Kids & Death: Too Young to be a Pallbearer?

In which another antiquated tradition goes under the microscope and we ask how young is too young to be a pallbearer.

May 03, 2024

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Hey kid! Your uncle just died. What do you think about dressing up in a suit and carrying him around for a couple of hours?

It’s not a direct quote, but the first time I was a pallbearer was when I was 11 years old. My great uncle Frank (mother’s uncle) died when I was in fifth grade and I was deemed old enough by the responsible adults in the room to join the festivities. I remember very little from experience, other than it being really weird and not understanding why my cousins and I had to put on little white gloves and pick up a very heavy box containing my uncle’s body1.

Based on my own accounting of these things, I have been a pallbearer nine times:

Great uncle Frank, age 11
Great grandfather (father’s side), age 12
Great-great aunt Giovanna (father’s side), age 14 (I think)
Great aunt Anna (Frank’s wife), age 19
Aunt Lynn (father’s side), age 20
Wife’s grandmother Rose, age 23
Wife’s uncle Tom, age 33
Wife’s grandfather Carlo, age 33
Wife’s grandmother Jane, age 34

(Strangely, I’ve been a pallbearer for three of my wife’s grandparents but zero of my own. I’ve never buried a peer, but I’ve only ever had one friend die.)

I’m not an anthropologist or theologian, but I’ll play one for the next few minutes. Italian-Americans of the Roman Catholic persuasion embrace death as a cultural landmark in a person’s journey. Sure, there is the “death is life everlasting” dogma that we were force fed in religious education classes, but Italians (like other Mediterranean cultures) raise their families around births and deaths. It’s celebrated as a coming home for the dead person religiously, but it’s just as much of a social event in Italian-American culture.

Funerals are happy hours for Catholics of a certain age and, since my experience is as a third-generation Italian-American raised in the Roman Catholic faith, that’s what I’m going to lean on. My wife’s grandparents2 used to plan their week’s around wakes, funerals and the Solvay senior citizens luncheons. They were active, fairly well-known people in Solvay — a small village adjacent to Syracuse — so it seemed as if every showing on the schedule at Bagozzi Twins Funeral Home3 was on their calendar, like they had season tickets.

Not everyone is of a certain age and I absolutely wasn’t when my uncle Frank died. So, I want to answer two questions: Why do we continue to use pallbearers in a funeral ceremony and when is the right age for someone to be a pallbearer?

Tradizione

For the first question, the answer is simple: tradition.

Pallbearers get their name for the pall, or heavy cloth draped over the coffin during a Christian funeral service. For many years, there were pallbearers and casket bearers. The latter would carry the coffin, while pallbearers would carry a tip of the pall or a rope or tassel attached to it.

The funeral pall of England’s King Richard III, who died in 1485, on display at Leicester Cathedral. Source: Flickr.

I have to think that lugging a heavy wooden box while someone walked close to you carrying the corner of a bed sheet was dangerous on some level. Add in the requisite amount of sorrow, tear-flooded eyes, and/or whiskey-clouded brains, and the trip-and-fall rates must have been astonishing. Eventually, the pall-touching job was eliminated and casket bearers became pallbearers.

Prior to the invention of the casket, unembalmed bodies were wrapped in the pall and carried by pallbearers. I’ll keep this mind the next time I complain about how heavy the casket is, particularly if it’s during the summer.

In Britain and many of its former colonies, the casket is traditionally carried on the shoulders of the pallbearers4 but that tradition is waning as waistlines expand:

The tradition of pallbearers carrying coffins at funeral services is facing a threat from Britain's soaring obesity problem.
An increased number of seriously overweight people has meant health and safety regulations have restricted usual practices at more and more funeral services.
With the combined weight of corpse and casket regularly exceeding 35 stone, funeral directors are having to use trolleys and lifting equipment instead of professional pallbearers and family mourners.

For once, another culture can bear the brunt of a lifetime of excess.

Modern pallbearers are typically selected from close friends and family, though I would add that’s not always the case. Sometimes you get picked out of a crowd, as was the case for Mike Cochran, a reporter for the Associated Press who ended up as a pallbearer for Lee Harvey Oswald in 19635:

No one else would follow; even the minister failed to show. Shaking his head ever so slightly, Jerry Flemmons of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram turned to me and said, “Cochran, if we’re gonna write a story about the burial of Lee Harvey Oswald, we’re gonna have to bury the son of a bitch ourselves.”
Sure enough, officials asked the gathered reporters to serve as pallbearers. I was among the first they asked, my reply not just “No!” but “Hell no!” Then Preston McGraw of United Press International stepped forward and volunteered, and with my top competition for scoops accepting the duty, I realized my error and joined McGraw and other reporters.

