“There is nothing like the sight of a dead human body
to assist the living in separating the good days from the bad ones.
Of this truth I have some experience.”
– excerpt from Bodies in Motion and At Rest by Thomas Lynch
I recently had dinner with three Mennonite women.
Our Mennoniteness was the reason for getting together. I knew two of the women and had never met the third. But it mattered not. Like having a secret decoder ring, there is a shorthand language among Mennos. Our upbringing gives us an instant understanding and frame of reference for understanding each other (along with an urgent need to clean something while feeling guilty for having more than the rest of the world, but that’s another topic altogether).
Inevitably, and sooner than you might imagine, we were talking about death. That’s kind of part of the whole Menno insider language thing too.
I brought up some of my funeral memories. Good times!
Funeral-going was just something we did as a family. Both funerals and weddings had their receptions in the church basement where the aroma from huge urns of weak coffee mingled with the yeasty tearing of fresh white buns.
Whenever I balked at going to yet another funeral, my mother would explain that it was for the family and friends of the dead person. We were there to bear witness. It was our duty.
During that recent dinner, our conversation turned to memories of photo albums filled with images of dead relatives in open-caskets, then spun into the stats on cremation versus burial. And just in case you don’t think we were having any fun, please know that in between there was plenty of rather unrestrained snorking laughter. Some might call it black humour…
Before we had a chance to move into the other inevitable Mennonite topic of depression and anxiety, Elsie Neufeld expressed shock that I’d never read Bodies in Motion and at Rest by the undertaker/writer Thomas Lynch.
I am now rectifying that situation and am in the middle of savouring Mr. Lynch’s fine book of essays.
In one story he talks of people’s fear of the sadness of funerals. “You should have seen my mother’s funeral…everybody loved it! They really really really liked it because there was no gloom.” (page 100).
Like Mr. Lynch, I too, find all this emphasis on happy times at funerals rather disturbing. These days everybody seems to want ‘celebrations of life’. Black clothing is no longer de rigeur, we have moved on to power point presentations, no tears and big cheesy smiles. I’m sure there must be plenty of opportunities for celebration selfies in all this too.
But guess what? Dying is a grievous business. Could we all quit pretending it’s all rosy? Quite frankly, I’d prefer a little wailing and gnashing of teeth. I would not feel out of place with sackcloth and ashes while we were at it. I’m sick to death (I know) of pretending it’s all okay, when it truly truly is not.
Why are we not allowed to be sad? Why do we spend so much time judging one another’s grieving process and thinking we know when they should ‘be over it’?
Really??
Our culture seems terrified of the truth of our existence.
As a teenager I was mortified with our familiarity with the dark side of life, but now I’m thinking it was very instructive. Dying and death is a fact. Feeling the emotions associated with this process is a necessary part of our human experience. Pretending it’s all fine is a disservice to ourselves and those around us. I am not recommending that we remain stuck in it, but when it’s happening, could we please feel it and experience it for what it is?
When my mom was dying there was one friend who simply could not enter her room. He waited outside while his wife went in. He was a big man who was rendered weak in the face of dying.
I know now that her death gave me the gift of being present with the ending of a life. I feel too, that I was priviliged with the vigil for my dad’s death.
I guess what I’m really saying is this; death is part of the business of life. And right now, I feel like I have spent most of the last year actively engaged in the topic. First with the decline, dying and death of my dad last spring and then with the advent of Kathleen’s brain cancer diagnosis in July.
I remember learning the Deadman’s Float in the outdoor pool in Mission City. I learned how to hang, arms forward, my body suspended in the deep blue of the pool. Every once in a while, I scissor-kicked my head above water to grab another breath before letting my head fall forward to be held buoyant by the very depth I was trying to survive.
So when you ask me how I am? Ignore whatever lies I tell you.
All I am really doing is trying to stay afloat.
“We take our leave,
much as we came,
unencumbered by doctrine,
speechless,
miraculous and natural.”
– Thomas Lynch
Great discussion – As you know this is a topic of great awareness for me as nurse, one who has come alongside those both in birthing and at many ages along life’s journey where grief is very poignant. I am no literary guru, but Shakespeare’s words resonate with me; “Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak whispers the oe’r fraught heart and bits it break.” To keep the experience locked up in a broken heart brings deeper wounds. Grief is an emotion that needs a form of expression – a story, a song, a poem, a painting, etc.
Attached is a link to a documentary I was part of several years ago entitled “Nurses Grieve Too”
https://vimeo.com/18714302
Monica, thank you so much for sharing your insights. I see why the Shakespeare quote resonates with you, it’s so pitch perfect and it applies to so many areas of life, from the smallest of rejections to the biggest of sorrows; we need to safely express it all and creative expression is a way to give voice to our pain, as is simply crying and talking with a good friend.I look forward to watching the documentary. Thank you so much for sharing it.
