Lewis Funeral Home Inc Obituaries
Monday, March 06, 2017Container { margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 20px; }H. Reiss Tiffany of Cinnaminson died Wednesday, March 1, 2017. He was 88.He was the husband of the late Betty Corinne (Lewis) Tiffany; father of Risa Tiffany-Morey and Marla S. Tiffany; and grandfather of Tiffany Morey, Tamara Morey, Kyle Middleton and Craig Middleton.Funeral service will be 2 p.m. Saturday, March 11, at the Lewis Funeral Home, 78 E. Main St., Moorestown, where visitation will be from 1 to 2 p.m. Private inte...
Monday, January 23, 2017And I've lost a second mother and a very close friend."Funeral services for Shirley Brown will be held at 10 a.m., Wednesday, December 28 at Lewis Funeral Home, Navarre Chapel, with Dr. Wes Yates officiating. Burial will follow at Barrancas National Cemetery.
Monday, November 21, 2016The Lewis...
Monday, September 26, 2016After graduation he was drafted and served a year in Vietnam before returning to Texas, earning his mortuary science degree and starting work in 1972 at Lewis Funeral Home, which serves a largely black clientele on San Antonio’s East Side.In the 44 years he’s worked in the small, white-walled prep room, Bryant has embalmed thousands of bodies. He’s seen those bodies get larger as obesity has become more common in America; his largest decedent weighed 881 pounds, enough to require an oversized casket and necessitate the purchase of a second burial plot. Four-hundred-pound bodies aren’t unusual.Funeral customs have shifted over time. Until a few decades ago, black funerals were lavish and lengthy affairs, often beginning with a wake at the decedent’s family home and stretching for several days. But the generation arranging funerals today moves at a different pace, Bryant says. “They don’t have time to mourn and grieve and sit around the house with Mom or Daddy or brother or sister in there. They’re a fast-moving generation, and they want to do everything right here and go back home.”Bryant is licensed as both a funeral director and an embalmer, but he prefers the latter work. Even when he’s finished his embalming for the day, he stays in the prep room, sitting at a small desk a few feet from the tables of sheet-draped bodies. He listens to jazz on satellite radio, studies his Bible, prepares the sermons he occasionally gives as a membership minister at his church. From time to time he gets up to check on his quiet company and touch a hand or two.Bryant has seen many familiar faces on the embalming table. He embalmed his mother, honoring one of her more difficult requests. “She didn’t want anybody else but me to do it. So my mother can say at least I minded her one time,” he says. He’s embalmed his father, brother, aunts, uncles, nephews, and classmates from grade school. When one heavy-drinking friend turned up at the funeral home, Bryant tsk-tsked at the body. “I told him, ‘Man, I tried to tell you this was going to catch up with you.’?”Bryant is a trim man who wears a Fitbit and works out at Life Time Fitness three or four times a week. It’s one way he copes with the challenges of the job: embalming a child, or someone who’s committed suicide. Once, he worked on a man who’d been shot 54 times. “Dealing with death every day is not for everybody,” he says. “It can be overwhelming.” He takes time off to visit Spain or Morocco with a group of funeral directors (his wife of 33 years is not keen on traveling; his four adult children are out of the house)...
