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Death is serious,
or else all things are serious
except death. A player who dies
automatically disqualifies
for the finals. If there were no death
nothing could be taken seriously,
not truth, not beauty, but that is not
a situation which we need to face. –Harold Nemerov from The Blue Swallows
I read this poem as part of a reflection by Elizabeth Zimmer on the funerals for Merce Cunningham, Clive Barnes, and Francis Scarlett Mason, Jr. Her thoughts on the role of the arts in each of these funerals paint a lovely picture of how the rite of the funeral mirrors the life the one who died. In the past few months I grieved that I couldn’t attend a dance tribute in memory of my ballet teacher and mentor, Moscelyne Larkin, and then grieved again when I learned that despite our communal wallowing in the technology of our digital age the memorial was not recorded. Zimmer’s reflections helped me re-frame those feeling of regret as she finds that each of these tributes, although each powerfully retrospective and indicative of the impact each of these giants had in their respective fields, she felt empty. She attributes it to age—that somehow when people die at a certain age (meaning a non-tragic one, which I think she defines as over-30—yoinks!) then death happens and we trot out that person’s little wagonload of good works, nod, smile and then move on.
But as I read her words, I heard preacher Tom Long ring out loud and clear, “Well, of course you feel empty! You went to a memorial when what you needed was a funeral!” What he means, in my mind, is that when death happens we all long for a guiding narrative of redemption that gives our small “l” lives big “L” Life. And let me be clear, I don’t necessarily say that one redemptive story trumps all others. I’ve been to funerals of people of many different faiths, but when I hear their redemptive story proclaimed, I think, “Okay. I get it.” And even though it may not be the communal story of redemption to which I ascribe, I know peace. When death happens we want more than ourselves, we want meaning. Long reminds me that funerals are not for the dead (that we even need to say this is funny, yes?) nor really even for the most directly grieved. Those closely related are often in shock and as Elizabeth and I have been finding in our interviews, most memories of the funeral are snapshots, sounds underwater, who was sitting next to you, where you were sitting…And so Long says that funerals are for the concentric circles of community that gather for the funeral and the rite itself (the prayers, the scriptures, the music) which help those gathered have a funeral for the people they have lost to death when they are no longer acutely grieving them. The funeral rite helps the community re-claim in words the overwhelming feelings of loss that have been experienced in life and hear them through a redemptive and loving lens. We keep attending funerals because the task of making sense of loss through the lens of ultimate meaning is never complete.
A friend shared a poem with me that reminded me of both the mystery of hearing and temptation of words to capture our being, and the serious task of both.
“The smallest muscle in the human body is in the ear.
It is also the only muscle that does not have blood vessels;
It has fluid instead. The reason for this is clear:
The ear is so sensitive that the body, if it heard its own pulse,
Would be devastated by the amplification of its own sound.
In this knowledge I sense a great metaphor,
But I do not want to be in haste in trying to capture or describe it.
Words are our weakest hold on the world.”
–Alberto Rios in “Some Extensions on the Sovereignty of Science”