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Final arrangements: For Mrs. McNair, tradition guides the journey home Second in a series Monday, May 24, 1999 By Gary Rotstein, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
It's 10:45 on a March morning, and Jane McNair is ready for her ascension.
In the embalming room of the Patrick T. Lanigan Funeral Home in East Pittsburgh, the staff has dressed her in a plaid slack suit and vest provided by her family. They've positioned her in the gold-colored steel casket with beige fabric that blends with Mrs. McNair's colorful outfit, also worn at her family's last big gathering on Thanksgiving.
"You want to break down the office, Andy?" Lanigan asks -- or directs, really -- one of his two assistants, who goes upstairs.
Within minutes, after the push of a button, Mrs. McNair and her casket begin rising slowly. It's as if they're part of a magician's levitation trick, accompanied by the electric hum of the lift device. She disappears from Lanigan's view, only to emerge upstairs in his Spartan office, where Andy Botti has moved an old desk and chairs and rectangular piece of false floor out of the way to make room for her.
One day after her death from pneumonia at age 86, two days before she will disappear into the ground forever, Mrs. McNair is ready to be wheeled into a viewing parlor. Following a final cosmetic touch-up, she'll begin receiving visitors, about 150 of them over the next day and a half.
The housewife known as a nurturing mother, exceptional pie-baker and meticulous family historian is heading into the hereafter the traditional way, at the funeral home that took care of her late husband, in the community of her upbringing, where her relatives will converge from around the country.
Like thousands of Pittsburghers who die each year, Jane McNair wouldn't have had it any other way.
The Lanigan family legacy in the death business dates to 1905, when John H. Lanigan began delivering caskets to families in East Pittsburgh, then a bustling mill town dominated by a huge Westinghouse Electric Co. plant.
Promoting a simpler way
Final Arrangements, Part I: A time of reckoning for the region's funeral trade
Ordering reprints of "Final Arrangements"
When he died in 1929, his wife, Bridget, took over the business. Their son, John G. Lanigan, succeeded her after he served in World War II. When he died in 1963, his wife, Emily, became the supervising funeral director.
All four of their Pennsylvania funeral licenses hang on the office wall above and beside that of John G. and Emily's son, Patrick Lanigan, who has run the funeral home since 1975, the year his mother died.
He is a graduate of Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science, with an outgoing personality and Kennedyesque features in that thick but handsome way -- wavy hair and prominent nose, lips and eyebrows.
He grew up on the top floor of the funeral home, which was built by his grandmother in 1938. He and his two brothers set up their own miniature golf course throughout the visitation parlors, and his father gave him his first job, putting canvas covers over the parking meters outside so mourners could feel free to park there without being ticketed.
"I wouldn't trade my childhood with anybody," says Lanigan, who is 48 and lives a four-minute drive away in Forest Hills.
He's a long-established civic leader in the Turtle Creek Valley as well as a spokesman for the local funeral industry. He's former president of the county and state funeral director associations. He's past president of the Westinghouse Valley Chamber of Commerce and president-elect of the Forest Hills Lions Club, for which he runs the holiday peanut sale out of the funeral home. At fire halls and churches in December, he's Santa Claus.
Civic activism is a chapter in the handbook of funeral directors nationwide. It's good for business, though that doesn't preclude it from being sincere.
The Lanigan Funeral Home itself is part of local history, from the days before the magical lift, when Lanigan's relatives used to call out to passersby for help carrying the caskets containing fellow East Pittsburghers from the basement to the first floor.
The community also has the Raymond J. Yuhas Funeral Home, but the Lanigans always have done well, particularly with the Catholic and Greek Orthodox populations. Lanigan handles about 125 bodies a year in East Pittsburgh, twice as many as the average local funeral home, and another 20 or so at a smaller Turtle Creek facility. He has known most of these deceased individuals personally, or their children.
"Pat took after his mother, who was a very vivacious women. He's an exceptional individual -- there is nothing I wouldn't trust him with. I know Pat wouldn't hurt me in any way."
