Good Grief
Good morning, and welcome, on this Memorial Day weekend.
Decoration Day, they used to call it, when communities would come together
To tend the shared space of the local cemetery,
And honor especially the memory of those who had given their lives in service to their country.
Today it signals the threshold of summer;
We have lost the habit of caring for graves as a common endeavor,
And our feelings about the military,
as we acknowledge the 1000th soldier to die in Afghanistan,
are ambiguous at best.
Yet even in this season, lush with life, it is well for us to spare a thought to inevitable death,
And bring to mind our grateful memories of all that we owe
To those who have gone before us on this planet.
For in remembering our lost loves,
And the sacrifices that have preserved our freedoms,
We learn to cherish those who are with us still,
And grow into the capacity to give of ourselves for the common good of the world we share.
And so we kindle this chalice, symbol of our faith,
not that we might, on this day of remembrance,
consecrate the dead;
but rather that we might reverently receive,
if so it may be,
some consecration to ourselves and to our daily work
from the light that was their lives,
and the light that is our memories of them.
Readings:
Emily Dickinson:
They say that 'time assuages,'--
Time never did assuage;
An actual suffering strengthens,
As sinews do, with age.
Time is a test of trouble,
But not a remedy.
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no malady.
The poet John Berryman writes,
I told a lie once in verse. I said
I said I said I said "the heart will mend,
Body will break and mend, the foam replace
For even the unconsolable his taken friend."
This is a lie. I had not been there then.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Never, never may the fruit be plucked from the bough
And gathered into barrels.
He that would eat of love must eat it where it hangs.
Though the branches bend like reeds,
Though the ripe fruit splash in the grass or wrinkle on the tree,
He that would eat of love may bear away with him
Only what his belly can hold,
Nothing in the apron,
Nothing in the pockets.
Never, never may the fruit be gathered from the bough
And harvested in barrels.
The winter of love is a cellar of empty bins,
In an orchard soft with rot.
Ritual of Remembrance:
Parable: Kisa Gotami
In the wisdom literature of the Buddhist tradition, a story is told:
Gotami was here family name, but because she tired easily, she was called Kisa Gotami, or Frail Gotami. She was born at Savatthi in a poverty-stricken house. When she grew up, she married, and went to the house of her husband’s family, to dwell there. Because she was the daughter of a poor family, they treated her with contempt, until after a time she gave birth to a son, and then they accorded her respect.
But when that boy of hers was old enough to play and run hither and thither and about, he died. Sorrow sprang up within her, and in her grief she carried the dead child to all her neighbors, asking them for medicine. But they said to her: “Where did you ever meet with medicine for the dead?” And they laughed, and clapped their hands in derision. She had not the slightest idea what they meant, and the people said, “She has lost her senses; that boy is dead.”
At length Kisa Gotami met a man who replied to her request, “I cannot give thee medicine for thy child, but I know a physician who can.”
And the girl said, “Pray tell me sir; who is it?” And the man replied, “Go to Sakyamuni, the Buddha.”
Kisa Gotami made haste to the Buddha and cried, “Lord and Master, give me the medicine that will cure my boy!”
The Buddha in great compassion answered: “I want a handful of mustard seed.” And when the girl in her joy promised to procure it, the Buddha added: “The mustard seed must be taken from a house where no one has lost a child, husband, parent, or friend.”
Poor Kisa Gotami now went from house to house, and the people pitied her and said, “Here is mustard seed; take it!” But when she asked, “Did a son or daughter, a father or mother die in your family?” they answered her: “Alas! The living are few, but the dead are many. Do not remind us of our deepest grief.” And there was no house but some beloved one had died in it.
Kisa Gotami became weary and hopeless, and sat down at the wayside, watching the lights of the city, as they flickered up and were extinguished again. At last the darkness of the night reigned everywhere. And she considered the fate of all people, that their lives flicker up and are extinguished. And she thought to herself: “How selfish am I in my grief! Death is common to all; yet in this valley of desolation there is a path that leads to the end of suffering for those who have surrendered all individual desire.”
And putting away the selfishness of her affection for the child, Kisa Gotami had the dead body buried in the forest. Returning to the Buddha, she took refuge in him, and found comfort in the fellowship of the Dharma.
Invitation to Memory
Kisa Gotami was told that a handful of mustard seed was needed in the medicine she sought for her son. Here is a bowl of mustard seed; I invite you now to come forward and take a few grains, and to speak aloud the names of those in your house, of your family or friends, your teachers or heroes, whose memories you honor on this day of remembrance.
