“What do people fear most about death?” Mitch Albom asks his former professor, now old and moving toward death, in his book, Tuesdays with Morrie.
What do people fear most about death?
‘Fear?’ the old man thought for a moment. ‘Well, for one thing, what happens next? Where do we go? Is it what we imagined?’
That’s big, Albom replied.
‘Yes. But there is something else.’ The old man went on.
What else?
(Lean forward)
‘Being forgotten,’ he whispered.”
What happens next? To say that we don’t know for certain has truth on its side. We don’t know what happens to us, what waits on the other side of that final transition that all of us will make..
But that has never stopped human beings from imagining…from fearing…or even from hoping that we might know, that we might guess right or pick the right religious belief…the right holy text…
But the imaginings are so varied…they can’t all be right…or can they?
Could it be, as poet Billy Collins speculated that: “…everyone is right, [and] as it turns out, you go to the place you always thought you would go.” Whatever that is.
Some of us “are shot into a funnel of flashing colors, into a zone of light…Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge…some have joined the celestial choir and some are approaching the apartment of the female God, a woman in her forties with short wiry hair and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.”
“Others float off into some benign vagueness, little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.”
Collins speaks to the tremendous range of imaginings…and religious beliefs…about death and what follows.
Some of us, many of us I think, are content to imagine that our bodies return to the earth, that the matter and the energy that made us “us” are used in new creations, in new life… so that, in some cosmic or universal sense, we do live on.
But if ashes to ashes and dust to dust is the destination for our bodies…what about our souls (?), our essence (?), our personality (?)…the particular organization of habits and beliefs and memories and connections that we experience as “who we are”? Our consciousness. What happens to that?
The theological questions get knotty very quickly. Do we have a soul…separate from our bodies? The theology gets complicated.
But the question remains simple.
What happens to our presence when we are, finally, absent?
“…what happens next? Where do we go? …
That’s big.
‘Yes. But there is something else.’ The old man went on.
‘Being forgotten,’ he whispered.”
A few years ago, my wife, Maria, and I took my daughter, Danielle, to my father’s grave in S. California. Maria had located the cemetery just the year before…and I’ve told the story of that search and visiting the house where I lived, at age 7, when my Dad died.
The current owners of the house invited us in and I discovered that my memories were quite accurate. Standing in that house, I somehow was both 7 and 70. Trying to sort out which “me” was there was unimportant. I think both were present. “Memory ties time together,” as our reading said.
Taking Danielle to the grave was, I thought, primarily for her. She had never known any of her grandparents. The only grandparent she ever met, my mother, died before she was one year old.
So I thought the visit to that grave would be another connection for her to her heritage.
But I found that the visit was more for me.
When Dad died, my mother made the decision to shield me from the reality of his death. Or she tried to. He had a stroke in the night and was taken to the hospital before I awoke. I was not taken to visit him him in hospital and after he died, mother decided that I should not attend the funeral.
She believed, I am sure, that she was making the right choice. She felt, I’m guessing, that I was too young to confront the military funeral [Dad was a veteran]. Or perhaps she just did not want to have to answer my questions…to have to explain all of that to me.
I think she may have felt she had all she could do to keep up a strong front for me. “We’re going to be all right, Billy. It’ll be all right.”
But the result…I now believe…was that I never had the chance to grieve.
Oh, I missed my father…I remember that…but I never had the chance to grieve. All I could do was miss him.
I remember returning to school…within days…to a “normal” life that every fiber of my being told me would never be normal again.
And, yes, I was told that I had to be the “man of the house.” Talk about mission impossible at age 7.
No chance to grieve.
That visit to the gravesite was meaningful for my daughter…she appreciated it…was so glad that we had gone. But for me, it felt like a burden had been lifted. I had been carrying grief…does that language make any sense to you?…carrying grief? It had been a burden that I did not even know I had been carrying…for all those years.
I think, now, that part of the weight I had been carrying was not seeing the facts, the physical facts of my father’s death. Hi death was not real for me and, somehow, my father became less real for me. Only the missing, the absence had reality.
And, somehow, by showing my daughter the simple marker in the ground with his name…my name…only the middle initial different…I somehow completed what I needed to do…to finally say goodbye and to forgive him for leaving me.
Are you carrying some sorrow that you have not been able to grieve…or to complete grieving?
I think many of us end up holding grief, sorrow that we are not able to complete, to finish, to be present to so that we can begin to let it go.
One of the things our faith does well is the memorial service. It is, for us, a celebration of the life, with the telling of stories of that life and its meaning for us. The telling of stories, rather than the proclamation of some theological promise.
We tell stories of the life so that we can remember…re-member that life and hold it in us, in memory.
We hold that life within us, so that it is…in some way…in some sense…not completely absent…
So that that life is not stripped away from us…at least not completely…because that life lives on in memory…in us…
I get comments and praise from folks from other faith traditions who attend a memorial service here about how meaningful those services are for them.
Therapist and grief worker, Francis Weller, writes that “funerals [and memorial services] are meant to honor our loss and put it back in a communal context, where it belongs. Without a [memorial service], a child may carry the grief privately, as something shameful…[something wrong with them].”
There is a process of normalizing death and the grief that we feel…that is religious work…whether it is done in church or not.
Death is one of the two most universal human events and loss is one of the most common, most normal experiences of living.