That's Marge Kirchner talking. She's Jane McNair's daughter.
Lanigan is sitting at his desk at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday in late March when he gets Kirchner's call. Her mother has just died at Latrobe Area Hospital. Lanigan has been awaiting the news since the week before, when Kirchner let him know her mother's death was imminent.
A resident for 16 months of the Newhaven Court assisted living facility in Greensburg, Mrs. McNair first had been hospitalized with pneumonia, then became comatose two days later. She was uncommunicative, incurable and struggled for 10 more days, with and without life support and assisted by morphine doses, before dying.
After speaking briefly with Kirchner, Lanigan asks Botti to drive to Latrobe to pick up Mrs. McNair. But first, the bald, bearded former Westinghouse Air Brake laborer has to stop at Forbes Hospice in the city's Larimer section.
The call to get Mrs. Wilson, another former East Pittsburgher, had come just after news of Mrs. McNair's death. In a dark Ford Explorer extended for extra cargo space in the rear, Botti picks up Mrs. Wilson from her room and delivers her to the funeral home, then collects Mrs. McNair from the hospital morgue an hour away to bring her back along Route 30.
In the funeral home's cold embalming room downstairs, the two women spend the next 24 hours on tables beside one another and Mrs. Orris, a third widow who had gotten there before them.
billy Schleifer is waiting when Mrs. McNair arrives. He's a funeral director who operates a small funeral home and supplements his income performing embalming work for other homes.
He does a majority of Lanigan's embalmings because Lanigan doesn't consider himself especially skilled at it. Schleifer has already finished the two-hour job on Mrs. Wilson when Mrs. McNair arrives at 12:40 p.m.
He puts a surgical gown over his Steelers jersey and snaps on gloves to resume work in the tiled room containing cabinets and shelves of fluids and metal instruments. A walk-in closet is full of casket pillows, shirts, wigs and other items that could be needed before someone's ascension.
With the help of Tracy Guerin, a long-haired young widow who is Lanigan's second staff funeral director, Schleifer cleanses Mrs. McNair with germicidal soap and water. He then makes incisions of the carotid artery and jugular vein between her neck and right shoulder. In a nearby machine, he mixes purple dye and a pink embalming fluid containing formaldehyde as its key ingredient.
The machine's slender hose is inserted into the large artery, with a pump activated to send the mixture through the arteries, replacing blood that drains onto the tilted table and into a sink. Gradually, Mrs. McNair's pale complexion takes on a colored, more lifelike appearance. In the course of 15 minutes, she begins regaining tone in her fingertips, then her forehead, then her arms and the rest of her.
Once the fluid leaving her body is clear instead of red, Schleifer moves to the second major embalming phase. A tubed metal stick called a trocar is inserted deep into her abdomen. It uses water aspiration to suck up bacteria-containing fluids that settle around organs.
"It's kind of like liposuction," says Schleifer, a genial, low-key sort who has done this thousands of times over 28 years.
None of this work is very pretty to watch. Author Jessica Mitford, a cremation advocate, called embalming "barbaric," and critics note that no other countries practice it as commonly as America.
Embalming is not required by law -- bodies can also be preserved in refrigerator units -- but funeral homes across the United States generally lack refrigerators and use embalming as the standard procedure preceding open-casket ceremonies. For at least a few days -- and often much longer though not permanently -- it helps restore the former appearance of the deceased and reduces odors and bacteria.
Lanigan says people might find knee surgery a turnoff as well if they actually watched it, but it wouldn't keep them from doing it.
"People want open caskets -- this isn't something we tell people to do," Lanigan says. "Seeing is believing, and it brings closure."
Schleifer and Guerin finish their work with soap and water and disinfectants rubbed and sprayed on the body. Incisions are sewed, fingernails cleaned, eyelids and lips glued shut, flesh-colored cosmetics applied to the purplish arm bruises that resulted from hospital tubes.