Sermon:
“We learn,” says the humanist poet Kenneth Patton about grieving, “to possess our sorrows as the measure of our love.” It is not a bargain that any of us would willingly make, of course. We want our loved ones here, in the flesh, living and breathing beside us, doing all those annoying endearing quirky things they do. Not enshrined in memory, the companions of our silence and solitude, but solid and real, sharing the days as they used to do. No one chooses grieving as an exercise in spiritual growth, and yet, when grief comes, as it does inevitably for all of us, we don’t have a choice about dealing with it. The choice is about how we deal with it, and so on this Memorial Day, when we call to mind our individual and collective losses, it is worth thinking about the options we have for responding to this unavoidable aspect of the human condition.
I should perhaps say a word about my own qualifications to speak to this experience; they are largely vicarious. In my own life, I have lost the two grandparents I knew, but these were not especially close relationships. I have walked with Mark through the quite sudden death of his mother, the rather gentle failing and death of his father, and the very tragic, unexpected death of his younger sister. We have stood together with the vet as she released a beloved cat from debilitating suffering at the end of a long life. But most of what I know about the valley of the shadow of death, I have learned from you, in this work that we do together as a community of memory and promise. I have mapped that territory primarily by walking it with those I serve as a guide in life’s profundities of meaning, suffering, and gladness. And I am keenly mindful of the poet’s confession that we may tell lies, unwittingly, out of our own unawareness, by offering comfort when “I had not been there then.”
Still, a map is useful to have, when navigating rough terrain, and I want to suggest this morning that our larger culture does not offer much help in teaching us what to do about the encounter with loss and grief. Indeed, this holiday of high spring, this Memorial Day, may be one of the few remnants remaining from an older perspective that took seriously the act of grieving as a necessary part of what creates, and shapes, our shared humanity. Bereavement, and its attendant grief, are inherently painful experiences, of course, and who would want to live in a world where the loss of our dear ones was a casual matter, and cost us nothing? Moreover, there is no way to know in advance, or to control, exactly how we are going to encounter them in specific instances, or what form they will take at any given moment in our lives. But some part of the bewilderment that often accompanies sorrow arises from its unfamiliarity and structurelessness, which is a product of our basic ignorance of how the process works, and what to expect. And so I believe that part of our responsibility as a religious community is to talk about this experience, and examine how we might bring our values to bear on it, and understand it better. Consider the approach that we take to helping our children understand and embrace their sexuality, that other profoundly compelling and mysterious energy of the human condition. Our hope is to lay a groundwork of confident knowledge and responsible values with our young people before they find themselves awash in the tides of powerful emotions and hormones. By the same token, it seems to me that one of our tasks together as a community of faith is to build an awareness, and indeed an appreciation, for what happens to us when we grieve, so that it feels less unknown in the moment, and so that we take away from it what is potentially precious.
The prospect of death, both our own, and that of those we love, is one of the challenges that orthodox believers will sometimes throw out to those who advocate a humanist world view. How can we bear to be without the expectation of a life to come, the hope of meeting our loved ones again, the solace that our separation is finally only temporary? On the one hand, it is a fair question, and yet it is curious to me that the conviction of an afterlife in heaven does not appear, from what I have observed in my own experience, to make anybody actually less sad about the death of people they care about. Clinical data also seem to bear this out; the process of grieving is the process of grieving, regardless of theology, and it varies more according to circumstance and personality than it does by religious beliefs. This is not to be confused with the self-reports of individual mourners, who may indeed say that it comforts them to know that their loved one is waiting for them in heaven. The significant thing is that people with no such beliefs find equal amounts of comfort, equally quickly, in their own ideas, whatever they may be. What religious concepts do accomplish, and this is a significant matter, is to give structure to the social practices that surround the time of bereavement as it unfolds. Whether it is sitting shiva in a Jewish household, or accompanying a body to be cremated on the banks of the Ganges, faith traditions teach people what to do and how to behave in the face of death, and in the presence of those who are grieving.
