This Is Wonderful

Steve Koleszar slipped out of his second-period class on a recent morning, pulled a blue blazer from his locker and buttoned his collar tight around his tie.

Thirty minutes later, the 17-year-old stood behind a hearse outside Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Cleveland, next to a casket that held a woman he had never met.

The widow Evelyn Klepac died at age 78, having outlived most of her friends and family.

Koleszar, with five of his St. Ignatius High School classmates, carried her casket into the funeral service and later bore it across a cemetery lawn to her grave, where they bowed their heads in prayer.

Then he went back to school, a bit changed by the experience.

"It's a little strange at first," said Koleszar, a member of a student group called the Pallbearer Society.

But the surviving family members are grateful, he said, and the simple act of service seems so right.

"I just feel almost, like, an obligation," he said. "I'm here. I can do this."

And so he and his classmates do. They attend funerals - one after the other. In the last two years, the volunteer student group - the only one of its kind in the region, according to local funeral directors - has helped to bury 42 men and women, most of whom died poor or alone or with few surviving relatives.