This weekend Magnolia Funeral Home commemorates twenty-five years serving Corinth and the surrounding areas.

This kind of business has no luxury of hope – when your loved ones come to us earthly hope is past. Our work holds no promise of healing – when we are with you true healing has already come. All of us live in the valley, in the shadow, but it’s been our privilege for the last twenty-five years to help light the path through it for you.

Mother Teresa once said, “It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing. It is not how much we give, but how much love is put in the giving.”

For the last twenty-five years we have had the privilege to do, give and mostly love while taking the lost, confusing days surrounding death and giving them the importance of a ritual, the distinction of a ceremony. We have wrapped the stumbling of grief into the clarity of moments, giving the living a touchstone. The ritual of remembrance, in whatever form the family chooses, stands against the silence of death. We have put song in the emptiness and have filled silence with eulogy.

Our work has had no vacations, no holidays. We have stumbled into a suit at 2 in the morning to take your loved one away with dignity. We have left t-ball games and birthday parties to pick up pictures and deliver flowers. We have sometimes suggested things you would not have thought of, discouraged options we knew you wouldn’t find value in, and have waited at the office after dark for the custom merchandise you ordered to make sure it’s perfect for the next day.

Over the last twenty-five years three thousand, five hundred people, your loved ones, have been brought through our doors. Some of them were old – their lives spent happily, ended surrounded by loving family. Others were young – lives cut short by tragedy. We have dressed babies the size of our hands in doll clothes, bought suits for men who had none, painted fingernails that no one would ever see – because people mattered, your family mattered. Bodies have been given to us quiet, still, shells. We have dressed them in pieces of their life, we have told them their time was well spent, we have painted their faces and washed their hair. Because they aren’t shells – not to you. The body that doesn’t hold your mother any more was her home for as long as you knew her, and we can no more discard her body without honor and ceremony than we could burn her belongings.

For twenty-five years, we have grown older in your service.

For twenty-five years we have had to sometimes sacrifice our families for yours. Our lives become second in importance to your loss.

For twenty-five years, we have faced death every day.

For twenty-five years, we have served every member of this community who came to us with the dignity and respect we would afford our own family.

For twenty-five years, you have trusted us to send your mothers, your fathers, your children – home. You have laid your greatest treasures in our hands, and we have carried them to their final rest. We have prayed, we have comforted, we have suffered, we have cried, we have toiled, and sometimes even, we have died.

But mostly we have been blessed.

Magnolia Funeral Home would like to thank Corinth and the surrounding areas for twenty-five years of trust. We hope that the next twenty-five years teach us how better to serve you.