Fayetteville : Funerals viewed via Net
Posted on Thursday, December 29, 2005
FAYETTEVILLE - The sound of marching feet crackled against bagpipes playing "Amazing Grace"as pallbearers moved a casket into place at the Fayetteville National Cemetery.
Arkansas Army National Guardsmen slowly folded the U. S. flag as a gun salute and taps ended the graveside service for Sgt. Arthur McGill, a 26-year-old former Gentry resident who was killed last July while on patrol in Baghdad.
McGill's flag and ID tags were handed to family members as McGill's 7-year-old daughter Kaylee watched.
A few days later and thousands of miles away, McGill's friends overseas also watched.
The July 28 service was posted online via streaming video by the Nelson-Berna Funeral Home in Fayetteville. It was later viewed on a projection screen by a large group of McGill's 1 st Battalion, 9 th Field Artillery friends still fighting in Iraq.
Nelson-Berna, Northwest Arkansas' first mortuary providing video webcasts of funerals, has posted seven funerals on its Web site since it began the service earlier this year. The funeral home subscribes to Dallas-based Memorial Cast, which provides the service to 20 mortuaries nationwide.
"Funeral homes everywhere are going to great lengths to personalize funerals and make them as meaningful as possible to families,"said Steve Gardner, a spokesman with the Brookfield, Wis.-based National Funeral Director's Association.
Nelson-Berna performs about 180 services a year, with the option of webcasts used sparingly by families for relatives and friends who can't make it to a service, said Scott Berna, the funeral home's owner.
McGill's grandfather and uncle were unable to travel from Houston for his funeral, which made the option of a webcast appealing to McGill's family, said Jamie Gilstrap, McGill's aunt.
Gilstrap and her family have watched the funeral several times during the fall and winter. It helps her grieve, Gilstrap said.
"Whenever it was all over, we wished we had been able to listen to some of the beautiful words people were saying,"said Gilstrap, who raised McGill during his teenage years. "After we got home, I immediately looked it up and watched the whole thing from start to finish."
Berna's Web site administrator prompted decision to add the service, Berna said, though it wasn't easy convincing the 25-year funeral service veteran.
"At first I said, 'No we're not going to do that - it's too far out there, '"Berna said. "I just didn't think it would be something people would do."
Others who have taken advantage of the free service, include a Fayetteville-area family with relatives in Asia and a family who had several members miss the service because of last-minute travel problems.
Berna uses a digital video camera to record indoor funeral and graveside services. He loads the video onto a computer and edits the service in about an hour before spending three to four hours compressing the file so it can be e-mailed to his Web site developers.
After the family has reviewed and approved the webcasts, the services are posted on the mortuary's Web site, www. nelsonberna. com, usually within about two days of the service. Then they are available for anyone to download and view.
Privacy concerns are not an issue because the decision to record and webcast is made by the family, Berna said.
Berna has decided not to transmit services live because of the unpredictability of funerals.
He said he has witnessed fighting during a service, seen a young woman chased out of a service by family members of the deceased and watched a woman die during her husband's funeral.
"You want funerals to be organized, but anything can happen,"Berna said.
"I choose to only give the option of the tape delayed. If some situation happens that a family wouldn't want to see, we can edit it out."
The ability to keep a recorded funeral online is the biggest change Berna said he's seen in the industry.
"In my opinion, the webcast will be somewhat limited because people don't want the funeral on the Web site unless it's a special deal,"Berna said. "Twenty years ago, you wouldn't have ever dreamed this was going to happen. I could see some old-time funeral directors thinking, ' You guys have lost your minds.' But that's the world we live in - you have to adjust and adapt."
Gilstrap, who now lives in Gaston, S. C., said she's grateful for the technology. It keeps fresh such memories as watching McGill tend baby pigs on a hog farm near Decatur when he was 16 years old. Gillstrap often watches images of the funeral's flag-folding ritual and listens to the sound of bagpipes playing during the sunny July day of the funeral. "It was a beautiful day,"Gilstrap said. "There were cows and chickens next door. I kept thinking of how he would have loved that - he was so close to farm animals."
To contact this reporter : cmorasch@arkansasonline. com
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