Eulogies

 

MUTTERED, NOT EXPECTING
TO BE HEARD

I write more eulogies than any-

Thing else these days, he said,

Adjusting his collar the better

To rest comfortably under his double chin.

If God is not dead, he’s on an extended sabbatical.

They don't all go gently into that good night

Tonight I attended the funeral of a patient I'd barely gotten to know before he told me he didn't need my coming around any longer. He went, in the course of less than a year, from 300+ pounds to the less than 90 pounds at which he died.

What made being there tough wasn't that he had told me I wasn't needed--I rarely take things like that personally--but that his death was so agitated. He fought, I'm told, to the last moments, flailing, swinging, muttering, so that his mother compared him to a very old man held under water. But he was less than 40 and the quiet death, I find, rarely appeals to the young.

I don't know whether to admire him or pity him. Personally, dying peacefully is my dream, as I think it is for many others. Alternatively, given his history, if anyone deserved to be pissed off at the lousy cards he was dealt, it was him, and maybe fighting until every last breath is exhausted is the way some should go. I'm uncertain, ultimately, what to make of it. We spoke of it, his family and I, in a mix of awe and sadness, and perhaps that's the best epitaph someone so young can hope for.

our old friend

This is my buddy Papaya, also called Pappy. He's been with us nearly a year and a half. He was the dog of a couple renters the sister of a woman involved with our rescue was evicting. They said they couldn't take him along and intended to put him down so the rescue took him in. They didn't give anyone a clue how old he might be, so he could be anywhere from fourteen to eighteen.

He had a poor reputation for being snappy and easily angered by the time he came to us for fostering. We discovered after close watching he is nearly blind and deaf, and so long as he wasn't surprised or startled he was all right. We got in the habit of touching him as we passed to get him used to us and that's all it took. After a few days he bonded enough to me that I could lift him onto a vet's table and in and out of the car. He started sleeping on a dog bed beside us or sometimes on one in the living room. A few weeks later we came to the conclusion no one would ever want an old, crabby, snappy dog so we adopted him.

Monday, the day after Easter, our vet is coming here and if the weather is good we will take him outside on the grass and she'll inject him and he'll die.

Pappy isn't sick, at least not physically. He's got stomach issues and arthritic hips we've given him multiple medications for and the little walking he does has probably completely shred the ACL joint of his rear right leg so that it swings almost free when he takes more than a few steps. Beyond that, he could probably live another year or two. But his behavior, never really the best, has grown worse. Our largest dog, Beans, alpha of the house, took it on himself to teach Pappy where everything was, it seemed, as he'd either lead him or nudge him in directions for doors and up the deck stairs. But in the last seven months Pappy has taken to barking almost non-stop when he sees Beans and has attacked him several times. We don't know if Beans may have hurt him or if Pappy is only imagining he's a threat, but after a while of this Beans retaliated, going for the top of his head instead of his throat, and leaving a deep gash there. That was around Christmas and after that we secluded Pappy in the kitchen, calling it his "Greg Brady" apartment and referencing his groovy room divider beads.

His animosity toward Beans has only increased, to the point where he goes into a fit of barking whenever he sees him or, in the past month, imagines he is nearby. We put a towel and then a blanket over the baby gate that seperates the rooms, but Pappy would mark constantly on it--and sometimes in other places in his room--so we've folded a shower curtain over it because it's easier to clean off.  His attitude, never the best toward anyone beyond us, sometimes blooms into full-blown paranoia when he barks and snaps at things he seems only to imagine. Our greatest fear is that he will bite someone who's come to visit and who we can't warn to move slowly first, especially a child.

He's a Shiba Inu and we had never heard of that breed before he came to us. After a year and change the most we know about these dogs is they are independent, often unaffectionate dogs that act more like spoiled cats. They have a high pitched shriek often called a Shiba scream that can be ear-piercing. He's nipped at us occasionally, fortunately never breaking the skin. Dogs can't tell you what they're experiencing, of course, so we can only assume he's growing more senile and sensing imaginary threats.  He developed a dolphin-like grin in the past month that the vet explains is the mark of a stressed dog in panic mode.

Still, as I say, he could live another year. Maybe two. But what determined our course is what he enjoys rather than what he fears. He loves to go outdoors, sometimes putting a peppy step to our walk down our long driveway to the mailbox and back, after which he's exhausted and can sleep so soundly we think he might have solved the issue by dying in his sleep. He loves to go for rides and tonight we took both Kiwi, a dog we're considering adopting, and him on errands with us and then for a drive to Dairy Queen where the employees treated them to little cups of vanilla ice cream with a dog treat on top. He sometimes cries out at night and one of us will go in the kitchen and lie with him on the floor, petting him and talking soothingly, until he starts to drop off again.

