Sometimes the journey and the destination become one. Thus it was on a recent family trip to a family funeral for a cousin with a beautiful woman with a beautiful heart and a beautiful voice. Shed sung at my sisters memorial almost three years ago and at my mothers graveside service about a year-and-a-quarter ago.

This is a big funeral inside the fully-packed country church, plunked down in the middle of agricultural land. I recall fanning myself here as a girl with a fan provided by a funeral home as we sat listening to a sermon and then rising to sing a hymn. Today theres air-conditioning, recorded music, and barely a dry eye in the full house of the Lord. The town drunk made something beautiful for God inside this renovated Sugar Grove Church.

Our funeral cortege is a long one and our journey to the Gillette Cemetery takes us past a long stretch of gnarly construction. All the Illinois Valley Paving construction workers standing beside the road take their hats off as we pass.

We step over cowpies in the cemetery separated from a neighboring pasture by a low wire fence and theres a cornfield next to that. I sit on a stump and watch a beetle crawl over over the deadfall of twigs as the last prayers are said.

The current custom of no longer lowering the casket into the ground at the close of the graveside service bothers my father. The lack of lowering the body to a final resting place feels incomplete to him. Pop says he took it up with a funeral director once who explained that they dont even own the lowering equipment anymore. Perhaps its unionized with a separation of services and duties? Did this change come from a cultural change? Is it a shift in our way of death?

Beautiful floral arrangements cluster around the casket underneath the green tent providing shade on this hot day. Family members sit in folding chairs covered with green plush to soften and comfort them at this moment of leave-taking. A grandfather explains to his grand-daughter that the casket sits inside the gold-colored vault and points out her grandmothers name on the end of the vaults top.

Then I witness a custom Id never seen before: family members wet their thumbs and press them against the casket, so their beloved one can take this ephemeral imprint from their bodies to the grave and the next world. I think of handprints on caves and how basic an act this isto leave the swirls of our unique identity as a final message, a final link and connection between worlds we cannot traverse.

Back at the Sugar Grove Church loving friends, neighbors, and church members have prepared a funeral feast for the returning mourners, mostly family now, but we still fill the church basement. Pops legs dont hold him up as strong as they used to, so we sit and listen to more stories while the line dwindles.

Our journey of reunion at a time of parting is complete, and we head home, gazing out towards the river and the white cranes.