Ryan Scalfani, a senior at Delbarton School in Morristown, couldn’t take his eyes off the hearse as it drove away from St. Mary’s Abbey Church and disappeared.
In silence, Scalfani and 24 of his fellow Delbarton students watched the departing hearse, which contained the remains of someone they never met and society had forgotten. They had just coordinated and participated in a Catholic funeral Mass on Oct. 29 to honor a man named Jose as part of Wave 4 Life, the school’s pro-life ministry. He was an older adult who died alone in a local nursing home.
That day, Delbarton united for Jose’s funeral in the abbey church in Morristown. The Benedictine community of St. Mary’s Abbey runs the all-boys school. No one who attended the funeral knew much more about Jose, except that no loved ones visited him while he was dying.
“We never met Jose, but I was proud that we honored his life with the funeral, prayed for him, and helped prepare him for the afterlife,” said Scalfani, 18, a Wave 4 Life co-leader, who was a pallbearer for Jose.
Founded in 2016, Wave 4 Life has provided funerals for 15 people who had been abandoned by society — from stillborn babies to older adults in their 80s. They were people without loved ones who had become wards of Morris County.
Elizabeth Mainardi, Wave 4 Life adviser and a Delbarton math and science teacher, learned about Jose from Drew Bauman, an attorney who has handled hundreds of guardianship cases and handled Jose’s affairs. Bauman makes the legal arrangements with Morris County so the ministry can hold these funerals.
Wave 4 Life members helped set up for Jose’s Mass and served as pallbearers, readers and altar servers. Most ministry members hadn’t previously attended a funeral. Afterward, the pallbearers placed Jose’s casket in the hearse, which took him to his final resting place.
For the funeral, ministry members wore a suit jacket, a dress shirt and shoes, and a tie — more formal than Delbarton’s dress code.
“Jose’s funeral was a special occasion,” Scalfani said.
Benedictine Father Michael Tidd, Delbarton’s headmaster, celebrated the funeral Mass for Jose.
“We are here, first and foremost, to pray for Jose and to give him a welcome in the life to come that he was denied in the life he lived. By doing this, we affirm his worth and dignity as a child of God,” Father Tidd said.
Wave-4-Life has been blessed with community support over the years to conduct its ministry. It has also undertaken other pro-life activities, such as attending the March for Life in Trenton and building cribs for an unwed mother’s home in Philipsburg.
“Our students pray for neglected people they never met, like Jose, who died alone. They performed one of the Corporal Works of Mercy at Jose’s funeral: burying the dead. Our students learned that Jose’s funeral is one of the many ways they can witness to the sanctity of life,” said Mainardi, a married mother of six.