So what does it behoove us, as humanists, to understand about the human experience of death, and loss, and grief? First, I think, we want to affirm the inherent resilience of the human personality and spirit. The reality is that most of the time, most people are able to recover from even the most devastating losses, and find comfort and meaning and even joy in their lives again. Death is permanent, but grief is not; it is a process that eventually ends, leaving the survivors permanently changed, to be sure, but nevertheless able to engage the world in positive and satisfying ways. There are people for whom this does not happen, but we recognize that they represent an anomaly, something gone wrong with the process; they are remarkable precisely because they are not typical. Grief is often compared to two other processes; it is spoken of as a form of work, or a kind of healing. There are those who would argue that work is a bad analogy for grief, because grieving is not something we can intentionally put effort into; it takes its course at a level that is mostly not accessible to our conscious will. Only to a very limited extent can any of us actually work harder at completing our grief, or deliberately refuse to do the work of grieving. Yet it remains the case that grieving consumes energy, no matter how little choice we may have about it. Consider the other metaphor, that of healing. When the body has suffered a trauma, such as a broken bone, or an invasion by germs, there is not much that we can consciously contribute to the physical process of healing, as the general unhelpfulness of advice in these matters demonstrates: “Stay warm, drink plenty of fluids, get rest.” Why do we need rest when we are unwell? Because our bodies, at a level quite outside of our intentional control, are working to repair the damage done to them. In the same way, the loss of those we love requires a kind of emotional and psychological repair process that has often has physical manifestations. People in the early stages of grief frequently report feeling exhausted, yet having difficulty sleeping, as well as loss of appetite, and loss of physical and mental focus, so that they become momentarily accident-prone and forgetful. All this suggests that the body’s resources are being commandeered as if responding to a physical threat or injury. One of the four dimensions of grieving is physiological, and it is actually helpful to know that these symptoms are real, and common, not the product of delusion. Some people find that their immune system is compromised, and they pick up colds or infections easily. In fact, in this dimension as well as others, what intention can do is to help us acknowledge, rather than deny, reality, so that we can have reasonable expectations of ourselves and each other. People who are mourning are likely to be physically tired, distracted, and fragile for a period time, possibly for more than just a few days. While it is not reasonable to expect normal stamina or energy during these times, and usual patterns of sleep, eating, and exercise may appear pointless, a gentle preference for routine can actually be helpful. The body responds to external cues of normalcy, even as the mind rebels against the knowledge that things will never be the same again. Bereavement creates a physical stress reaction, which is a chemical and cellular reality that manifests itself in differing ways, but deserves to be taken seriously.
Perhaps the most obvious dimension of grief is the emotional, as we process the pain that goes with ending an important relationship, and re-establishing a self-concept and connection to a world that no longer includes the lost loved one. One of the great gifts that humanism offers by its acceptance of the finality of death is the assurance that sadness is a fully appropriate response to such loss. There may be an accompanying gratitude for the person’s life, and for the relationship that was shared, as well, but there is no attempt to talk ourselves out of the sorrow that we intuitively feel by imagining the person we love in happier circumstances without us. As I mentioned before, this isn’t usually a very successful strategy anyway, but it can make people feel bad about feeling bad, which seems to me a particularly cruel twist at such a moment. It is in the context of emotional healing, or work, that it helps to remember that human beings are by nature evolved to be social creatures. Even the most introverted personalities among us are designed by evolution as open limbic loops, which is to say that we rely on others to participate in regulating the life systems that keep us functional. Communication and touch are not just pleasant, they are essential to our well being, and that is why relationships with other people are so central to the perception of happiness. When someone who was a partner in our system of limbic connections dies, it is not just metaphor to say that a piece of ourselves dies too. This is why it makes perfect sense that there is such a desire to touch or hug someone who is recently bereaved, as if to assure them – and ourselves -- that alternative limbic connections are still available. This is also why grieving people can sometimes be strangely vulnerable and impulsive sexually; there are few more potent forms of limbic mutuality than sex, and this may feel intensely needed even though it seems oddly inappropriate from a rational perspective. People often speak of the sense of ‘acceptance’ as the goal of the emotional work of grieving, but I tend to think that word short changes the complexity of the process that is actually going on. It is true that some mourners struggle for a while with a sense of unreality – “I keep thinking maybe I will wake up, and this will all be a bad dream,” is a common expression – but our true resilience lies not just in coming to terms with the truth of loss, and accepting it. The emotional dimension of grieving continues until we have both integrated the memory of the person we loved as a source of pleasure and strength, and returned to emotional accessibility and aliveness in our other relationships. Thankfully, this is how we are constructed as psychological beings, and most of us have the capacity to reclaim the potential for meaning and joy that is out of reach when our grief is fresh. This does not mean that we forget or cease to value our lost loves, but rather that there is a healthy and appropriate role for those connections, as there are for all our various relationships. Every Hello and every Goodbye in life brings with it the emotional work of integration, of figuring out once more who we are in the context of these ever-changing realities. That process does not happen overnight, nor do we get to choose pace at which it unfolds; we can’t fast forward through its discomforts, nor can we put it on hold until we think we are ready. As with many forms of growth and maturing, much of it happens beneath the surface, until at some moment we look backwards, and realize that we are at a very different place than the one we last noticed. And also like many other forms of maturing, it isn’t always linear. Many people describe grief as a spiral, that cycles through different sequences of feelings again and again, until the movement itself becomes familiar and understood. When you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death, the sun may be well up in the sky before you notice that the horizon has begun to lighten, but that doesn’t mean that sunrise isn’t underway all around you.
