Family and friends gathered together to give Jacksonville sexton a fitting farewell
Wayne Maxson’s family members wanted his funeral to be just so. Instead of turning to a funeral home, they decided to do it themselves.
Sharon Armstrong, a granddaughter of Maxson, and other family members planned a funeral, secured a site and handled details ranging from placing an obituary in the newspaper to arranging for cremation, a eulogy, burial and more.
“It was like a final gift to him,” Armstrong says. “We all worked together, and we’ll always remember it.”
Although most people opt for the services of a mortuary when a loved one dies, there is no law that says they must.
Historically, the notion of a full-service, commercial mortuary is a recent thing, becoming popular only in 20th century America.
The Maxson family is among a small but growing number of people deciding to take final matters into their own hands. Those who do realize substantial savings. But they say that’s not always the main incentive.
“It’s a neat way to do things,” Armstrong says. “It was a way to pay tribute to him and be respectful of the things that were important to him. Grandpa would’ve been proud of us.”
Maxson, who died Sept. 3 at 89, was the sexton of the Jacksonville Cemetery.
He worked hard for years restoring the grounds, often making improvements with his own tools on his own time.
Family members say that far from finding graves and tombstones morbid or depressing, he loved the place.
At Maxson’s request, Armstrong and her sisters had planned the funeral for Maxson’s wife, Evelyn, when she died four years ago. They held a simple, personal ceremony at the Odd Fellows Hall in Jacksonville, where Evelyn had volunteered for years delivering hot meals to seniors. Maxson was deeply touched.
“He really liked it,” Armstrong says.
It was understood after that that the family would someday do something similar for him. When Maxson died, Armstrong and other granddaughters went to work planning a funeral while their mothers, Maxson’s daughters, tended to the house and began organizing an estate sale.
Deciding against embalming and a visitation, they had the body cremated at Rogue Valley Funeral Alternatives in Medford, then took possession of the ashes. They reserved a community room at the Jacksonville library. They estimated attendance, rounded up family photos for a slide show, took care of a million details.
On the afternoon of Sept. 12, about 90 people came to the funeral. After the eulogy, people came forward and shared their memories of Maxson. A slide show afforded glimpses of his life. There was music: The Judds’ “Grandpa (Tell Me About the Good Old Days),” the Youngbloods’ “Get Together,” Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up.” There were tears.
Mourners walked to the old cemetery. The Jacksonville Fire Department, for which Maxson had volunteered, blew a sad whistle. People passed the urn containing Maxson’s ashes from person to person. It was placed in the grave, and family members scattered dirt on it. Barbara Lowe, a daughter of Maxson’s, read a Shel Silverstein poem.
Wayne Maxson’s funeral is almost a textbook study for the kind of planning advocated by Paul Firnstein, the owner of Ark Wood Caskets in Ashland.
“The reason the funeral industry can take advantage of so many people is that most people are uneducated about what they can do to help themselves,” Firnstein says. “In order to reduce the cost of a funeral, you have to get involved. The family has to say, ‘I want to be hands-on.’ You have to learn how to shop a funeral. And you don’t do it by waiting until that person dies.”
The national director of a consumers group agrees.
“People think it’s illegal to care for their dead,” says Joshua Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance. “Except for five states, it’s not. They think embalming is required. It’s not.
“It’s hard to put numbers on it, but we’re seeing more people for whom what was important was not to relinquish the body to a commercial mortuary to have it processed with formaldehyde and put on display in a mass-manufactured casket.”
Slocum says the alliance got more than 10,000 phone calls after the debut of A&E’s “Family Plots,” a reality-based television series about a mortuary.
He says that with the average funeral costing well over $5,000, many people he talks with want to leave the mortuary out to save money. Some have other motives.
“It’s the emotional intimacy,” he says. “Doing something, whatever it is, at this time, is very sustaining.”
Armstrong agrees.
“It was great,” she says. “Something to look back on. It’s an intense process, but we all felt honored to do it for him. Grandpa always liked special attention.”
As a bonus, the custom funeral brought family members together at a highly emotional time.
The hardest part was the organization, but Armstrong says it all came down to “basic event planning.”
The only thing she would do differently would be to have programs printed.
She remembers another family member whose family had a huge funeral and spent $10,000 on the casket alone.
“It was beautiful,” she says. “Almost like a piece of china. They were happy, so it’s OK for them. But every time I drive up there, the end result is, the graves look almost alike.”
Family effort
Sharon Armstrong, who helped plan and carry out her grandfather’s funeral, offers these tips to families who want to do the same thing:
- Get the family involved and brainstorm together.
- Be respectful of everybody’s wishes.
- Determine how many people to expect.
- Delegate. Divide work.
- Decide on a facility and check it out ahead of time.
- Check out any gear you’ll use, such as sound systems or slide projectors.
- Decide whether to have food and how to handle it.
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By Bill Varble, Mail Tribune, 10/2/2004, bvarble@mailtribune.com,
