Six teenagers gripped the funeral ark’s polished handles, carefully descended eight steps, and rounded the corner of a brick walk at Historic Woodlawn Cemetery.
The young pallbearers made the trip from hearse to crypt five times, accompanying the ashes of strangers who died poor or alone on their final journeys.
During the funeral service that followed, two priests and the pallbearers joined a small gathering to honor the lives of 10 men and women whose cremated remains had waited years to be claimed.
But no one came. For three years, for seven years — and for one elderly woman even longer — no one ever came.
On Thursday, the boys of St. John’s Jesuit High School showed up.
“I really think that it’s only fair that everybody gets a final farewell, even if nobody is there to carry their casket or anything,” said Jacob Szymanowski, an 18-year-old junior from Toledo.
The school’s Reginald Dixon Chapter of the Joseph of Arimathea Pallbearer Society exists for this purpose. Founded in 2014, the group is named for a beloved custodian who died the year before without funeral plans or money.
Since then, a couple dozen students have served as pallbearers at 10 services.
They’ve carried the casket and lifted the burden for families too small or too frail to do it for their own loved one, and stood with mourners from the Sisters of Notre Dame.
The society also wanted to help bury the poor, but because most of Toledo’s indigent dead are cremated there was little opportunity to serve as pallbearers until a father of two St. John’s graduates crafted an urn carrier for students to use.
It was that maple-and-glass ark, which woodworker Tom Maxon fitted with casket handles, that the boys solemnly escorted, three-to-a-side, for the first time Thursday to the cemetery’s pond-side crypt.
Caleb Kynard, a 16-year-old sophomore from Holland, later acknowledged he was a little nervous.
At the end of each of their five trips, the pallbearers paused to allow Jordan Urbanski, owner of Urbanski Funeral Home, to retrieve two boxes of ashes contained inside. He had been holding onto the remains for years, hoping someone would come to claim their loved one.
Two more students led the small group in an a cappella rendition of ‘‘Amazing Grace’’.
As the last strains faded, the pallbearers gathered around the crypt where they had placed the glass box on a wooden pedestal. Six pairs of hands, freed from the weight they had shared, then folded in silence as the names of each of the departed were read.
Heads bowed.
The Rev. Daniel Zak, a retired diocesan priest, and the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a Jesuit priest with the school, offered prayers and read scriptures during a service that spoke to the living as well as honored the dead.
“Any experience like this will help you to reflect on your own mortality and to help you also to put things in perspective — to pay attention to the spiritual side of your life, where your soul is going to live on forever, to give perspective on what is really important in life,” Father Zak told the students. “What it really says by what we are doing here today is that these people mattered.”
The students then read together from slips of paper.
“They died alone with no family to comfort them, but today we are their family. We are here as their sons. We are honored to stand together, before them now, to commemorate their lives and to remember them in deaths as we commend their souls to eternal rest,” they prayed in unison.
In 2002, a theology teacher at Cleveland’s all-boys Saint Ignatius High School started what the Jesuit school believes is the first such high school pallbearer ministry. Since then, the school’s St. Joseph of Arimathea Pallbearer Ministry has served at more than 1,600 services for the needy and lonely or those with small families.
More than 500 juniors and seniors participate, making the ministry the largest student organization on campus, said Saint Ignatius spokesman Connor Walters. The school doesn’t track how many similar societies its effort inspired, but groups have formed in high schools from Detroit to Topeka, Kan.
They take their name from Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy follower of Jesus who, after Christ’s death, wrapped his body in linen and laid it in his own tomb, according to The Bible’s book of Matthew.
Pope Francis proclaimed this year to be a Holy Year of Mercy, and burying the dead is one of the Catholic church’s seven corporal works of mercy. The works, modeled after how Jesus taught Christians to treat others, include feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and visiting the sick and imprisoned.
The pallbearers’ work is an extension of other ministries performed by St. John’s students and illustrates the effort to educate the whole person, said Phil Skeldon, the school’s Christian service director. The society will continue to help at services.
Senior Steven O’Neill of Holland has volunteered for two years, an experience he describes as humbling.
“I think this is something that too often people overlook, and this is the part that often gets forgotten about. This is the end game,” the 18-year-old said.
When someone reaches that end alone, he and his fellow pallbearers make sure someone comes.
Contact Vanessa McCray at: vmccray@theblade.com or 419-724-6065, or on Twitter @vanmccray.
First Published April 15, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