When asked the toughest thing about his work, Schleifer thinks immediately of all of the smaller bodies he has seen on embalming tables. He gives the same clipped answer as almost every funeral director provides:
"The children."
The pair finish with this far older person at 2:30. At just that time, a casually dressed couple walk in the front door upstairs, oblivious to the work below.
jane McNair left two children in their 50s: Scott, a North Carolina sales manager, and Marge Kirchner, an insurance agent living in Penn Hills.
As the child still living close to her mother's home, Kirchner will take charge of death arrangements. It is more common for women than men to handle such matters anyway. And Kirchner and her husband, Bill, have known and liked Lanigan all of their lives.
With her husband sitting silently beside her, the husky-voiced Kirchner begins telling the funeral director some of what she wants for her mother -- visitation for two hours Wednesday and four hours Thursday, a funeral and burial Friday morning.
Lanigan nods and takes notes. They converse about Mrs. McNair's death and biographical information needed for her death certificate. He prompts Kirchner in a conversational manner for various details.
The funeral director knew Mrs. McNair from his boyhood, before the McNair family moved to Braddock Hills. He saw her many times during her later trips with her daughter to East Pittsburgh to have her hair styled. He guided her through her husband's funeral 11 years before her own death. Nonetheless, he needs a lot of basic facts about her for state records, for the newspaper death notice, and for his own files.
Kirchner wants a service at her mother's Lutheran church, and she produces a deed for a burial plot at Restland Memorial Park in Monroeville, where Mrs. McNair will lie next to her husband. Kirchner scoffs in amusement when Lanigan asks if her mother would mind her age being publicized in the death notice. Of course she wouldn't mind.
"That's something she was always proud of, 86 and a half years old," Kirchner says, smiling.
There is an easy banter between them, sometimes punctuated by laughter, even as Lanigan notes it's time for them to begin discussing the cost of arrangements and gives her a price list to review. Lanigan explains he could offer her one of three burial vaults -- for $470, $585 or $685 -- to surround the casket in the ground and keep earth around it from shifting, which is a cemetery requirement.
"What did Daddy have?" Kirchner asks.
The vault for $585.
"They don't mean a thing to me, but if it was good enough for Daddy, that's fine."
Once Lanigan adds up the services and merchandise the Kirchners are seeking, he advises them they're looking at a cost of $3,545 from him, $600 from the cemetery for a grave opening fee, $100 for use of a cemetery chapel, plus whatever they want to spend on a casket.
Then they head downstairs, through narrow passageways to the casket room. Lanigan has 13 of them displayed on two levels against three walls. All of them are from Yorktown Casket Co., where his brother, also a licensed funeral director, is a sales representative.
All are open the entire length, just as they would be during visitation. That's called the full-couch style, which is preferred in Western Pennsylvania and a few other regions. More than three-fourths of the country uses half-couch caskets, where only the upper half of a person is viewed. No one seems certain why it's different here -- that's just the way it's always been done.
Lanigan displays caskets ranging from the $785 Baron, a dull gray steel model, to the $3,317 solid cherry wood Warfield, which one could imagine being rebuilt as a wonderful dining room table. Lanigan points out the gold casket called the Sterling, priced at $1,590, and says, "This is comparable to what your dad had."
He comments on a couple others, including a pink model, at which Kirchner wrinkles her nose. "That's not my style," she says.
Otherwise, she appears indecisive. She seems to want Lanigan to pick for her. Her husband doesn't say much. As a group they come back to the original Sterling, laying Mrs. McNair's outfit in it to make sure it coordinates with the crepe interior.
They all seem satisfied, though hardly elated. Lanigan notes the choice would put the family's bill above $5,100.
"Pat, we've known each other too long to worry about the little stuff," Kirchner says, joking she'll just give up eating "for a month of Sundays" in order to pay him. Her mother has left behind enough life insurance to cover the cost.
