When the Saints Go Marching In

As many of you are aware, today is All Saints' Day. It is a time to remember those who have passed on during the year.

I had the honor of being a part of a rather large funeral today in which a faithful servant was celebrated. As friends eulogized, voices cracked and tears fell, but I noticed that as quickly as Kleenex's were snatched up, smiles also swept across faces. It made me think about how grief, in its simplest form, is a reaction to loss. This reaction, however, is a process.

Popular psychology will tell you that grief has stages. Elisabeth Kubler Ross even goes so far to define these stages as denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. In reality, these stages aren't really stages in the way we think of stages. There is no set order, there are no set time-frames. We go back and forth, around and around, drifting in and out of our own sense of consciousness. We tell, we re-tell, we 're-member.'

It all brings us to a part of ourselves we wouldn't get to otherwise.

Grief over life, grief over death.
We give each other grief. We grieve for and with one another.
We are taken aback by it.
We all somehow grieve differently and yet we all grieve the same.

Oftentimes, our minds process our stories in pieces. We end up telling and retelling our experiences in an effort to fully grasp them. Our words take on a rote tone, one that Thomas Lynch describes as prayer-like.

It's a funny thing, our rememberings. Our words. Our prayers--even the ones that don't have words. Our grief ages our souls as it brings us to our knees. It shows up in the daily things--in getting the paper and in the breaking of bread. Our comings and our goings--it all becomes more holy. Our daily bread becomes a perpetual communion and sleep is an answered prayer. Life becomes fractional; bits and pieces exist in a type of suspension, but not as a whole.

Our grief, however, is not the end. We can take comfort in the fact that a new world will one day be revealed, a world where death shall be no more. As Revelation 21 says, "neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away."

I will leave you with the words of the hymn, When the Saints Go Marching In.

      We are trav'ling in the footsteps
      Of those who've gone before,
      And we'll all be reunited, 
      On a new and sunlit shore...

Some say this world of trouble,

Is the only one we need,

But I'm waiting for that morning,

When the new world is revealed...

Lord, how I want to be in that number

When the saints go marching in!

Prepositions

I'm sitting in the same classroom for the 4th hour in a row. On one side of me, there are two caskets (empty, I promise), on the other, there are twenty classmates, all of various ages and backgrounds. The instructors ramble a bit, confusing words like 'generic' with 'genetic,' 'presents' with 'presence,' and 'elections' with 'electrons.' Nobody else seems to notice. Oh well.

Somewhere between the chemistry lesson and the three-thousandth question about whether or not we have to  know ALL the bones in the body, words begin to pop out at me. The words are simple, prepositions actually: by, with, for...

We have moved on to the 'Funeral Services' portion of the school day and are watching a PBS Frontline documentary called The Undertaking. (<-- VERY highly recommended).

....By the living
....For the living
....With the living

It strikes me as it has done before-- funerals in the modern sense mean different things to different people, but Thomas Lynch's words start to work in my finite brain, "we deal with death by dealing with the dead..."

Our death traditions are just that- traditions- just like our marriage traditions, birth traditions, and holiday traditions. They serve a purpose, but we have to remember they are not immune to change. The processes of planning, conducting, and attending funerals helps usher us through the beginnings of the grief journey. They give us something to grasp, rules to follow, and roles to play as our little worlds change beyond our comprehension.

We all view and deal with death a little differently, but, in the end, we all must face it.

It never fails that at any funeral I attend, there is a solitary moment in which time seems to stand still. It often happens at the graveside as the pallbearers carry the casket to the grave. Watches tick, birds chirp, cars go by, but the hallowed plot of land on which we place the casket is eerily quiet. We've come as far as we can. Family and friends have eulogized, prayed, sung, cried, rejoiced, remembered and now we stand in reverent awe. The casket is lowered and we reach the end. The body stops moving. We stop carting everything around. We arrange the flowers for the last time. We say a final prayer, maybe sing a final song. Then we leave and the reality of the loss accompanies us as we walk away from the grave.

We continue to lean on the living; hearing words of sympathy, accepting tender embraces, and eating fried chicken to our heart's content. In these moments, we are vulnerable in our humanity. In moments to come, as we look back and remember things about the ones we've had to let go, we seem to be more vulnerable in our spirituality. Through tears and laughter we keep moving until death interrupts again; until our little worlds stand still.

Do you see what I see?

[If you're a regular, you may have noticed that the background changed a bit. Don't be alarmed, it was just time for an update. If you're new here, welcome! Hope you're not intimidated by a little dialogue about death... no, really.]

I get it. I like living in the mountains. I use cloth bags for my groceries. In fact, I advocate 'reduce, re-use, recycle' in all circumstances. I compost. I cringe at the amount of petroleum used on a daily basis, yet I want a bus-load of kids. I'm obsessed with learning about midwives and morticians. I'm kind of a granola-- and that's ok with me. All of this begs the question: aren't modern embalming practices anti-earth friendly? The simple answer, yes, unfortunately, they are.

So what of it? There are many unnatural things, and lots of chemicals, involved in preserving a 'memory picture' of our loved ones as we view them between death and burial. Without these chemicals, the type of viewing (open-casket) we think of would simply not be possible. The chemicals--formaldehyde, methanol, phenol, etc. offer temporary preservation for the body. After burial, the chemicals eventually reach the earth and probably our ground water. There are also materials used in hospitals, ambulances, the preparation room, and cemeteries that are not sustainable (mostly plastics and precious metals). And then there's the space taken up by cemeteries, headstones, mausoleums, on and on and on. To think I will actually depend on this way of doing things for my livelihood bothers me sometimes. But, then again, it doesn't. I get it. I understand why we do it this way. I mean, let's face it, it's right in line with our American way of living. Does that mean I agree with it or think it's for everyone? No.

The bottom line is that we see what we want to see about the funeral business.

If you want to see that our culture has shaped us into being materialistic and shallow, you can fall into the camp that says funerals are obsolete; that the presence of the dead at their own funeral is optional; that all funeral directors do is capitalize on the grief of others.

If you want to sympathize and say open-casket services are essential to the grieving process, you'd be in the group that says embalming is a necessary art, one that is unique to the funeral industry and important for closure for friends and loved ones.

If you want to get hung up on the paperwork and the insurance and the money and the convenient 'packages'  funeral homes offer, you can and I won't judge you because I have the same thoughts.

I choose to see that embalming, open caskets, cremations, funerals, gravesides, flowers, thank-you cards, etc. are important. I just don't think all of it has to be for everyone <---And that is what will help me change along with this business.

After attending a funeral directing convention this week, I have some new knowledge of the industry and some new ideas of my own that I will continue to talk about. Please feel free to share your ideas with me too!