Posted on 11/09/2003 8:40:40 AM PST by Glenn
CHIPPEWA TWP. - Not even a bagpiper playing "Amazing Grace" could drown out the guttural sobs of Dawn Marie DeFelice on Saturday as she sat in front of the caskets bearing her brother and her mother.
In a funeral service filled with tears and a touch of laughter, family and friends said their farewells to Mary Ellen Bucklew, 57, of Darlington Township and her only son, Ernie, who was killed in Iraq on Nov. 2 while trying to return home to mourn his mother.
"This is not a hopeless end, but an endless hope," said the Rev. Jay Hurley of the Mount Mariah Baptist Church in Smithfield, Fayette County, to the nearly 250 mourners who crowded into the Highland Middle School in Chippewa Township.
Staff Sgt. Ernie Bucklew, 33, of Fort Carson, Colo., was one of 16 soldiers killed when the helicopter they were riding in was shot down near Baghdad. Bucklew had received emergency leave from the Army to attend the funeral of his mother, who had died from an aneurysm while driving home from work on Oct. 31.
Just before the public service that lasted about 40 minutes, the immediate survivors of the Bucklew family, including Mary Ellen's husband and Ernie's father, Donald, and Ernie's widow, Barbara, and the couple's two sons, Joshua, 9, and Justin, 4, spent a few minutes in a private farewell.
Hurley said family and friends should "rejoice in the homecoming" of the Bucklews.
"Those left behind must deal with the loneliness, the emptiness, the shattered dreams of what may have been," Hurley said, but he assured loved ones, "This God will never turn his back on his children in their hour of peril, their hour of need."
Mary Ellen and Ernest Bucklew, Hurley said, were "people of faith who loved life, and had a great sense of humor and could laugh at themselves."
"Death has no sting and the grave has no victory," Hurley said, "because in this life, they put their faith in Christ."
Mourners chuckled when Hurley spoke of Mary Ellen's love of card games.
"I'm told you didn't want to find yourself in a card game with her," Hurley said, "She had a way of knowing more about your hand than you did, and she didn't like to lose."
Ernest, Hurley added, had a mischievous side, and "should have owned stock in the Dr. Pepper company." Hurley said Barbara told him, "Even on my worst day, he can still make me laugh."
Mourners then made a two-mile journey to the Beaver Falls Cemetery, where an American flag at half-staff was whipped by a bone-chilling wind and an honor guard carried mother and son to their final resting places.
"It's hard to lose good people," Army Chaplain Maj. Robert Leathers said as the mourners dabbed their eyes and shivered from the cold. "It's hard to lose those who are loved so much and who loved so much."
"We say we're sorry," Leathers added. "We say we hurt with you."
As a military unit fired off a three-round volley, the sharp crack of the rifles echoing off the hillsides, the Bucklew family wept, pressing their bodies against each other for solace.
With whispered words of thanks, military personnel handed folded American flags to Donald and Barbara Bucklew as a bugler played taps.
As family members slowly walked away at the end of the burial service, only the two caskets remained, Mary Ellen Bucklew's adorned with six carnations, and her son's with a single rose on top and a yellow ribbon and a plastic badge bearing his photo and the words "Honor those who serve" tied to a handle.
The two were laid to rest in a section of the cemetery designated for military veterans and family members. The family declined to comment.
Staff Sgt. Edwin Mojica, a fellow soldier at Fort Carson, said he hoped that Ernie Bucklew's legacy would be one in which people remembered his drive to get the job done.
"He was always a hard charger. He always wanted to get the mission done as soon as possible," Mojica said.
A sad day.
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