Sometimes his life is full of joy. In this, his final week, we've bought expensive meaty canned food to mix with his usual fare and we give him fatty treats and sometimes even food we're eating. Dogs and cats should leave this life on a good note and we want Papaya to die knowing there are still moments of pleasure and exhultation in his day rather than it becoming a chore he--and we--must labor to get through.

Most of our other animals have been creamated but one, Rayzen, was buried out back. We've often wondered, if it's true animal souls remain where their bodies are, if that's a lonely spot, and decided Pappy should join him there. I dug the hole today. They never knew one another but I don't think that matters. Besides, we don't think his remains should be closed up in a can tucked on a shelf but allowed, like Rayzen's was, to give sustenance to the worms and grubs and other crawlies under the grass there.

“BEER, AND THANK YOU”

 

A Sermon Delivered to the Unitarian Society of

Menomonie, WI, March 23, 2914

 

I want to start out this morning talking about a death that affects me profoundly and maybe surprisingly. The Reverend Fred Phelps, Sr., of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, died Wednesday night about midnight.

            I don’t know what the weather was like that evening in Topeka when he died, and I don’t want to make light of his death, but I wondered if this man, a member of what the BBC had once chillingly called the most hated family in the United States, had chosen such a cold, harsh, desolate time to depart this life, as if a reminder of the desolate theology and God he served.

            I’m not about to write a eulogy for Fred Phelps but I do want to remind you of some wisdom from John Donne. In his Meditation number 27 he famously writes, "No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind..." The quote has become so ubiquitous as to have lost much of its original impact. But it manages to retain an impact and a truth beyond its simplicity.

I don’t eulogize him but I mourn Fred Phelps. I also mourn the death of ideas and cultures and languages, of whole populations of insects and birds and mammals and fish wiped out before we ever had an opportunity to know of them, of civil discourse and sitting silently before answering and owning up to what one has said. But I mourn Fred Phelps a little differently than those because he was are a part of my experience of the world and I think I'd be the worse for not having known about him.

Unlike Phelps, and I presume unlike you, I have little room in my theology for hatred. Not of groups of people and, I hope, not of individuals. I continue to work on my intense, let’s call it disfavor, of Ronald Reagan and Dick Cheney, but for all other people I like to think I am, at worst, ambivalent. In my theology, god is everything that makes up our experience, including the way we treat one another, the thoughts we have and act on, the toast we have for breakfast and selecting the bread and toasting and smothering it with butter as well as where the bread and the toaster parts and the cows and grass and water that make up the butter came from. This idea that god is a verb, simply is the way everyone and everything behaves, is something I picked up from born-again writer Anne Lamott. But it didn't originate with her. It was probably Jewish mysticism as exemplified in the Kabbalah that came up with the idea. In the contemporary world this is called pantheism, which posits that the divine itself composes all that is the universe, and thus that God, if that’s the name we use for it, is not separate from reality but is what constitutes it. As a result, Fred Phelps, his church, his hatred and his obsession, are as much an expression of God as Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Physicists have calculated that exactly the same amount of matter resides in the universe today as did moments after the Big Bang, and if that is the case then nothing ever goes away, it simply changes form. Fred Phelps qua Fred Phelps is on his way to becoming another series of atoms in another form. (Whether the new form acheives sentience, as in reincarnation, is another matter.) What I’ve wanted to find since his death is a cartoon memorializing him by showing Jesus explaining to him, "Look, it says right there in Mark, I hate figs!" because I think that would be a funny way to eulogize him.

But as Adam Weinstein in an excellent essay on the website Gawker points out, Phelps and his Westboro family, despite whatever else we might say about them, are at least consistent in their reading of the Bible. He identifies them correctly, and the term is not meant to be pejorative—Unitarian Universalism also grew from these roots—as Primitive Baptists. The “primitive” label would be more contemporarily termed “original;” that is, these are Baptists who, in early Nineteenth Century America, refused to allow modernizing influences to water down God’s message and authority. As Weinstein notes, doing so would have made no difference anyway, since they believed in predestination, which said God already had or had not chosen you for admittance to eternal life.

Weinstein does such a good job of enumerating the Calvinist idea of what the Bible teaches, what I learned in seminary by the acronym “TULIP,” that I’m going to quote him in full.

·         The total depravity of man. This one is everything: Human beings' default mode is damnation (thanks, Adam and Eve). We are not merely headed for damnation, though: We are depraved, alienated from God and goodness and unable to return to goodness by yourselves. In short, humans without salvation are all irredeemably terrible. Does that sound bleak? Well, that's the way it is, according to Calvinists.

