Edward Garvin laid to rest

MALDEN -- As the funeral for Marine Lance Corporal Edward Marcell Garvin drew to a close yesterday, the organ began to play "God Bless America," and hundreds of mourners tried to sing along.

But many of the young men and women crammed inside Sacred Hearts Church were too overwhelmed. Some doubled over the pews in anguish or clung to mothers or fathers, crying inconsolably.

Garvin was 19. He had been in Iraq for four weeks.

Dozens of uniformed police, military service members, and veterans on motorcycles lined up yesterday, shoulder to shoulder, in a scene familiar to families who have lost loved ones to the war in Iraq. They saluted as the flag-draped coffin was slowly carried into the sanctuary, and the wail of bagpipes echoed inside.

Governor Mitt Romney, who has pledged to return home for important occasions and prided himself on attending the funerals of Massachusetts servicemen killed overseas, skipped the funeral to campaign in South Carolina and Michigan. Romney is considering a run for president in 2008, and the two states he visited are early in the primary calendar.

"He spoke with the widow and the soldier's mother, and the widow is coming to meet with him privately," Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney's communications director, told the Associated Press in an e-mail.

Garvin was killed on Oct. 4 during combat operations in Anbar Province, but not a word was spoken of that. At the beginning of the service, the Rev. Robert J. Bowers and Garvin's wife of four months, Melissa, urged mourners not to agonize over the death.

"He wouldn't want you to cry," said Melissa Garvin, 20. She insisted that the crowd think about her husband's smile, his silly jokes, and sense of humor.

As tears fell slowly onto hymn books, mourners mumbled through a somber rendition of "Amazing Grace." Their voices could hardly be heard in the call and response portion of the song, "On Eagle's Wings." Instead, all eyes were on the coffin holding the young man who graduated from Northeast Metropolitan Regional Vocational School in Wakefield in 2005, and who married the girl he had met in the second grade.

"This city of Malden and this grateful nation turns to God right now," Bowers told the crowd.

Bowers remembered meeting Garvin 19 years ago when he baptized him as a newborn. With the baptism came a promise that Garvin would be with God, he said.

"I consider it a privilege to have known Eddie," Bowers said. "We are not here to mark his death."

Instead, Bowers asked mourners to celebrate a life well lived and the love between Garvin and his wife. He also urged the grief-stricken to come to God and take the path Garvin had followed, one of hope and faith.

Days before the funeral, Bowers said, he spent time with Garvin's wife, a young woman he praised for her composure and strength. She made him watch a home video she made of her husband months before he deployed to Iraq, he said.

"We watched a young celebration of life," Bowers said chuckling. "Eddie, in that video, encapsulated his life in a single phrase, `I was born to be sexy.' "

In her speech, Melissa Garvin recalled the day that the two were married and how she caught Garvin, wearing his favorite green shorts, singing to himself in the mirror, "Going to the chapel and I'm going to get married."

Before he went to Iraq, she said, the couple talked about what she should do if something happened to him.

"He wanted me to let everybody know that he loved them," she said.

"I strongly believe he is with us today," she said. If he could say something, "he'd say something silly to make us laugh," she said. "That's what he would have wanted."

Few could muster the strength for that yesterday. Garvin was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Malden.

From the Boston Globe

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