Contributed Photo / Dr. Homer KempOf all the things this villain virus has stolen from us, the loss of full funerals is among the most galling.
We humans have developed good medicine for grief. We gather. We share memories. Through broken hearts, we can sob and laugh in the same sentence.
We intuitively know that every human life reduces to a basket of stories. The rituals of death – funerals, wakes, obituaries – are just stages for their retelling. We may even imagine our departed loved ones hovering in spirit and absorbing their curtain calls.
Homer Kemp, Ph.D., was a lover of stories. Kemp, a former professor of English and department head at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, Tennessee, died in Ringgold, Georgia, on March 28 of natural causes. (Not COVID-19.) He was 79.
“He ate supper and watched TV,” said Mary Tanner, his widow. “I helped him to bed. I stayed up about 30 minutes more, and when I came back to bed he was dead.”