Doris Jean Bailey worried that her grandson, an Army chaplain, would be deployed overseas when she died and wouldn’t be able to officiate her funeral service.

Capt. David A. Hicks indeed was in Afghanistan on Monday, the day of Bailey’s funeral; he tried, but wasn’t able to fly home. Nevertheless, through a live stream over the Internet — with an adjustment of a large monitor to the right so he could see his mother — he was able to read from Scripture and talk about his grandmother to those packed into a chapel of Brown Funeral Home in Elizabethtown.

“I would have loved to have been there,” Hicks said in an interview after the service, taking time out from visits with others who stood in front of the Apple computer screen. “I’m so grateful to be able to do this. This is the next best thing.”

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