·         Unconditional election. This is the predestination thing. God in His omniscience and in his mercy will save some of you. He already knows whom He will save, and he's not doing it because you're nice or funny or pretty, but because He can. Deal with it.

·         Limited atonement. Jesus died to save some people. But not all people. Just the ones God has elected. You can't atone for you sins, and maybe Jesus can't, either, because at the end of the day, maybe God heard your prayers and Jesus', and said "Yeeeeeeeeeeah no."

·         Irresistible grace. How do you know if God has saved you? Oh, you'll know. Because he'll touch you with grace, and you won't be able to refuse. No matter what a dirty philandering murderous gay Episcopalian you may be, God might save you, and you will heed His call, because that's how He rolls.

·         Perseverance of the saints. Once you go saved, you never go back. Here's the thing about an omniscient God: If He's elected you for salvation, you're getting saved, even if you keep being a dirty philandering murderous gay Episcopalian. That's just how grace works. No takebacks!

 

Weinstein concludes “There's a God who saves some people and screws the rest over for eternity, and there's nothing you can really do about it. If there were, He wouldn't be God, and you wouldn't be a depraved, terrible not-God quivering mass of id urges…As the old Presbyterian joke goes (Presbyterians still take the Calvinist points quite seriously): ‘God has answered your prayers. The answer is no.’”

            Let’s not allow ourselves a moment of triumphalism, saying, “Well, that’s what’s wrong with those fundamentalists, they see the world entirely in terms of black and white, right and wrong, them and everyone else.” Because the truth is, as easy as that may seem to us to make the path through worldliness it actually makes being Christ-like (as they might say) the more difficult. Because the Bible and their tradition tell them in no uncertain terms that you can’t just live quietly with this determination. You must proclaim it, no matter who it hurts, no matter what discomfort it is to you, no matter what the consequences might be. God demands no less than complete obeisance from you and God says, quite specifically in Mark 16:15-6: “And [Jesus] said to [his disciples, ie, everyone who would be a Christian], ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. He who has believed and has been baptized shall be saved; but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned.’” From the perspective of Fred Phelps and other Original Baptists what’s wrong with everyone else, including most self-proclaimed Christians, is that they won’t do that. In our arrogance we refuse to accept God knows what is right and has told us very explicitly what our responsibilities are and it is their responsibility to point that out. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists and other sects that grew out from that root, they are meant to be prophets, not telling what will happen in the future but what must happen as a consequence of disobedience.

The abolition movement, the temperance movement, the social gospel and social justice movements, the civil rights movement—all of these came about as a result of the efforts and influence of the Original Baptists, also known as Hardshells. Should we thank Fred Phelps or his clan from Westboro? Not even I would go that far. Some things should remain beyond the pale of human interaction and public displays of hatred should be among them. But we should recognize that there is great complexity in people no less than there is in life. From the 1950s until he was disbarred, Fred Phelps was an active and effective lawyer on behalf mostly of black clients, winning settlements against institutional racist practices and police abuse. In the late 80s he was given several awards by the groups Blacks in Government and the NAACP.  Indeed, no man is an island. Neither is anyone just a single attribute.

I mourn the death of Fred Phelps, then, as a fellow part of god, for the good he did in his life, for his role as a man, as a lover, as a father, and as a leader. It's sad that his legacy will be a rank hatred of people and ideas his theology couldn't prepare him to accept, and it's sad that for some people that will be reason to, if not celebrate, then dismiss his death. But life, like everything else we do, has consequences, and this is his.

            We justifiably cherish, as Americans, as members of different generations, as UUs, and as members of this congregation, our sense of social justice, of what needs to be done and undone. In the aggregate, we have had tremendous influence on the world, sometimes for ill, mostly for good. As individuals, many of us have worked in support of causes ranging from opposition to war to women’s choices to raising the minimum wage to helping the homeless and improving conditions for the mentally ill and people in poverty. Perhaps when we die the media is unlikely to cover efforts we made to change the world. But it is unlikely we will be referred to as having belonged to the most hated family in the country or as having left a legacy of angry and exclusive theology.

There is a song by a writer named Bill Callahan called, appropriately, “The Sing.” He describes having a day when he’s surrounded by people but says only two things to anyone. Now before I tell you what those two things are, I want you to think about what such a day is like. A day in which you say only two, at most two, things to people. I’m not talking about talking to people outside your immediate family or your significant other. Such a thing as that is lonely enough, I know. I’m not talking either about only wanting to say two things to people—we all have days like that, when we want no or nearly no contact with others and huddle into ourselves, keeping mum. I’m talking about days when there is almost nothing to say and nearly no one to say it to. But for a moment think about leaving your house and going through your day as you do normally and in that span of time saying only two things to anyone. That’s a lonely experience and while I’ve been lonely in my time, I don’t think I have ever been that lonely.

