Mind Your Business

Mourning 

Rev. Ron Sala

The Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford, October 28, 2001 

 

When I was in 7th grade, my grandfather was quite ill. He had been sick several times before, but this time was serious. My father had driven across state to be with him while the rest of the family stayed home. He was my eldest relative, and I was worried. We spent every school vacation staying with our grandparents. I loved them so much and did not know if I could handle the death of either one.

I came home one day from junior high, and my mom told me that my grandfather had passed away. I immediately collapsed onto the couch. I pressed my face between the cushions and felt myself flush.

I thought I might cry but didn’t. I hadn’t wept since the fourth grade when I cried in class and my teacher told me that boys don’t do that. (I wouldn’t cry again till my twenties. Now I tear up over anything—a movie, a story on the radio, a song. Perhaps I’m making up for lost time....)

My mom asked if I was alright. I said I was. My mom has never been one to talk much about feelings. In fact, my whole family is not very expressive emotionally. It never occurred to me to do anything but keep my feelings to myself. At first those feelings were searing pain and disbelief. But soon they changed to a blanket of sadness that seemed to cover my whole world. I spent some time in my room staring at the wall and remembering.

Yet, amid the sadness, there was a strange comfort, a intuition that this was normal, natural, the way things were meant to be.

My uncle drove us across state to be with my father and grandmother. He was a reassuring presence while we were away from Dad. Though he didn’t have any kids of his own, he knew how to put us at ease through his friendly manner.

As we stood by my grandfather’s open casket to pay our last respects, my uncle and my father both fell into uncontrollable weeping. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen my father cry. Even today, the memory moves me. My Dad showed me another way to be a man than those stoic heroes on TV: what it is to be strong and to visibly grieve at the same time.

I still remember some of the kind words the minister spoke in his eulogy, and all these years later I still remember one of the hymns, “Jesus Has Risen,” sung in the stirring a cappella Mennonites are known for:

Resplendent in glory to live and to save.

Vain were the terrors that gathered around him

And short the dominion of death and the grave. 

Though now I doubt the literal truth of these lines, I know that part of my grandfather lives on.

After the funeral, I went back to school. Though she knew that my absence was caused by a death in the family, one of my teachers still chose to humiliate me in front of the class for not having my homework done. I didn’t express the rage I felt. But, even today, I can’t hear that teacher’s name without anger. It was a hard lesson for me about what it feels like when someone acts without sensitivity—especially one in a position of trust and power. I take this first-hand knowledge with me into ministry.

On the other hand, I feel that the care I received from family, friends, and clergy helped me to accept a loss I wasn’t sure I could handle.

Such mystery, such heartache, such challenge that mourning gives is thrust upon children, their parents, and especially the aging. But no matter our age chronologically, as Emerson once wrote in his journal, “Sorrow makes us all children again,--destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.” It is a universal condition. The late Carl Seaburg writes, “The Harvard anthropologist asked [an] African Bushman why he stayed near his dead. The … Bushman answered quietly, ‘He is our person, whom we love.’” Seaburg concludes, “Civilization has no better reply.”

My favorite writer growing up was Edgar Allen Poe. A lot of the attraction I’m sure, was the same as other boys that age—the fantastic and macabre. In this vein, my favorite poem was “The Raven.” It had all the requisites: a spooky nighttime setting, a thinly-veiled Poe figure as protagonist and narrator, and a preternatural being in the form of a black-winged bird. In short, it was creepy!

I used to gather my friends together and read it to them by candlelight on Halloween. O.K. ... sometimes I still do.

There’s something fascinating about death. The overdone spook-forms of a children’s Halloween party are caricatures of their fears, primarily about death. Vampires and monsters allow them to manipulate these fears and realize their creative and destructive possibilities. It’s as if they’re playing “Peek-a-Boo!” with life and death and persuading themselves they will be able to handle the real thing when it comes.

It was in this way that I first read “The Raven,”—as a ghost story. (And that is a wonderful way to look at it. C.S. Lewis reminds us that even Hamlet is, in way, a fine ghost story.) But I eventually came to read “The Raven” in a different light. The underlying emotion of the piece is one more of sorrow than of fear. The second stanza reads,

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Eagerly I wished the morrow;--vainly I had sought to borrow

From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—

For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—

Name less here for evermore. 

It was not the Halloween season of autumn, but mid-winter, December. This is the time of the bleakest, shortest days. In terms of Wicca, a Celtic form of Paganism, the god of the waning year has died on Samhain, Halloween, but now he is in the underworld, approaching Yule. Likewise, the December of “The Raven” is not the immediate horror of death, but the bitter, lonely longing of grief. And where does the narrator turn on this barren December night of mourning? “[V]ainly I had sought to borrow/From my books surcease of sorrow....” He turns to his books, his intellect, to escape grief. But he finds this way is vain.

