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Funeral demand strains Arlington |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Monday, 18 April 2005 |
April 17, 2005
Mourners must wait weeks or months
By Joe Holley
Washington Post
WASHINGTON --In a black suit, muted red tie and white shirt, Keith Barnes resembles a funeral director as he sits down at his desk in the administration building of Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., and notices the blinking red light on his phone.
"Four in the queue" he calls out. That means four calls are waiting. As he does 60 or 70 times a day, the 40-year-old former Army chaplain's assistant picks up the phone to take one of them. The office of 16 handles 300 calls a day.
On the line with Barnes this morning is a Newark funeral home requesting burial within the next couple of days for the spouse of a World War II veteran who died in 1956 and is buried at Arlington. It is Barnes' duty, as it is frequently, to explain that the next couple of days won't be possible.
"All she wants is a date", he tells a visitor when the caller puts him on hold, but there's more to it than that.
Families of veterans or veterans' spouses requesting burial or inurnment, for cremated remains, might end up waiting weeks, occasionally months.
After Barnes and his colleagues verify eligibility, a relatively simple matter, they work to line up a veritable Rubik's Cube of factors that determine when the service will be held.
It's a process they repeat for about 3,000 ceremonies and 6,000 funerals annually, an average of 26 a day.
These days, three factors: the growing number of deaths of World War II veterans, military branches' additional responsibilities since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the increasing popularity of cremation are exacerbating the delay. Family preference on time of day, season and type of funeral are contributing factors.
"It's a bell curve", said John C. Metzler Jr., who has been the cemetery's superintendent since 1990. Metzler, 57, succeeded his father, superintendent from 1951 to 1972.
"We will peak between now and 2008", he said.
The cemetery held 2,740 funerals the year the elder Metzler stepped down, about 11 a day, five days a week. In 2008, if the numbers peak as expected, Arlington will host 7,400 funerals, or about 30 a day.
World War II veterans are dying at the rate of 1,056 a day, says Jose Llamas, a spokesman for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The Muskegon, Mich., family of World War II veteran Joseph Beyrle is one of those having to wait. As a soldier, Beyrle rarely waited for anything. A paratrooper whose eagerness for leaping out of airplanes earned him the nickname "Jumpin' Joe", he was 20 when he parachuted into Normandy for the first time..
Four years later, Beyrle was captured by the Nazis but escaped after several attempts. He ended up fighting with a Russian tank unit. After the war, Beyrle went back to Muskegon and married his sweetheart. He died at age 81 on Dec. 12, and his family had his funeral in Muskegon shortly afterward. The body was cremated. He is scheduled to be buried at Arlington on Friday.
The delay at Arlington is something his widow, JoAnne Beyrle, said she understands, even appreciates. It will allow family members, including her son, who is deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, to make travel plans.
Most families feel the same way, unless they're members of an orthodox faith that requires immediate burial.
"If the most important thing to me is to bury the family member tomorrow, yes, I can do it"' Metzler said. "The actual act of burying someone, we can do that immediately. What I can't do is to produce a chaplain or have an honor guard or make all the other arrangements that certain funerals require.
Standard military honors include pallbearers, a firing party and a bugler. The family may also request a military chaplain.
Commissioned and warrant officers may receive full honors, which include a caisson, a military band and escort troops. For Army and Marine colonels and higher, a riderless horse may be requested. For flag officers of the Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, the "Minute Guns", are provided; for flag officers of the Army, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, there is a gun salute.
The Sept. 11 factor further complicates scheduling. Before the terrorist attacks, Metzler said, every branch of the military had a full complement of buglers, band members, honor guards and others whose primary mission was to support Arlington. Since then, he said, each branch of service has taken on new responsibilities relating to homeland security.
Cremation, the third factor in the scheduling puzzle, gives families the option of scheduling funerals at their convenience but creates peak demand periods.
"Fifty years ago, (cremation) was a very rare item, maybe one or two a week", Metzler said. "Today, it's 62 percent of our workload".
Cremation allows families to wait weeks, even months, for a date that suits them best; the most requested period is the weeks in June just after schools let out. Some families delay as long as a decade, waiting until the spouse dies so the two can be buried at the same time.
"It used to be rare, having two family members, husband and wife, at the same time", Metzler said. "Now it's common."
On the phone with the New Jersey funeral home, Barnes is explaining politely, with just the barest hint of exasperation, that because Arlington, unlike most local cemeteries, conducts at least 25 services a day, it's not possible for a service to be arranged immediately.
"Generally, our cemetery is booked solid for three weeks out," he explains.
His caller puts him on hold again while she goes off to confer with the family.
"Local people always know," he says as he waits. "They don't even ask. But you get someone calling from Ohio or some place, they've never been here before, they just don't know."
The New Jersey woman's service turns out to be relatively easy to schedule. From a file cabinet, Barnes retrieves a typed card with information that an Arlington representative took down at the time of her husband's funeral nearly 40 years ago, a card that probably hasn't been touched since then.
He checks his computer for a time slot and finds one that's less than a week away. It's at 10 in the morning. The family says yes.
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/news/nation/11418405.htm |
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