The COVID-19 “Car Cruise” Cortege

A popular Queens Catholic high school girls’ basketball coach and school administrator has died from the coronavirus, the school announced. Joseph Lewinger, 42, who spent 20 years at the Mary Louis Academy, a private girls school in Jamaica Estates, died Saturday as a result of complications from the deadly virus, the school’s principal said in

To many people, and throughout the last one hundred years, cars in procession have been as instrumental to the funeral as the officiant or the death announcement. A cart, a horse-drawn carriage, a train or motor vehicle or just a parading line of grieving people in a funeral becomes “the cortege,” still a vitally important part of any transformative end-of-life ritual. You don’t have to lease a Lincoln or Cadillac, but you do need to line up and process. It’s a great word in this instance—you are processing the new reality, wading in, “working through,” bearing the weight and filing along—this is what we do when our loved ones die. We move from one point to the next with leaden legs and numb brains, but we press on. We move. It’s an epic wallow.

A burial in the Carpathian Mountains painted by Teodor Axentowicz in 1882.

I once helped a family that had no other chance to process but from the center of the crematory chapel, where the casket stood, to the door of the rear retort area just 15 feet away. But they did it. They accompanied their dead and marched alongside. Something gets dislodged in the doing and the moving. Love is internalized too.