Thanks for this
Colleen,
A theatre colleague of mine died last week in a tragic accident. I hadn’t seen him in years but I think about his death day and night and cry for his loss daily…my response has surprised me but at the same time it feels incredibly positive to let my feelings and my tears flow through me. Facing death puts life into perspective for me and helps me discover what is worth fighting for and what to let go.
Coral, I’m sorry to hear about your loss.
Isn’t grief a strange creature? It definitely has a life of its own. Every time I think I can’t cry anymore, I get blindsided again. It comes unbidden and yet, like you, I really feel like it helps clarify what’s important and what is not.
I have clear memories from my childhood of tearing open the buns at a post-funeral ‘faspa’ and putting sugar cubes inside to make a sugar sandwich. I can remember many things in that scene. The church basement, long tables with lots of big people, the white sugar cubes (a ‘treat’ we didn’t have at home), the yellowness of the fresh Grunthal cheese, how small I was compared to the table. I’m pretty sure it was at my Mother’s funeral. I was 7.
It’s not surprising that death and funerals shape us when we had extended families in small tight-knit communities and every few years there was a death in our big extended family.
Menno friends are priceless. Special. Comfort friends. 🙂
Elinor. I love the visual of your sugar sandwich and can’t imagine how your little girl self would have begun to take in such huge loss. I hope you take lots of opportunities to give that little girl a big hug…
In our case, we didn’t have many relatives around, they were still all back on the Prairies, so I think the congregation served as our ‘family’ and it was just assumed that everyone would attend almost all the weddings and funerals within the church.
Amen to your declaration about Menno. I’m glad you’re included in that category…
My mother died 15 years ago and my dad 5 years ago. For both the funerals of my parents I wore black – as a mark of respect and sadness for the departure of dearly loved parents. The family wore black – it was not imposed but felt that it was the right choice of colour. I have never felt that in our society I am not allowed to grieve – some people grieve longer than others (in my case it’s more on the longer side).
It might be the “new thing” not to grieve and to treat funerals as a “jolly affair” – not in my religion though – the Roman Catholic Faith. We are entitled to grieve and enter a church to pray silently.
Grieving is important – I read once a true story of a woman who had lost her son and everybody commented “how well she coped” but 3 years later she developed a stutter – probably as a direct consequence as “coping so well”.
Catherine, thanks for sharing your experience. I agree that grieving is so important and your story of the ‘coping’ woman is a great illustration of things that can go wrong when we don’t. The key is to allow our feelings to actually be felt instead of doing our best to distract ourselves or to feel like we need to ‘move on’.
It sounds like you made some good and healthy choices with each of the deaths of your parents.
The hyacinth on its side – it’s a Menno thing. At least it brought back memories of my grandmother and a group photograph taken in Russia. They were positioned around a table holding a vase of flowers—turned on its side so as not to obscure the faces I’m guessing. But definitely intentionally placed on its side. When we asked her about it, it was as if it was a completely normal thing to do, but she laughed when she thought about it. Thank you for the memories.
Whoa Liz! This is getting stranger and stranger. I love your story of your grandmother and this random connection to my sideways hyacinth. Life is a strange connect-a-dot kind of affair. Thank you so much for sharing your story. I love this…
What is really interesting to me is that on the feedburner copy of this post I received in my email inbox the hyacinth is shown horizontally instead of vertically as it appears here on your site. I found the incongruent juxtaposition strangely comforting with the word ‘hope’ in the caption below it. I will send you a copy by email (and as your Geek, I must now find out WHY that happened) but maybe it is a mystery and a message all together.
I love feeling things, whatever they are, and grief is one emotion I have found must be savoured to be digested so as not to kill me. Today I’m grieving a friend with an Alzheimer’s like illness and I keep getting sideswiped by it and thinking, ‘but she is still here, locked inside her mind’… so strange to grieve someone gone and learn to know and love the new person or the character of the remnants still with us while she travels to far flung planets in her mind. It’s not like she’s one of my dearest either, but the yearning to go back in time is so intense it takes my breath away at times.
I wrote a poem once about us ‘augering ourselves into this good, decent earth;’ and that’s what I think grief also is, a kind of growing in the dying.
XO
Indeed, we are ‘augering ourselves into this good, decent earth’. That’s perfect. The grief plants us firmly in the dying and somehow the growing comes out of it all.
As for that hyacinth? When I originally added the image to this post, it was sideways too, but I flipped it and saved it. Or so I thought…perhaps it is, as you say, both a mystery and a message. I like that idea.
I’m trying hard not to sink too deeply. This morning all I could do was keep walking, promising myself that the waves of sadness would go through and eventually pass. I went past several churches, thinking I could sneak in so I could cry in private. Apparently that is no longer allowed in our 9/11 world. Some had signs with warnings of surveillance cameras and all were locked.
I miss the dim sancturaries in places like Mexico, where there is always a quiet place to step out of life.
I guess one of the lessons in all this is to be with who the person is now, whatever that looks like. It is the biggest reminder that everything changes, even our friends.