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August 2017 · December 2020 — the test run on both candidates and printed at its resulting size
The test, stated: The checklist asks for the funeral that stopped the city — the day a whole place turned out. Granger's two candidates were named in the audit and are tested here at event size: Ara Parseghian, who died at his Granger home on August 2, 2017, and Mark Beeson, Granger Community Church's founding pastor, who died on December 17, 2020. A funeral stops a place on the ground where the place gathers. Neither of these did — for two different, documented reasons — and the test is printed at that size.
Parseghian, August 2017 — the gathering was Notre Dame's: Parseghian died at 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday, August 2, 2017, at his home in Granger, aged 94 — the death is this ground's. The funeral observance was not. Notre Dame's own account fixes the course: a Mass for the Feast of the Transfiguration and Celebration of Life at 2 p.m. on Sunday, August 6, at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame, the university's president presiding, and a memorial celebration following at 3:30 p.m. in Purcell Pavilion at the Joyce Center, with family, former players and colleagues speaking, the public invited to both. The Tribune's photographic record of August 6 shows what gathered: the family, Lou Holtz, the athletic director, the sitting head coach, Joe Theismann, Vince Gill performing, the Notre Dame Children's Choir. It was a national football figure's farewell, staged by his university on its own ground across the line — Granger's share was the house he died in and the community he had lived in for decades, and no observance on Granger ground appears in the coverage.
Beeson, December 2020 — the funeral that could not gather: R. Mark Beeson died on December 17, 2020, after a fifteen-month battle with pancreatic cancer — the founding pastor of the church he had started in a Granger living room in 1986. His obituary states the arrangement plainly: "Due to COVID-19, funeral services will be private. The celebration of his life will be available to view online, streaming on Sunday, December 20 at 4 p.m." — on Facebook, YouTube and the church's own stream, and on demand afterward. The largest church on this ground marked its founder's death the way the pandemic required: privately in person, publicly on a screen. By definition it stopped nothing; it was designed not to assemble.
The verdict: Granger has no funeral that stopped the place in the record reached. Its two greatest modern residents were mourned at full size — one by a university, one by a livestream — and both observances are printed here at the size the record carries them, with the ground's own share stated exactly: a death at home, and a founder remembered from the church he built, neither of them a day the place itself stood still.
Sources:
- Notre Dame News, August 2, 2017 — Parseghian's death at his Granger home, 1:30 a.m., August 2, 2017; the August 6 Mass at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart and the Purcell Pavilion celebration, public invited.
- ND Insider / South Bend Tribune photographic record, August 6, 2017 — the memorial celebration's participants as itemized.
- McGann Hay obituaries — Ara Parseghian (arrangements as above); R. Mark Beeson (d. December 17, 2020; private funeral, celebration streamed December 20, 2020, 4 p.m.).
- Granger Community Church, "About Mark Beeson" (grangerchurch.com) — the 1986 living-room founding; death date confirmed.