 

            Here are the lyrics to “The Sing.”

Drinking while sleeping strangers
Unknowingly keep me company
In the hotel bar

Looking out a window that isn't there
Looking at the carpet and the chairs

Well the only words I said today are "beer" and "thank you"
Beer, thank you
Beer, thank you
Beer

Giving praise in a quiet way
Like a church
Like a church
Like a church that’s far away

I've got limitations like Marvin Gaye
Mortal joy is that way

Outside a train sings its whale song
To a long, long train long, long gone
Then silence comes back alone
High as scaffolding

'Til the wind finds something to ping
When the pinging things finds the wind
We're all looking for a body
Or a means to make one sing.

Callahan conjures with the two things he says to someone a homey situation. He gets up and goes about his day and at a bar, maybe where he’s staying, maybe one he knows, he says “beer” and “thank you.” We’re left to imagine the conversation on the bartender’s side. Maybe he’s asked “what do you want?” or gives him a nod while wiping down the bar in front of him. And Callahan answers with a specific, non-specific request: “beer.” Not Budweiser or Miller Lite or even a further question, “what do you have?” which is the question I always ask. But a single word which, in its vagueness, says it doesn’t matter what the bar carries or what brand he’s given, he just wants a single taste in his mouth: “beer.”

            He’s been defeated. He’s drinking in a bar where people sleep at the tables. I’ve been in those bars. The TV’s on, not for the game or information or even entertainment, but for the company. What you’re drinking isn’t so important as the act of drinking. He looks out a window he only imagines, and at the floor and the empty chairs. He faces his limitations which are probably considerable, and he hears a train that wails in its loneliness, and even the silence with which it’s answered is alone.

But the second thing he says is much more specific. We imagine the bartender has set a glass down and Callahan says “thank you.” The bartender has given him what he asked for and now he’s thanked him. Is it possible that everything we can ever say to anyone can be reduced to those two phrases? Beer. Thank you. I mean, telling others what we want and then, after they’ve given it to us, thanking them. As Callahan says, “giving praise in a quiet way.”

            Well, if we’re not particular, that might work. But what if we are more particular? What if, in fact, what we want isn’t something as simple to supply as milk or a book or beer but something a lot of us lack? What if the something is correction of a social injustice? I’m not certain Reverend Martin Luther King’s requests could be reduced to “justice” or “equality.”      More importantly, perhaps, is the “thank you” that follows. Perhaps, had he lived to see his requests granted by the United States, King would have said “thank you,” but if so it was only out of his innate politeness. I’m not certain it was the majority’s ability to grant that request. After all, equality and justice aren’t really options on some menu society places before us. They are, per the first of our Seven Principles, a part of the inherent dignity granted every human being. And rounding out the seventh is the suggestion that such dignity is accorded every member of the interconnected web of being.

            But I am not Martin Luther King, Jr., much as it pains me to admit. Perhaps none of us is. Perhaps a Reverend King only appears every millennium while Fred Phelps’ are born daily. Perhaps in our attempts to make an impact on the world, our attempts to inculcate justice, to make amends for injustice, to encourage peace or equality or to just get everyone to live together a little more easily, we are sending out, like that train, our whale song to something or someone who’s long, long gone. And we’re answered with silence that itself is alone.

            But that isn’t all there is. Somewhere, our song touches something or someone. Something we don’t recognize, someone we don’t know. We all have at least one story—and without knowing it we’ve probably got a lot more—of people we find out we’ve touched gently, gracefully, with our lives that we hadn’t even known about. We all have stories about others who’ve touched us without knowing, why assume that’s only a one-way street? That we’re only the recipients and not the givers? The pinging thing finds the wind. It may never come back to us but that doesn’t matter. It goes on. “We're all looking for a body, or a means to make one sing.” We may never see the result, the body, of what we do, of our efforts, of the sacrifices we make. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that we touch one another, somehow, somewhere. And the chord we touch in one another is what makes each of us sing.

 

god is fred phelps

"No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind..."

This quote, from John Donne's Meditation 27, has become so ubiquitous to have lost much of its impact. But like many phrases and concepts of the Christian Bible, it manages to retain an impact and a truth beyond its simplicity.

 

I mourn Fred Phelps as I mourned Adam and Nancy Lanza and Lou Reed and my friends and children I've never met and my mother and my pets and animals that were only with me a short time. I mourn equally the death of ideas and cultures and languages, of whole populations of insects and birds and mammals and fish wiped out before we ever had an opportunity to know of them, of civil discourse and sitting silently before answering and owning up to what one has said. But I mourn Fred Phelps and the others differently than those because they are a part of my experience of the world and I think I'd be the worse for not having known them.