They return upstairs to write up a formal contract. Lanigan has the Kirchners look at prayer card options as one final decision. Here, the bantering stops. Kirchner begins tearing as she sees the pretty designs and spiritual prose. She removes her glasses and wipes her eyes.
The men leave her to her emotions for a minute without comment, then she and Lanigan sign the contract. They go over a checklist of details each needs to attend to. They're ready to part company until the next evening, but then something stops Kirchner.
Before leaving, the daughter needs to talk a bit more about her "Mum," about her last days and about all the preceding years.
"Watching her was tough," she says. "It couldn't be nice and easy -- bing, bing, bing. ... I'm not happy, but I'm at peace with it." She chokes up again. "She's seen so many things. Stop and think about it, she's 86 and all she's seen, the automobile and the man on the moon and all that stuff. I think it's neat, Pat."
They all stand soon after that. Kirchner and Lanigan hug. They've done all they can for Mrs. McNair this day.
Mrs. McNair's last Wednesday begins with her final hairstyling appointment. Jean Rich, who's been handling the Lanigan Funeral Home's clientele since 1970, arrives in the morning with brush, comb and spray and uses a curling iron to fluff Mrs. McNair's hair in the manner of a photo provided by her family.
One by one, Mrs. McNair, Mrs. Orris and Mrs. Wilson are arranged in their caskets afterward and sent upstairs where the desk has been moved out of the way. They each have their own parlor. Mrs. Orris is put in the largest one, but not necessarily because she's more popular; she has just one day of visitation, so her crowd might be larger.
The funeral home's phone is ringing constantly this morning. People are wondering about the timing of Mrs. McNair's funeral. It's listed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as Thursday morning, a day early and implausibly prior to visitation. When Lanigan arrives, he takes blame for the error. He gave the wrong day to the newspaper, an inexplicable lapse. The phone keeps ringing.
"I blew that one, didn't I?" Lanigan says to Guerin, shaking his head, before calling the Kirchners to apologize. Guerin has already phoned the newspaper to fix the next day's death notice.
Guerin and Botti position the three widows' caskets atop biers in their parlors and adjust pillows and blankets under and around them. A noisy train rumbles outside, as it does several times a day, on tracks atop a 30-foot wall behind the funeral home.
Lanigan settles into his office to make a series of phone calls settling various details. He talks to Mrs. McNair's cemetery; his transportation service providing hearses for all three funerals; the priest handling Mrs. Wilson's service; a local florist; the company providing Mrs. McNair's burial vault; Mrs. Wilson's cemetery; the former employer of Mrs. Wilson's husband, which had provided her a pension; a weekly newspaper for Mrs. McNair's corrected obituary.
He receives another phone call himself. An elderly man he knows has been sick and fears for his mortality. He's worried about how things will be for his wife if he dies. He's worried about his own future if his wife dies before him.
The mortician nods, murmurs, offers a few encouraging words. "George, you can lick it. I hope you're being very premature here," he says in his soft baritone before they hang up.
The man has neither pre-paid nor pre-arranged his funeral. Lanigan and most funeral directors have files full of pre-paid contracts signed by people organizing death details, committing through insurance plans or paid trusts to use a certain funeral home and services.
The depressed man on the phone could have been one more to add to the hundreds in Lanigan's files. Lanigan lets the opportunity pass.
"That's not what he needs," he says.
At 6:15 p.m. Wednesday, Mrs. McNair's relatives gather to see her for the first time in days. Other mourners will arrive at 7. The family meets ahead of time to talk with Mrs. McNair's pastor and view her body in the casket, which is now surrounded by two dozen floral arrangements.
Kirchner approaches her mother, with Bill and Lanigan at her sides and holding her hands. The elderly woman resembles her appearance at the family's Thanksgiving celebration more so than the way she'd looked during her hospital stay on the brink of death.
"Thank you, Pat," Kirchner whispers. "Thank you."
