WIDOWS CARRY WEIGHT OF THE WORLD ON SHOULDERS

Recently, on the news I watched the coverage of Martin McGuinness’s funeral.  Of course, the footage was edited for the television news, but as I observed the casket being carried by the mourners, I blinked twice. ‘Is that a woman carrying the casket?’

Indeed it was.  Not only was it a woman, it was a widow. The widow of Martin McGuinness: Bernadette Canning McGuinness. Directly behind her was another woman, also a pallbearer. What a spectacle.  What a statement.  A visual statement without words.  Two women leading the way and carrying the coffin.

This got me thinking about the funerals I’ve been to in my life and there have been many.  Not one funeral featured a female pallbearer.  At all of these funerals of family members and others, the position of the widow was in the usual place, behind the casket leading the mourners out of the church.

I started to wonder if there are other instances of female pallbearers and when tradition started to be challenged and changed.  And I discovered images of suffragettes carrying coffins.  Of course they would.

Pallbearers or casket carriers are traditional roles assigned to male family members or close friends.  This is because it is argued that the pallbearer must be able to shoulder an average of 80lbs in weight and many still believe that a woman can’t physically handle such a weight.  So often, images of funerals feature two hefty men heading up the funeral procession, as seen here.

If a woman says she can handle it, she can handle it, as Bernadette McGuinness and the suffragette sisters, so nobly illustrated.  I’m inclined to think that these days, the weight argument no longer holds any weight.

It makes sense that the wife of the man she has loved, fought with, been with in sickness and in health, as the vows so often state, should have the right to carry her husband to his resting place.  The point in all of this is that it should be her choice.  If she doesn’t want to, fair enough.  But if she does, no-one should tsk-tsk about it behind her back.

Thinking about all of this reminds me of a scene in the 2007 BBC miniseries of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, when Captain Brown goes away for work leaving his two adult daughters to fend for themselves.

The older daughter dies while c is away, and her sister, Miss Jessie Brown breaks with tradition to walk behind her sister’s casket (women of Jessie’s class were not supposed to attend funerals).  Jessie’s decision invites discussion and comment from Miss Deborah Jenkins, the moralist in Cranford.  Jessie tells Deborah, ‘I will walk behind the coffin on my own,’ to which Miss Jenkins replies with astonishment, ‘Oh, that will not do at all.  Ladies NEVER attend funerals.’  ‘But I can’t send her to her grave alone’, continues Jessie. ‘It would break our father’s heart if I were to tell him it was done so.’

Later Miss Jenkins remarks that if Jessie goes to her sister’s funeral ‘she will be in contravention of all polite codes’ and she worries about what people in the village will say.  Tradition is challenged by Mary Smith from Manchester, when she declares that in Manchester, sometimes ladies go to funerals and that it is becoming the custom.  In the next scene, we see Jessie coming out of the house to walk behind her sister’s coffin.  She is almost immediately joined by Miss Deborah, who has examined her own conscience and decided she needed to accompany Jessie.  And so the women of Cranford, by doing the right thing in the absence of a male family representative, break with tradition and challenge the absurdity of convention, just like the women in this post have done.

All this has led me to ask my readers this: have you been to a funeral where the widow has been a pallbearer?  What about where women have been pallbearers?  What were your experiences of this?