 

In my theology, god (small "g" for the same reason we don't capitalize "People") is everything that makes up our experience, including the way we treat one another, the thoughts we have and act on, the toast we have for breakfast and selecting the bread and toasting and smothering it with butter as well as where the bread and the toaster parts and the cows and grass and water that make up the butter came from. This idea that god is a verb, simply is the way everyone and everything behaves, is something I picked up from born-again writer Anne Lamott. But it didn't originate with her. It was probably Jewish mysticism as exemplified in the Kabbalah that came up with the idea. In the contemporary world this is called pantheism, and I'm comfortable being called a pantheist.

 

Physicists have calculated that exactly the same amount of matter resides in the universe today as did moments after the Big Bang, and if that is the case then nothing ever goes away, it simply changes form. Fred Phelps qua Fred Phelps is on his way to becoming another series of atoms in another form. (Whether the new form acheives sentience, as in reincarnation, is another matter.) I have looked in vain for a cartoon memorializing his death by showing Jesus explaining to him, "Look, it says right there in Mark, I hate figs!" because I think that would be a funny way to eulogize him. But as Adam Weinstein points out, Phelps and his Westboro family, despite whatever else we might say about them, are at least consistent in their reading of the Bible (and I ought to mention my unique thrill at seeing the theological Calvinist acronym TULIP used on the Gawker website). Christians, Calvinists, Evangelicals, and Fundamentalists might not like to claim him, but the truth is the Westboro Church has as much right to claim themselves part of the fold as anyone else.

 

I mourn the death of Fred Phelps, then, as a fellow part of god, for the good he did in his life, for his role as a man, as a lover, as a father, and as a leader. It's sad that his legacy will be a rank hatred of people and ideas his theology couldn't prepare him to accept, and it's sad that for some people that will be reason to, if not celebrate, then dismiss his death. But life, like everything else we do, has consequences, and this is his.

imagine

I seem sometimes to know a lot of dead people. I suppose it's a result of knowing a lot of people. But this dead person wasn't, herself, a friend but the daughter of a friend. I attended her memorial, the way I think many people do, not from a sense of obligation to the deceased but out of love for the living.

I have, at best, a complicated relationship with suicide. I don't understand the overwhelming hopelessness I presume it results from. Overwhelming hopelessness, this I understand, but my own experience of it suggests that ending life only guarantees things never get better, and as depressed as I get, I never completely forget that everything, even hopelessness, changes.

But it isn't about my experience. It's the experience of someone for whom only the unknown brings some comfort, and who may ultimately be braver than the rest of us. There are experiences of life, I'm certain, that only ending it can soothe. And while we struggle to figure out what to make of such decisions, we are most honest when we admit we never will.

On my drive further out of the rim for the service I heard John Lennon singing "Imagine" which itself always fills me like a good hymn. The service was full of people I know but hadn't seen for long whiles and the family whose hurt I'd come to share. We spoke and hugged and chanted. But mostly we sang.

It was in that I felt most connected. I have a rough, uneven voice that is unpleasant to hear, I know, but I love nonetheless to sing and sing loud with others. The songs were deeply steeped in the generation most of us were a part of, some Lennon/McCartney, some Dylan, the almost obligatory soulful "I'll Fly Away."

And then one I didn't expect but fit the tenor and the mood of yearning to receive and give comfort: "Hallelujah." With his nicotine and whiskey rasp Leonard Cohen is the songwriter for the funerals of junkies and suicides, and I surprised myself by the lyrics I'd memorized by listening intently even when I didn't realize I had been. The mournful strains we attempt at hitting the right notes on the chorus, and the inability of most of us to do so, is as good a simile for our lives as any.

I keep coming back to my drive there when, in the snowsquall that had started and turning down the radio that was still playing "Imagine," I pulled over to a car stopped on the side of the road to ask if everything was all right. Everything was and in the world I imagine we take time and effort to ask that question, especially when we know the answer will not be "yes."

our children are not our own

On Tuesday night I came home from work to find a message. One of my friends, who is a midwife, had given my name and phone number to her clients who had just delivered a set of twins, one of whom died a few hours after birth. I was being asked to provide a graveside service for him. I met with the couple, organic farmers who live about a half hour to my north, and the following is the order of service and eulogy I wrote and delivered this afternoon. I have done many memorials and funerals but this was the first I've done for a child, let alone a newborn, and my voice caught a few times when I delivered it.

November 15, 2013

Amery, Wisconsin

Welcome/Opening Words

Reading 1: “We Have a Beautiful Mother” by Alice Walker

Reading 2: “A Child Said, What is the Grass?” by Walt Whitman

Silence

Message:

“Your children are not your children.” There is never a time when the words of Khalil Gibran are more true or more cruel than when a child dies. Rabbinic wisdom says it’s in moments like this that people understand how God feels. It’s horrible, it sucks at our soul and gives us reason if we want it not to go on.