For the next 2 1/2 hours people float in and out of the parlor, some resting a hand on Mrs. McNair, others hugging Kirchner and her brother Scott. Mrs. McNair's nieces and grandchildren, who live out of state, also renew acquaintances with old friends.
Former neighbors show up. The woman who did Mrs. McNair's hair for many years stops by. East Pittsburgh's shoe repairman pays his respects. In all, there's more laughing than crying. A lot of the conversation has nothing to do with Mrs. McNair herself.
"I think when you come to something like this here, it's more of a reunion," says Scott McNair, the businessman who's fighting a cold and carrying the drawl of his adopted home state. "In North Carolina, it isn't like this with the laughing and carrying on -- it's more somber."
People explain that this is about a community showing support for one another, even if many of them only knew Mrs. McNair slightly. Many of her contemporaries died before her.
Gradually, the parlor and adjacent visiting room become less crowded. By 9 p.m., there's just one lone figure built like an offensive lineman in front of the casket.
It's Mrs. McNair's grandson, crew-cutted Beau, 27, the largest man in the funeral home this evening. But right now, his broad shoulders are shaking.
He was as close to his grandmother as a grandson can be. During Beau's wedding ceremony at Heinz Chapel the previous summer, he made sure Mrs. McNair was part of it, providing a reading from her wheelchair.
Now he stands above her with head bowed a long time -- five minutes, 10 minutes, 20. His father and a friend stop, separately, to pat his back silently.
Still he stays, the shoulders occasionally heaving in the plaid shirt.
on Thursday, Mrs. McNair's family receives more visitors in the afternoon and evening. At one time, she probably would have had two full days, or even three, of visitation instead of two evenings and one day. Her husband had two full days in 1988. Funeral directors say the length of that custom has been shrinking gradually everywhere, but that Pittsburgh visitations still are longer than most places, where one evening might be the norm.
"It allows us closure," Kirchner says of the days spent at the funeral home. "You've got to get certain things out. ... This is what I've grown up with, this is what I know. I don't know that it's right and I don't know that it's wrong. This is traditional."
Scott McNair thinks it may be the last traditional funeral of its kind for the family. No town barber or shoe repairman will likely be paying respects when he dies.
"People have moved away from here," he notes. "With the movement of people around from my age bracket, you won't be seeing traditions as much. There's no one central place. ... When I die, I'm going to be buried in North Carolina."
While the family spends one more day seeing old friends, workers are busy three miles away at Restland Memorial Park in Monroeville. Using a backhoe, they dig out a rectangle 3 feet wide, 8 1/2 feet long, and a little more than 5 feet deep, on a grassy plateau overlooking a residential development and power line about a quarter-mile away.
Mrs. McNair and her husband purchased a four-grave site for a total of $250 in the early 1950s, as did many of their friends from church. Today, each grave would cost $850.
About 500 people a year are buried at Restland, and 35,000 people have been placed there since its founding in 1933. That doesn't mean the 100-plus acres are crowded. Owner Mark Lehnert believes there's room for another 165,000 people to join the McNairs on the property before Restland is filled.
at 9:30 a.m. Friday, Scott McNair brings in some old friends to see Mrs. McNair a last time, commenting, "She looks like herself, doesn't she?"
It is the morning of her funeral and burial. A small crowd gathers at the funeral home to see her off. About 20 are in the parlor with the casket and 20 in the adjacent outer room when Lanigan reads aloud three prayers. He invites people afterward to pay last respects, and they traipse in pairs, first friends and neighbors, then relatives, then immediate family, up to the casket.
Once everyone leaves to get into their cars, a hasty efficiency surrounds Mrs. McNair. The three funeral directors snatch the flowers and photos from the casket. Pillows and blankets are put aside next. Lanigan removes Mrs. McNair's watch to give to the family.
Botti takes a locking rod out of a drawer. Lanigan closes the casket lid permanently, and rotation of the rod in a device in the casket seals the lid tight over a rubber gasket lining the casket rim. The sealant is supposed to help keep water out of the casket once it's underground, although most in the funeral industry acknowledge there's no guarantee of permanent protection.
