Funeral and cemetery musings - Rector's Rambling for September 28, 2025

     On Tuesday morning this past week we had the funeral for Gail Weedon, a longtime member of St. John’s.  Increasing immobility due to her Multiple Sclerosis made her have to give up her home in Sylvan Lake and move into a retirement community, and then after additional medical issues she moved into a nursing home setting.  With each move her world got smaller, and she had to let go of things like her wonderful art collection and things accumulated in her many travels over the decades.  But as her world got smaller time with family continued to be of utmost importance.

On Tuesday afternoon I said the final prayers at the graveside where her ashes were being interred next to the mortal remains of her mother and father.  I buried Dorothy and George in 2002 and 2005.  Time continues to move on, and her daughter Audrey and I realized that we are the same age now that Gail was when I arrived at St. John’s in 2001.  Audrey and Lara’s kids who were baptized here and ran around the nursery with my kids are now grown, the three youngest of them now college aged. Tempus Fugit.

Having arrived early at Pine Lake Cemetery in West Bloomfield I had a few minutes to walk around and visit the burial place of Tigers great Norm Cash, and the mother of Charles Lindbergh, who was a teacher in the Detroit Public Schools and owned a house in Grosse Pointe Park later owned by a former members of ths parish, and currently owned by a friend of my wife.  And there were stones marking the final resting place of generations of people known to God and their family and hopefully not forgotten.

I say all this as we head out of September and are only a little over a month away from All Souls Day, where the church remembers all the faithful departed.  I was told that there is an old Jewish adage that there are two deaths - the day you have your early death, and the last time someone says your name out-loud. 

Here at St. John’s everyone who has died and been entered in our burial register are remembered in prayer on the anniversary of their death.  They are not forgotten by God or by us and we remember  them by name as well.  We may not know much, if anything about them personally, but they are prayed for nonetheless.

I have had the privilege of doing a lot of funerals here in nearly 25 years as rector of St. John’s, and am thankful to be able to pray for them, and remember them, before the throne of God.