Digressing, pallbearers are responsible for loading the casket in and out of the hearse at the funeral home, church and burial site. Most funeral homes provide white polyester gloves to wear when lifting, adding to the challenge of not losing your grip. As if it wasn’t a pain in the ass to lift the casket while wearing a suit, go ahead and grab for the brass handles in gripless gloves. It’s a blast!

A man’s job?

Last summer, my sister-in-law was asked to be a pallbearer for her godfather6. In fact, there were two of the six pallbearers were women.

There’s no canonical rule about genders and pallbearers, but traditionally this role has been held by men. And why? Well, according to a Syracuse-area funeral home, it’s because women are weak:

Men are naturally physically stronger than women and can carry this weight easily, compared to the latter. This aspect is why you will not see women as pallbearers.

Bravo to whoever developed the content for this website. I mean, lugging a casket and body is heavy no matter the gender or age. Still, we seem surprised that the dainty and delicate of the genders7 can lift a full casket and walk. The New York Times, great bastion of liberal thought and torchbearer for equality, published an article in 1904 about a funeral where all six pallbearers were women:

WOMEN AS PALLBEARERS
Six New Rochelle Templars Carry Body of Mrs. Agnes Green
NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y., July 31 – At the funeral of Mrs. Agnes Green, the wife of Edmund Green, a bicycle dealer, held here to-day, six women who had been her friends acted as pallbearers. The women are members of the Independent Order of Good Templars, of which Mrs. Green was the local President. They were in white with black sashes.
After the service at the house, which was conducted by the Rev. Dr. Saul O. Curtice of the Methodist Episcopal Church, they carried the coffin out to the hearse and marched with it to the cemetery. At the cemetery they took the casket from the hearse and carried it to the grave where each dropped a bouquet of flowers on it.
The funeral was the first in New Rochelle at which women took the part of pallbearers, and attracted much attention as it passed through the streets.

There are so many things in this article to discuss — beginning with the era’s use of commas — that I’m not sure what I find more objectionable. Between this and the founding of a women’s-only college in town, New Rochelle in 1904 must have been a powder keg of male confusion. What are these women doing? Pallbearing and learning? The next thing you know, they’ll want the right to vote and work outside of the home.

I’m surprised the last paragraph of the article didn’t include a quote from a local man asking, “When will the madness end?”

Maybe You Shouldn’t Ask the 11-Year-Old

There’s no right answer to “when is a child old enough to attend a funeral?” Ideally, you explain to the child what to expect and what they will see, and let them make the decision. Sometimes you know; there was no way my six-year-old was going to hack a 75-minute funeral service. She’s never attended a church service of any sort in the past, so her grandfather’s funeral didn’t seem like the right time to break the seal. Plus, it’s hard enough for me to keep my attention fixed during a funeral and I’m a (mostly) mature 46-year-old. Expecting her to sit still was a proverbial accident waiting to happen.

Similarly, there is no right answer for the minimum age for being a pallbearer. Some funeral homes suggest 16, but most just want to ensure they are physically capable of the task. Take a 200-pound casket and add a 150- to 200-pound body to it. Was I really capable of lifting that much weight at 11 years old? Maybe8. Should I have? Probably not.

And then there is the emotional aspect. “Hey kid. How about you carry the box with your dead uncle inside?” How does that land?

In my case, it was the 1980s, so children’s mental and emotional health were not immediate concerns for, well, anyone. Anxiety hadn’t been invented yet and children didn’t start having emotional scarring until the 1990s9. Plus, for ethnic families, they had a more important problem to solve than whether they would screw up a kid’s head. They needed six people to carry the dead guy in the box.

Given the state of things today, you have to consider how this will land with a child before putting them in the position. All of the talk about how “it’s an honor to be a pallbearer” and “they must think a lot of you to ask” is all fine and good, but how this might impact the emotional state of the kid involved should take precedence.

There are hundreds of websites with advice for funeral planning and hundreds more grief websites that talk about the emotional weight of death. None of them marry the two with regard to whether kids are able to handle the role beyond suggesting that the pallbearer be 16, as if getting a driver’s permit somehow makes you emotionally stable to handle the task.

So, I sit here as an expert on nothing and feel like I should weigh in. Should I have been a pallbearer for my uncle Frank? Probably not. Though I really have no memory of it all, there’s no way I was able to physically handle the responsibility and I’m certain that I was not emotionally able to process what I was doing. How about a year later when my great-grandfather died? He didn’t speak English and we didn’t see him much, so I can’t really say that I had an emotional reaction.

But, I doubt I was more physically capable of it a year later.

Kids & Death: Too Young to be a Pallbearer?

In which another antiquated tradition goes under the microscope and we ask how young is too young to be a pallbearer.

Tradizione

A man’s job?

Maybe You Shouldn’t Ask the 11-Year-Old

Final Thoughts on Finality…

Discussion about this post