Pallbearers in white gloves hoist the casket into the rented hearse outside with Lanigan guiding them. A procession of 25 cars using headlights, flashers and orange flags stuck to their hoods moves to nearby Hebron Evangelical Lutheran Church.
With the casket at the head of the main aisle there, the Rev. Donald Worth reminds the 60 people present of Mrs. McNair's cooking, baking, mothering, traveling and sociability, while a group of children fidgets in the rear of the church.
"I suggest you think of her inability to get well as an Easter gift from God," Worth says. "She would not have wanted to be a burden."
After communion of bread and wine in the cold stone church, the casket is wheeled back to the entrance over the closing strains of "Amazing Grace." The motor procession then regroups, traveling slowly along Route 130, and makes its way to a Restland Memorial Park chapel.
The family sits in a dozen folding chairs, facing the casket, with about 30 friends standing around as Worth reads some scripture. "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust," he intones.
The family has declined a graveside service. At 11:18, when Worth pronounces, "Let us go in peace," everyone takes a flower to place atop the casket as a final gesture, and they shake hands with Mrs. McNair's two children, Scott and Marge, before departing.
Most of them head to Chesterfield's, a sprawling restaurant along Route 30 in North Huntingdon, for the funeral luncheon where the survivors begin a lighter transition to life without this woman they've known all of their lives. Only the funeral home staff accompanies the cemetery crew and casket to Mrs. McNair's resting place.
The five cemetery workers are a brisk force, removing the casket from the hearse and carrying it up the grassy slope to the open space where the burial vault company has installed its concrete box. The casket is set on the straps of a lowering device and slowly sent 5 feet down.
As is custom, Mrs. McNair's spot is to the right of her husband, although the family has yet to purchase a memorial marker for either grave. Once the casket is in the ground, a backhoe lifts the 500-pound rust-colored lid of the vault, bearing an inscription for Jane McNair. Two workers help guide the lid into place, about 18 inches below ground level.
No one says much as this takes place. It's routine to all of them. The workers throw flowers and the pallbearers' gloves atop the lid of the vault -- another burial custom -- before a beeping dump truck backs up to begin piling dirt into the grave.
As four loads are dumped, a cemetery employee wearing sunglasses and a ball cap turned backward completes Mrs. McNair's departure.
The seasonal employee, Dennis McWhinney, 28, manipulates a tamping machine -- similar in size, noise and vibrations to a jackhammer -- across the gravesite to pound and level the loose dirt. It appears to be a job no easier than lugging an octopus around a confined space, but in less than an hour, a little more than 76 hours after Mrs. McNair's last breath, he has her flat grave ready for grass seeding.
"You don't get any complaints here," McWhinney comments cheerfully when asked about his work.
There's nothing about working around the deceased that bothers him. His black T-shirt, in fact, reads: "Life's too short to sleep."
"It ain't nothing -- it's just playing with dirt all day," he says after finishing his work above Mrs. McNair.
Seven miles away at Chesterfield's, Mrs. McNair's relatives are saying goodbye to one another and friends after finishing their food and reminiscences. It's time to catch flights to North Carolina, California and other places the mourners call home now.
"This is the end of an era," Scott McNair pronounces. It could apply to his mother, to the family, or to the traditions they have all come together to observe.
Pat Lanigan, meanwhile, is headed from the luncheon back to his funeral home. He has a 2 p.m. arrangement conference with a family whose father's body he had picked up at 7 a.m. from a nursing home in Squirrel Hill.
That family wants a cremation, quickly, with no one to visit the funeral home.
For them, Lanigan will shuttle a body and ashes and handle some phone calls and paperwork. There will be no embalming, no ascension by the lift, no laughing and weeping in the funeral home.
That is not the Pittsburgh way of death, of course. But after all, there's less of that every year.
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