of Melbourne two new babies were born close together. Over the next couple of years they grew up, often sitting in the same pram.
As I look at their photographs today, I can’t help but think, however, of that dreadful time when young Monty drowned and I had the second of two ghastly experiences as a young minister conducting funerals.
How to handle those experiences was not taught in the classes at theological college. At least that is what I thought as I walked out into the heavy air, with the wind blowing from the abattoirs, started my motor bike, and headed towards the College of The Bible to train as a young minister, thinking of my meeting with some of God’s children in Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES