Funerals, Part One

I've only ever been to one "traditional" New Orleans funeral, and that was of my best friend's mother, who died of lung cancer, back in the summer of 2009. She was buried near City Park in Lake Lawn Cemetery and since the funeral I have not been back to the standing grave where she was laid to rest. However, I remember the services very clearly.

Ms. Biffy, as we called her, had been diagnosed with lung cancer the day before Christmas in 2008, and she spent the next six months trying chemo therapy and wearing oxygen masks. However, she passed away in June 2009 and the services were held in New Orleans and Metairie, where she had lived with her husband and two children. The wake was one like I had never before witnessed. It was held at Lake Lawn and there were well over a thousand people there to pay respects to her. It was a beautiful occasion. There were visitors from all over the state (due to the Katrina diaspora) whom I had not seen in years and have not seen since.

The funeral mass--she was a well-to-do Catholic woman with good standing in the church--was held in St. Ann church in Metairie. The church was packed with weeping witnesses. Her husband wrote a eulogy which he was unable to deliver and so had a family friend deliver it instead. It was beautiful.

After the mass, everyone followed the hearse to the interstate and to the cemetery where there was a standing grave labeled "DeBuys." I think the worst part was watching them push the coffin into the tomb.

I mention this funeral because I will be going to another traditional Catholic New Orleans funeral tomorrow for my great-grandmother who passed away around noon last Wednesday. This one, however, I'm expecting to be small, as she was well into her eighties when she left. My grandparents have set up donations to animal hospitals for the funeral, as my great-grandmother was a fond lover of animals, even after she developed Alzheimer's. She was known to collect stray cats and let them wander through her house, and her favorite dogs were Schnauzers, whom she often overfed and didn't bathe. However, she was a wonderful woman with a big heart, and I am sad to see her go.

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Traditional New Orleans graves stand above ground, due to the fact that it floods here quite often. During/after Katrina there were a great many corpses which had been unearthed from their graves because of the excessive flooding.

St. Louis Cemetery #1

The "Real" Marie Laveau Tomb

Voodoo Priestess/Mambo Marie Laveau is supposedly buried in the St. Louis Cemetary #1 located on the corner of St. Louis Street and Basin Street. Several cemeteries claim to be the home of her tomb but this one is "the one" according to the lovely tour guide you see below. He explained that people thought she was buried in the tomb you see labeled as the supposed tomb but really it was just a name plate added to the tomb of one of her dead husbands. The tour guide also then told us that she was really buried in the tomb on the right and several of the people I was with claimed they could "feel her presence" when they touched the tomb. As you can see in the picture on the left of the "real" tomb there are many marks of XXX. Though this is illegal it is said that if you do so and make a wish she will grant it for you and you go back and circle your 3 x's. 

Maintenance man gone tour guide

Supposed tomb

XXX marks the spot... 

New Orleans being how it is, does not allow for bodies to be buried below the ground because we are below sea level and it just doesn't work out too well. That being said, our cemeteries are above ground and consist of tombs instead of headstones. Since the bodies are put in tombs there are no coffins so the bodies are placed in the tomb and is sealed in there for one year and a day. Because of the humidity and heat the tomb acts as a natural crematorium and the body is reduced to bones which can be pushed back to allow for another family member to be placed in the same tomb. 

From within a tomb