Weller goes on to say: “Many [memorial services]…(and this is true of ours, here)… don’t give mourners
[much]permission to weep and wail.”
I think about the ritualized wailing in many indigenous cultures and whether we have tapped the resources of ritual enough to help ease us through the losses we encounter. Weeping and wailing might offend our sense of being in control and our often intellectual approach to loss. But still, I wonder.
Psychiatrist R.D. Laing writes that we moderns arrive here as Stone Age children. We inherit the entire lineage of our species. Through all but the most recent times, death and grief have been communal events.
I do not mean only that they were celebrated and mourned by the community…think of the “crying songs” of the Pueblo people to help move grief along…the collective altars in the Mexican Day of the dead traditions…
The losses are recognized as losses to the community…that the community needs to mourn and transform.
But, too often, we expect grieving to be a private matter…a source of shame almost…a sign of weakness…not to be displayed in public.
We carry grief as a solitary burden.
And we expect to move through grief…to finish with grief…so quickly.
In many traditional cultures, a year of mourning is the norm. In traditional Scandinavian culture, it is called a year of “living in the ashes.” Ashes are rubbed on the body in several African cultures. It is a public recognition of the internal work of grieving and of transforming grief.
Transforming grief.
Author China Mieville (mee AYE vel) writes: “ In time, in time they tell me, I’ll not feel so bad. I don’t want time to heal me. There is a reason I’m like this. I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won’t smooth you away…”
I won’t smooth you away.
I don’t think loss every goes away. I don’t think we are ever miraculously “healed.” At least in my life…the losses remain. The empty places are not refilled…at least not perfectly or completely.
I miss my father to this day. And still treasure the father figures I continue to seek out…to this day…to fill the void he left.
Over time…yes, the sense of loss is smoothed a bit…becomes less intense(?)…less insistent(?)…
Yes, time is an ally.
But the transformation, at least for me, is to allow…to help…to encourage the intensity of the loss to be transformed into gratitude for the gift of that life, rather than its loss.
For me grief and gratitude are woven fine.
Francis Weller, again: “The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That is how much gratitude I can give.”
Gratitude for the gift of the life that has ended becomes more the focus rather than the loss.
Let me be clear, I am not talking about romanticizing our ancestors…not at all.
My father was not a perfect person. He was not the man I am trying to be. My mother was not perfect. Nor any of my grandparents or their parents.
Not a perfect person in the whole bunch.
But they are my bunch of human merely beings. My bunch. The lineage that led to my life.
And I am part of the bunch that my children know and now my grandchildren.
None of us perfect. But all of us offer our lives as gifts…perhaps the only real gifts we have to give…
Drawing from those who went before…passing on the gift of our life to those who follow.
And these gifts are made in memory…and through memory…as our lives become the embodied hopes and dreams of those who have gone before…even if they could not have imaged our lives.
Through memory, as those who follow us remember our living and draw strength, we hope, from our stories and our struggles.
A final quote from Weller: “Grief doesn’t need to be solved; it needs to be tended. Whether it comes from our ancestors, or from what we didn’t get from those closest to us, or from the parts of ourselves we shut off, or from the destruction of the natural world, our job is to mourn the loss so that we can become people who respond to the world rather than just survive in it day to day.”
Malidoma Some speaks of a word in language of his village in Burkino Faso…”yeilbongura” which means “the things that knowledge cannot eat.” The things that knowledge cannot eat.
We cannot think our way through grief. We cannot “figure our grief out.”
We cannot figure grief out, but we can be present to it…we can tend it…so that we can finally transform it into a gratitude…not for heroes or sheroes we put on pedestals and can never equal…but gratitude for the lives that made our lives possible…gratitude for the lives that make possible our life.
“Memory ties time together…” in the words of our reading.
Honoring ancestors is part of many cultures. It certainly is part of my heritage in the African diaspora. The gratitude is not for specific choices made by those who came before. Often I hope I would have made different decisions than my ancestors did. But they did the best they could…just as I am…and just as you are…and it is that connection…that shared struggle in which I find comfort…today.
Elijah Cummings, in one of his last public speeches in Congress…pointed his finger and asked “When we are dancing with the angels, the question will be asked…what did you do? In 2019, what did you do?”
What will you do? What will each of us do…facing trouble and loss in our lives and the desperate struggle and loss in our world…
What will we do? Knowing that we are creating our legacy with each choice we make…determining what we will pass down and pass along…
We will be remembered. “Memory ties time together.” And our lives can become sources of gratitude as well.
What happens to us when we die?
The answers [are] there…”most often: I don’t know.
But memory ties time together
And again the darkness softens
As if you had never left the room.’
The answers are there, as we hold one another…
“In memory.”
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of Life and of Love. Mystery that held our ancestors just as it will hold our descendants. Just as it holds us all. Dear God.
We live between the miracle of birth, and the mystery of death.
We live between unknown and unknown.
What will we do in this time between?
Let us be present to it, all of it.
Present to the hope and the joy. Present to the sorrow and the pain.
Help us be present, Spirit. Help us actually life the life we have been given.
It will be our living that will be remembered.
In this community of memory and of hope,
Help us find the strength to be…in every way we can and in every place we can…help us find the strength to be agents of love, helping ourselves and those around us to get free.
Through the hope and through the sorrow, help us be agents of love.
Let that be our legacy.
Let us be agents of love.
Amen.
Topics: Death