For much of his 30-year career as a Baptist minister, Doug Manning once believed it was his job to keep mourners’ emotions in check.
“If I got through a funeral and people didn’t cry, I thought I’d done a good job,” said the former Baptist minister. After all, he’d grown up in a mid-century culture with a “horrid fear of any public demonstration of grief.”
That changed for him in the 1970s when he tried to calm a devastated mother who had suddenly lost her 18-month-old child.
