Friday, November 11, 2005
STUDENT PALLBEARERS
Amy Welborn has linked this story from the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
Steve Koleszar slipped out of his second-period class on a recent morning, pulled a blue blazer from his locker and buttoned his collar tight around his tie.
Thirty minutes later, the 17-year-old stood behind a hearse outside Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Cleveland, next to a casket that held a woman he had never met.
The widow Evelyn Klepac died at age 78, having outlived most of her friends and family.
Koleszar, with five of his St. Ignatius High School classmates, carried her casket into the funeral service and later bore it across a cemetery lawn to her grave, where they bowed their heads in prayer.
Then he went back to school, a bit changed by the experience.
"It's a little strange at first," said Koleszar, a member of a student group called the Pallbearer Society.
But the surviving family members are grateful, he said, and the simple act of service seems so right.
As an only child with only one child of my own, and that a girl; with no brothers or sisters; I've often wondered what will happen when the time comes to bury my husband or he to bury me. Considering the size of families today, this problem is going to be multiplied in many families. I'm sure these young men are providing a service far greater than they know.
