The dying tradition of the funeral cortege

It's a tale of two funerals.

Spring 2018, Corner Brook, N.L.: As we leave my grandmother's funeral, other drivers yield to our procession, even stopping on a green light to let us through so we aren't separated. We reach the cemetery together to bear the casket into a receiving chapel for a final farewell.

Spring 2023, St. John's: Leaving my cousins' grandmother's funeral, the hearse is immediately cut off from mourners by a courier van barrelling down the quiet side street. Despite our blinking emergency lights, the procession is interrupted by car after car, and we ultimately arrive at the cemetery by ones and twos, as though we had travelled separately.

The funeral cortege is a dying tradition, especially in larger centres where traffic is heavier and there's a higher proportion of young drivers unfamiliar with the tradition of yielding to them.

Critics say we'd be better off without processions, which delay transit and occasionally even lead to accidents. Is there still a place for solemn, intimate customs like this one in our increasingly fast-paced and impersonal society?

Funeral processions have existed throughout recorded history. They emerged independently in many different parts of the world, for purely practical reasons.

When a person dies, their remains must be transported from the location of their death to a place where their body can be prepared, then onward to their final resting place. Sometimes there's a stop at a ceremonial space like a church or a temple along the way.

Since death is a social event — one that engages family, friends and community in commemorating the loss — it's natural that the people who gather to honour the deceased should also accompany the corpse on its last journey.

A 4,000-year-old lament from Mesopotamia describes a king's funeral. Weeping soldiers escorted his body to its grave, where his donkeys and chariot were buried with him to carry him the rest of the way to the netherworld.

Upper-class Egyptian funeral corteges included family members, priests, servants and sometimes musicians or professional mourners. The Tale of Sinuhe (ca. 1900-1700 BC) vividly depicts the trip to the tomb from the corpse's perspective (translation by Roland Enmarch):

"A funeral procession will be made for you on the day of joining the earth with a mummy case of gold, a mask of lapis lazuli, a heaven over you, and you placed in a hearse, with oxen dragging you, and singers before you."

An ordinary person might not have a golden casket, but in most places they would have the dignity of some sort of procession. Their body might be carried on the shoulders of loved ones or pulled to the gravesite on a wheeled bier followed by neighbours and friends on foot.

In rural communities, the distance from the deceased's home to a cremation site or burial ground was usually short, but larger centres often required cemeteries to be located outside city limits for sanitary reasons or to preserve space for housing, making them difficult to reach on foot.

As a result, motor vehicles were incorporated into funeral processions almost as soon as they became widely available.