            But like God, the universe, and reality, we go on. Eventually the sting of [___] death will feel less and less like our own, and while we aren’t likely to forget it, it will become part of the mosaic of our past that we can look back on and not feel as if our world ended. The bitter taste on our lips, the ashes in our heart, will fade and then there will be laughter on our lips again and delight in our hearts. That’s as it should be. The Ecclesiast says, to everything there is a season. Grief and tears give way in their time to dancing and lovemaking.

            [____] are aware of this. As farmers, they’re aware of the time of year, the quality of the soil, alert to the wind and sunlight, rain and heat. This is how they live. [____] told me that last year was their best year ever, and this was their worst year ever. That’s how it goes, this cycle of day after day after day. There is no guarantee that the next day will be better, just that it will be. You can’t live only in the good days, can’t stay in bed on the bad days, you do what needs doing. And when you’re free gather with your family, warm in the comfort and presence of each other.

            Physicists have calculated that the amount of matter in the universe has remained stable since the moments after the Big Bang. As Walt Whitman wrote, “Everything goes onward and outward, nothing collapses.” It changes. Our children are not our children. We are not our own. We are each other’s. We have our season here and then we are somewhere else. But while we are here we are precious and it is among this precious company that [____] spent his season. Poet Mary Oliver says it best:  “To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”

            [____], hold one another. Keep each other warm and safe. Grieve how you will as long as you will. Remember [your other children] are shelter for you too. Be gentle together. Know that in this precious company you are safe. You are home.

Reading: “Where the Sidewalk Ends” by Shel Silverstein

Silence

Reflections, Memories, Thoughts

Silence

Reading: “On Children” by Kahlil Gibran

Ending: “I am Goodbye” by Bonnie Prince Billie

Benediction: “Take courage, friends. The way is often hard, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high. Take courage. For deep down, there is another truth: You are not alone.”

“Our service together has ended. May your individual services continue.”

warning: this is a photo of a dead body

Yesterday morning one of the websites I normally visit published a photograph of Trayvon Martin's dead body that it had received from another person who happened to save it after it accidentally appeared on the MSNBC website and before it was taken down.  If you do not want to see this photograph, don't advance any further below or click on the following link.  Adam Weinstein, the reporter who recieved the picture and spoke with the reader who had saved it, put it on the main Gawker page where it has opened a massive can of worms.  By the time I post this, a little over thirty hours later, 94 comments have appeared with another 671 waiting to be cleared by the administrator.

I want to take a moment to explain why I think it's important for Adam Weinstein and Gawker to publish the photo and for me (and I hope other bloggers and writers) to publish it too.  I grew up as part of the generation that watched the Vietnam War play out on our television screens and about whom it was reported we had seen x amount of violent acts, real and fictional, on television by adulthood (I cannot locate the number, but it has been increased in recent years and in 2004 stood at 8ooo acts, mostly without remorse, by age 11), as well as real violence among our peers and our families, and so was argued that we had lost our sense of disgust at real instances of violence playing out before us or at least our shock at it.  Somtimes, to an extent, I think that too, at least in my case.  I have seen people die and I have grown up seeing dead bodies in photos and videos.  I'm of the generation that fetishized the gore of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the squirm-inducing rape sequence of The Last House on the Left and topped those off with repeated watchings of The Faces of Death series.  I can open a newsmagazine or a website to be faced with photos of dead people and continue to eat my cereal without blinking.

Does this suggest that I, and by extension many people of my generation who've had similar experiences, have become inured to horrible death?  Perhaps.  I think often I've lost my shockability, and that may not be a bad thing.  Sometimes, when shock becomes the status quo, not to react may be the more transgressive act. 

But it does not mean we are immune to reacting to the photo or the death behind it.  I'm still profoundly affected by the filmed deaths of Nega Agha-Soltan and some unknown desparate jumper and, before them, the photos of Phan Thi Kim Phuc (who did not die) and Thich Quang Duc (who did).  These four instances alone are enough to reduce me to a state of distrust of human capacity for goodness if not tears.  The photograph of Trayvon Martin minutes after his death, while I did not bat an eyelash on seeing it, has worked my guts in such a way I can hardly explain.  Except to say this.

