Students offer service at funerals

One volunteer said the moving experience teaches him that life is precious.
CLEVELAND (AP) -- 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 coffin 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 coffin 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.
Reaching out
"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.
"I just feel almost, like, an obligation," he said. "I'm here. I can do this."
And so he and his classmates do. They attend funerals -- one after the other. In the last two years, the volunteer student group -- the only one of its kind in the region, according to local funeral directors -- has helped to bury 42 men and women, most of whom died poor or alone or with few surviving relatives.
They promise, on short notice, to provide trained pallbearers and a dignified funeral. Over time, they've come to realize how much that means.
"If we weren't there, they'd have maintenance guys carrying the casket," said Brett Gigliotti, one of the student leaders of the society. A senior from Strongsville, he has served as a pallbearer at 15 funerals since his junior year.
He's been thanked by homeless men, hugged by grieving family members, and moved to tears himself.
"I think it's the most humbling thing I've ever done," he said.
How it started
The service began five years ago when a student group called the Christian Action Team sought to launch extracurricular programs with heart. Faculty moderators challenged them to address the Corporal Works of Mercy, seven acts of charity advocated by the Catholic church.
"One of the works is 'Bury the dead,'" said theology teacher James Skerl. "We thought, well, we have young guys who are strong and have time to donate. Maybe there's a need."
They had no idea.
People typically learn of the pallbearer service from a funeral director at a time of grief and anxiety. A loved one has died. Hurried plans must be made. Who can carry the coffin?
"A lot of people just don't have any friends and relatives left," said Charles Walter, the funeral director at Rybicki & amp; Son Funeral Home in Garfield Heights. "I tell them, 'We've used this service many, many times.' I tell them, 'They're young men who consider this an honor.'"
More than 100 students take turns staffing funerals on school days, weekends and through the summer. They call themselves the St. Joseph of Arimathea Pallbearer Society, for the disciple who prepared the tomb of Jesus.
Each has taken a training course at school and pledged to adhere to guidelines that instruct them to button collars, join hymns and express condolences.
Emotional impact
"Really, I was looking for a way to serve that's a little different," said senior Patrick Kincaid of Cleveland, who joined at the start of his junior year. "I just thought this was an amazing thing."
Typically, the pallbearers meet the surviving family members at the funeral home, attend the service and deliver the coffin to the graveside.
In the course of a burial, they learn a lot about life.
Last week, they saw Evelyn Klepac's brother, Richard D'Onofrio, cry above the freshly dug grave at All Saints Cemetery, put a palm on his sister's coffin and say, "You're with mom now." Klepac died Oct. 29.
They have buried a husband and wife from the same parish a week apart.
They buried a 48-year-old man they met through the school's homeless ministry.
Most of their burials take place at Memorial Park, Cuyahoga County's "potter's field" for the indigent and the unknown in Highland Hills, and the students are working on creating an entranceway for the unmarked cemetery.
"What I realize from all these trips," Gigliotti said, "is that life's precious. I'm sure all these people we buried had stories to tell."
He said the experience has caused him to consider life's limits, the certainty of death, and his grandparents.
"It made me want to get to know them better," he said.