His grief, in the form of the bird of death, cannot be kept out by any effort of his mind. He then confronts the bird’s, that is, grief’s, arrival by fear, then joy, then anger. But the raven could be turned away in none of these ways. At the end of the poem, the raven’s shadow envelops the narrator’s very soul.

In the same way, grief cannot be prevented or eliminated, no matter how hard we try sometimes. This raven, at some time or another, is the unwelcome guest in the room of every heart. And all we can really do when he comes is to sit with him, like one does at a wake or sitting shivah.

There’s something in our culture, though, that doesn’t approve of this sitting, that wants us to be moving—efficient, happy, innocuous, at all times.

I was riding an elevator once and was horrified at a conversation I overheard between a woman and an acquaintance who had just gotten on. She said, “My mother only has a few days to live.” Her voice was perky. “But she’s not gone yet, she’s holding on!” she continued with a nervous laugh. There’s something in our culture that reinforces such a mask of cheerfulness, such an armor of the emotions.

In the Western world “mourning is treated as if it were a weakness,” says anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer. How often we expect a person to have a serious loss and be “back to normal” in 3-5 days, as if it were some kind of flu! When I was treated harshly by that teacher, I experienced pain and alienation when I most needed comfort and acceptance.

A cottage industry has sprung up telling us how to go through a so-called “grieving process” with a prescribed list of steps and stages. But everyone’s steps and stages are unique. And anyway, theories about grief aren’t grief itself, or even a treatment for grief. It can only be gone through.

In my early days in New York, I had a breakup with a girlfriend. It was my first serious relationship, and I was devastated. This was not physical death, but it was a type of death nonetheless. A friend spent the following afternoon with me--was with me in my loss. He listened to my sad tale and didn’t run away or try to control my grief. He simply said, “Don’t ‘a+b=c’ yourself to death.” He meant that we can ever so carefully plan our lives, we can have it all worked out, or so we think, and then some force blows it all away. He meant that we can try to hide in expectations about the world rather than taking it as it is. He meant that my brain couldn’t do what my heart had to. “If you cry it’s OK, if you don’t its OK,” he said. “Don’t a+b=c yourself.”

And, speaking of tears, scientists have discovered that the chemical composition of happy tears and sad tears is different. The sad tears contain toxins released from the body. It seems that tears are a way of washing poisons out of our system. Or at least that’s the way it feels. Let’s not a+b=c ourselves.

Everyone has to find their own way across the wilderness of grief. Turning once again to C.S. Lewis, in A Grief Observed, he describes all the ways in which he struggled through the death of his wife. Lewis journeys across sadness, anger, doubt, and hope. If you’ve seen the movie, Shadowlands, based on the book, you would certainly have felt each of these states through Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal. (That’s one of those movies I sobbed my way through). And you would have seen the many ways this grief helped Lewis grow and deepen as a person. As a result, his pronouncements on the human condition through the printed and spoken word rang more true. The human process of mourning had humanized him. He became a person better able to walk with people through their pain.

I think that’s a dynamic each of us have become more familiar with since September 11th.

Yes, we must each find our own way through the valley of the shadow of death that is grief, but someone to walk with us part of the way helps us along. To be such a shepherd is a blessing not only to others but to ourselves. Don’t be afraid to show honest sympathy to someone who has had a loss, a sympathy that honors them as equals of ourselves.

We UU’s are famous for our memorial services. Someone has joked that the reason why they’re so good is that it’s the one time we really listen to each other. I don’t think that’s true. It’s a backhanded complement, but a complement nonetheless. We do really listen to each other at such times. Our focus in memorial services is on people, not theology or ritual. We listen to each other express our pain and grief. We listen to stories about the one whom we’ve lost. We take comfort in the eternal processes of nature without trying to definitively explain them. A UU ministerial colleague of mine has colorfully said, in a memorial service he won’t touch the subject of the afterlife with a ten-foot pole. That’s my policy, too. It’s this world that we focus on. That’s what we know for sure.

Dignity, simplicity, and intimacy are the trademarks of a good memorial service in our tradition. Such a service allows the community to come together so that no one need be alone.

ReBecca and I were in Boston a few years ago. We walked through the graveyard of King’s Chapel, the oldest Unitarian Church in the country. Many of the ancient gravestones had a motif etched into them of a skull with wings. This, a plaque explained, symbolized both the gravity of death and hope for the future. Many of us today are not so sure that there is some heaven we can wing away to after we die. But through our grief, we have hope as well.

We hope in the promise of healing love we find in others and ourselves.

We hope in the growth that comes from struggling sleepless with the meaning of life and death.

We hope in what poet Brendan Galvin calls “the simple rightness of things.”

We hope in every kind of birth that comes out of death.

We hope in a part of us that carries on all others we have known.

We hope in a part of others that will carry us when we go.

We hope in Life always.

Amen.


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