Okay. You are a curious bunch. I’ve received several messages asking me explain our family’s adoption of the very old Southern practice of ‘walking the dead’. So here it is.

When I was 18 years old and a sophomore in college (skipped half of my senior year of high school), the phone rang at our house one day. My mom answered it — one of those old black Bakelite rotary dial phones. She briefly conversed with the caller, hung up, and turned to me. She said, “Well, today you become an adult.” She explained that one of the ladies at our small rural church had passed, and her spinster daughter had called my mom to come. She was distraught and didn’t know what to do.

Mom and I hopped in the family station wagon, and traveled the one mile to her home. Mom immediately took charge. She phoned our local funeral home to come get the deceased.

Within minutes the hearse arrived. We vacated the bedroom while the undertakers loaded the body on a guerney.

As they rolled our friend’s body into the living room, Mom stopped them. She carefully folded back the undertakers’ blanket uncovering the face of the deceased. I watched her neatly smooth out the wrinkles of the blanket tucking it gently under the chin of her dear friend. She then instructed me to stand on the left side of the guerney and place my hand on the side rail. She stood on the right side and did the same, then nodded to the undertakers that they could proceed.

With them at the head and foot of the deceased, and Mom and me on either side, we proceeded slowly and solemnly out the front door of the home and to the hearse, with the daughter following solemnly behind. We stepped aside and let the undertakers load the body into the hearse. Mom told them they could now cover the face of her friend.

Later that day Mom explained to me why we walked the lady to the hearse — the practice known to previous generations as ‘walking the dead’.

She said a person’s soul may be gone, but they were more than just a dead body. They should be allowed to leave their place of death — whether home or hospital — with the same dignity with which they had lived. They should not be surrounded on that brief journey by strangers but rather by people who knew them and cared about them. They should feel one last time the warmth of the sun or the breeze in the air on their face.

In short, ‘walking the dead’ is a solemn ceremony to show respect for the deceased. Simple, solemn, respectful.

When my sister passed last August, my nieces and I waited in the living room while the undertakers loaded her body on a guerney. We explained our tradition to them and asked them not to cover her face. We then proceeded to accompany her body out the front door and to the funeral home’s van. I was a bit amused when one of the undertakers peered out from the back of the van to ask, “Can we cover her face now?” We assured him that, yes, we had fulfilled our duty and they could now cover her up.

I hope that when It’s my time, I won’t have to make that journey alone in the company of strangers.

The photos below are in loving memory of my sister, Barbara, and my parents who rest behind her, Carroll and Estine Edmondson.

 

~Kentucky Farmhouse Finds~