We are anesthetized to death, especially to the deaths of strangers or people who become famous for their deaths.  That doesn't mean we don't feel them but we often are placated by the implications they suggest of permanance.  Lee Harvey Oswald in an eternal flinch.  Saddam Hussein mouthing what may be prayers or deprecations with a noose around his throat.  The almost beatific posed dead of Matthew Brady's Civil War.  We act as if those deaths are closed or their acts don't continue beyond the moment recorded, as if they don't have loved ones who mourn them loudly.  To do so is to open something uncomfortable in us because they take on a greater realism than the deaths of family or friends we aren't privy to might have.  Once we recognize they have lives outside the frame we are in danger of feeling profound loss.

These images ought to affect us that way.  They ought to make us angry or depressed or frustrated or any of a number of other things.  What they should not make us is numb.  This, finally, is the truth of the trial of George Zimmerman that we need to be reminded of.  Whatever verdict is returned, whether he is found guilty of muder or manslaughter, whether it's believed Trayvon attacked him or Zimmerman incited him to attack, whether the "stand-your-ground" law is a mistake and whether the justice system in Florida is biased, this is what the trial is about.  A 17 year old unarmed boy is dead by another person's gun.  The looks on our faces when we say that ought to be as surprised, as disbelieving, as the look on Martin's.

the strawberry of memory

That's my friend Rich's voice on the soundtrack of this video.  He died earlier this week, a 37 year old victim of heart attack.  The story of the monk and the strawberry, while it has a lot of history behind it, particularly for Buddhists, also has tremendous import for me.  Decades ago, while still taking myself seriously as a bhikku in training, I determined I'd live my life by its lessons.  It held at least equal resonance for Rich.

This is a video he produced for an arts project at the seminary we attended together and I'd seen it twice, once as he prepared it and again in a class on Zen we took.  He is--was, I have to remind myself--an odd person even among the denizens of my congregations.  He had, even by my standards, an interesting life:  born (and, I think, baptized) a Mormon, converter to Unitarian Universalism, converter to fundamental Christianity, converter to Buddhism, graduate of Liberty University.  Volunteer in the military, veteran of the Bosnian Conflict and the First Iraq War.  Chaplain in training.  World traveler.  Learner of Japanese.  His first marriage ended very badly and bitterly and it was in chewing over the bitterness and learning to accept the hot taste of it that we bonded.  His second marriage to a Japanese woman five years his senior he met at a Buddhism conference.ended with his death. They were married a month.

In a week my seminary will hold a memorial for his memory.  We are very good at memorials, fitting for people whose primary purpose, no matter what we tell ourselves, is to comfort the dying and the surviving.  I am trying not to mourn Rich's death but merely, as I think he would express it, to accept it.  He was a good man who got on my nerves at times--he talked too much at times, pressed his presence on people at times, made too much of his Buddhism at times, refused to observe his own faults at times--but do we know anyone (besides ourselves) who don't get on our nerves at times?  That, as much as dying, is a part of life.

The story of the monk and his strawberry doesn't mention anyone acknowledging the monk's death.  But like the rest of us monks need a community; a monk may live a solitary life but one isn't a monk by oneself.   That's what distinguishes her from a hermit.  Someone notices the monk's absence.  Someone has a moment of silence or a brief word for his life and death. Someone recollects the monk's life.  This reflection may be the sweet part of someone's life, the strawberry plucked, not by the monk but by the monk's survivors, enjoyed in contemplation.

If I could play the guitar or sing I would play this for Rich.  But as I can't do either I'll go to the original.

the most heartfelt prayer I've ever heard

I'm not big on prayer and neither is my denomination.  But on reading this morning about the relation between prayer and the sense one is part of a community, I was reminded of the greatest prayer I've heard.

It was in my last years serving the Menomonie UU.  The adopted daughter of some friends had been killed accidentally in Florida--she'd been struck by a car while walking on the side of the road, a stupid, meaningless accident that leaves a giant hole in the gut because no one, outside maybe God, could be blamed in such an event--and I'd been asked by them to co-officiate her memorial.  My friends and most of their family are UU while the girl herself had been pagan, so the other officiators were representatives of one of the local pagan communities.

It was a good, solid memorial during which many people said many good, solid things.  The melange of faiths, pagan and UU, mixed well (as one would expect since there are many UU pagan groups like CUUPS to help that along) and one by one her friends stepped up to the mic to speak about her.

The mix of congregants was good.  My friends' are deeply involved with the local homeless and punk communities and they were out in force.  Much of the memorial, in fact, was punk-flavored, from the music and the dancing to the clothes many celebrants wore, torn and shredded, reminiscent of the ancient Jewish ritual of rending garments in grief.

One kid, who had dated her years earlier and who had stayed friends and close with her, stepped up to the mic.  He was disheveled and had arrived late, and had been drinking for days.  He was, maybe, 17 at the time.  I'd been warned by my friends that he might be inappropriate because of his drinking, but I agreed that he should be given his chance to have his say.  There had been others, also drunk or stoned, who'd had something to say and their words were no less powerful for being slurred or rambling.

