Mock funeral focuses on life choices
Death hit students hard at Coeur d’Alene’s alternative high school this year. Suicides by Lake City and Coeur d’Alene high school students and the apparent drug overdose death of another teen left some shaken.
After attending one funeral and hearing about friends going to others, Alex Burrell decided she’d had enough. The 17-year-old student and a few classmates at Project CDA planned a funeral of their own. This time, the deceased was fictional – a 16-year-old named “Taylor.” But the message was real: poor decisions, such as illegal drug use, can take your life.
English Funeral Parlor partnered with the school to bring a casket and stage funeral proceedings in the gymnasium. The school’s 200 students sat on bleachers as representatives from Real Life Ministries spoke about life, death and drugs. A golden-brown casket sat in front of them with flower arrangements on each end. Students filed outside for a graveside ceremony following the service.
“This is kind of an odd thing to do,” admitted Angie Beck, a teacher at Project CDA (Creating Dropout Alternatives) who helped the students organize the event. “But if it makes a difference for one student, then it was all worth it.”
The Rev. Bill Putman, a pastor at Real Life Ministries, spoke of a life familiar to some of the students listening. Family problems and lives marred by drug abuse often lead kids to the alternative school. It’s how Pat Lessard got there, but hope is how he made it through.
“There is hope, though you don’t see it and you don’t feel it. There is hope,” said Lessard, a 2001 Project CDA graduate.
Through God, Putman and Lessard said they turned their lives around and stopped the destructive behavior that made living so difficult all those years.
“This should be me,” Lessard said, knocking his knuckles against the hollow casket. “Six feet under.”
The two spoke of redemption from addiction through religion, and the students responded.
“It reminds me why I try not to do what my brothers have done,” one girl wrote on a large piece of paper set out for the students to share their thoughts on what school organizers called Black Ribbon Day. The paper filled with a mix of reactions. “You will do what you do and die when you die,” one student wrote. “RIP my bestest friend. I’ll miss you forever,” wrote another.
Students also watched a computer presentation that Burrell and her classmates made. They researched the effects of drug and alcohol abuse, surveyed classmates and put together a 10-minute presentation on what they’d found. The students also have shown it to the Coeur d’Alene School Board and the City Council.
But they wanted to do more than just a typical anti-drug lecture, Burrell said. The school timed the mock funeral, as well as a celebration of life with a barbecue and talent show Thursday, to coincide with the onset of Memorial Day weekend, graduation and summer vacation.
“You don’t have to be all loaded to have a good time,” Beck said. “We’re trying to develop in these kids sense that the decisions they make will affect them.”
And this year especially, many have seen that. Project CDA student Kelly Coplan, 17, can name three friends who have died in the past two years. Classmate Mercedes Garza, also 17, said she knows of others. One girl’s brother is memorialized with “in memory of” stickers on cars in the school parking lot.
Some were suicides, others drug overdoses.
“We need to understand that life choices affect all of us,” said Tirinni Shafer, 18.
Said Garza: “They’re teaching us that if you kill yourself, you’re just being selfish.”