He came up to the alter and sort of gathered into himself.  For a moment I feared he would cry and cry so hard he couldn't get anything out and I would have to lead him away after a moment.  But then he threw up his head and screamed one articulate word:  "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!"

It went on almost 20 seconds and many of the others joined in.  I'd like to say I did too but I was too surprised at the word, the vehemence, and the appropriateness of it that I simply stood there, and looked at them all.  It was like ululation, a wave of "fucks" drawn out and shrieked, and in that moment it was a desperate question put to the universe and a cry against injustice.  It sounded perfectly right.

His rage spent, the kid went back to slouching against the wall in the back.  Another kid walked up to the mic and said more things but I don't remember who it was or what that kid said.  The kid's prayer was still ringing in my ears.

I've kept up with that kid.  He's got an apartment now, a job, got his GED and given up drinking mostly.  I check in with him and he says he's doing okay.  we don't talk about the memorial because we don't have to. he said everything he ever needed to say.

pastoral clinical week 15

CPE REFLECTION WEEK 15

I met with one of my residents at her mother’s viewing and funeral this morning. It was as good an experience as I could have hoped for and helped me to recognize some of the ways in which I’ve been privileged during this experience.

First, the preparations for making her aware of her mother’s illness and death were more complicated than they needed to be. But this should be expected, I suppose, when dealing with a family whose relationships are as riven with bitterness and suspicion as those between her sister, the resident’s husband, and the resident’s children are. The complications were magnified by distrust between the sister, her other sister, and her husband, each insisting someone else should be the one to tell her about her mother’s illness and death, but none willing to let an outside source do it. Finally, her husband visited and told her about it, and then we went into the question of whether she wanted to attend the funeral and who would take her.

But this morning’s experience made all that moot. She was welcomed into the grieving group in a way I wasn’t entirely expecting. I have sometimes wondered if her husband is behaving lovingly toward her in response to what he hopes for others to see; but I saw some behaviors between them that seemed genuine, and I didn’t think he could know anyone was watching or listening to him. They were little things, like his gentle wiping of the drool that pools in pools in the cleft between her chin and chest (which is something I also do repeatedly, thinking of her dignity) and running his hand soothingly over her hair. At one point, while he took her to use the bathroom and I was watching outside the door to ask anyone approaching to wait a few moments until she was finished, one of her sisters-in-law said she had to take her child in to throw up, and in the moment when she opened the door, I could see her husband slowly and carefully lowering back into her chair. I am convinced that he is genuine in his dedication to her.

Similarly, a woman who grew up with my resident, went to college with her and with whom she shared an apartment for years, and who is a nurse now in Buffalo, came directly to her when she walked into the funeral home, got down on one knee to be at her level, hugged her, and then spent most of the funeral talking with her, running down memories and experiences, and at times crying with her. The affection in her eyes was wonderful to see.

Her children, with whom there are apparently many issues—I discovered in talking with them that both had spent the intervening years since her debilitating aneurysm living with their father—most particularly their unwillingness (according, separately, to both her sister and husband) to visit her, attended the funeral. (My resident has three children and a fourth adopted daughter whose name has not come up and I didn’t think it was prudent to ask about her. The two who live closest came.) Her eldest son came directly up to her when he came in but awkwardly stood next to his father while he said hello, and then just as awkwardly stood around during the viewing, the funeral, and the social time afterward. Her daughter, who lives in St. Paul, pointedly ignored her mother when she came in, managing to catch her dad during one of the times while I sat with my resident alone while he mingled, and then passed without looking at her when she went in to sit down. (She was looking at me out of her single good eye then and didn’t see her walk past.) But after the funeral she came over to her mother and took her hands and got down on her knees to hug her. She looked up at me as if to tell me, “My daughter. This is my daughter.”

If she didn’t have a good time, which I doubt anyone can say they have when they attend their mother’s funeral, at least she didn’t have a bad time. This whole experience affected me profoundly, as I felt privy to a few hours’ window into the intimate and previously functional life of someone who’s entered my life as a person in need of constant, sometimes overwhelming, care.

On my drive back to the facility, I reflected on how many intense but common experiences I’ve been allowed to share with residents during this CPE. I’ve visited people in the hospital, spent time with them while they were most vulnerable and afraid of death, sat their bedsides while they were in the process of dying and then handled their bodies after they died, talked with them about their families and their relationships with other residents, talked them down when they’ve been angry or frustrated. Outside of birth and marriage, these are the most intimate and bewildering experiences most of us have and most ministers go through with their congregants, only I have been privileged to see them in the course of a few months’ time. I am humbled by their power.