The third dimension of grieving is easier to track, because it has a set of common markers. For in addition to the physiological and emotional, grief also has a social dimension. We are called upon to recognize not only our own inner experience of loss, but also the impact that our loved one’s absence has on the rest of the world outside ourselves. It is extremely rare that only one person is affected by someone else’s death; nearly always, death is a social event, and it is not just our individual internal meaning structures that are challenged by it, but also the cultural process that generates our shared understanding of the world. This is why every human society and religious tradition has established rituals and practices for dealing with death and bereavement, and there is a sense in which all such practices are necessarily arbitrary. No culture and no theology has any custom that succeeds in giving us back a loved one who has died, and for those who are mourning, no other outcome seems at the time to have any point. Humanists are particularly subject to this perception, because we rarely have the sense that there is something we can do to ease the departed person’s transition into some other existence, so why bother with cultural customs at all? And yet, as Kisa Gotami learned, every death is not only the loss of a particular individual; it is also a window into our shared mortality; every grief is a mirror of every other grief, reminding us that in this respect, perhaps more than any other, we human beings are never alone. In the midst of bereavement and sorrow, when we feel most removed from everyone else in a world that is heartlessly going on without the person who mattered so much to us, we are also connected with all humanity by the most essentially common human experience there is. Custom also helps us to move through the necessary tasks of honorably disposing of the physical remains of the one who has died, and beginning to outline the structures of a life no longer oriented around that person’s presence. Recognizing that the process of grief has an outward, social aspect as well as an inward, feeling dimension can help us to understand those rituals from the perspective of human dynamics rather than merely the effort to impose beliefs, or extract money. There is some evidence to suggest that the quality of our social connections contributes to our overall resilience, so that it is more important than ever to maintain those other relationships when we are mourning for one that has been lost.
Finally, grieving has what I can only call a spiritual dimension; it confronts us with questions about the meaning and purpose of life in seemingly urgent and implacable terms. How are we to trust the world, when the rug can be pulled out from under us in such a devastating way? If all the work that we do, and the sacrifices that we make, to create authentic, responsible relationships of mutuality can so abruptly become pointless, why continue? If life can hold this much pain, what sense does it make to cherish life? Fortunately, although the experience of grief may deepen our insight into these questions, it does not actually require that we answer them, only that we acknowledge their enormity. The spiritual work of grieving does not necessarily make us all into philosophers, but it does challenge us to recall, in the midst of our sadness, whatever we have found to be worthwhile, or a source of good in the world, and to explore whether those realities are not still true, and still available to us. If the love we shared with the person who is gone was a good thing, is not love itself still good? If beauty has made us glad, is there not still beauty in the world? The unique combination of qualities that made your loved one special is not replaceable, and yet each of those qualities persists somewhere, and continues to matter. The spiritual healing of grief is to learn to trust the universe again, to believe that what was of value once is of value still, and matters just as much as it ever did. This is not an awareness that we can come to just by deciding it; the journey of grief cannot be cut short by intellectual fiat. Nevertheless, little by little over time, the questions that were once agonizing become simply tools for reflection, and find their replies, if not their answers, in the ongoingness of life.
The healing of grief does not lie in final forgetfulness, though it does give us the capacity to focus attention on something other than loss in the end. But what we need to achieve is not to eliminate those we have lost from our emotional equilibrium; rather, it is to create for them a new role in the consciousness of memory, so that the truth of what we shared with them remains available whenever we turn to it. Memorial Day asks to remember this simple truth, that the interdependent web of all existence is not merely a present reality; rather, it extends over time, and it includes all those who have ever loved us, and all those we have ever loved. We are who we are, both as individuals and as communities large and small, because of the gifts and sacrifices of those who are gone now. It would be a stunted existence indeed without their presence in memory, to cheer us and strengthen us and make us tender and noble as we honor them. It is only by walking the path of grief through the valley of the shadow of death that we receive this gift, and come to know first hand the profound resilience of the human spirit. Physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually, we are changed by the loss of those we love, and yet we learn to affirm life even with its losses, and find that in the sacred realm of memory, they are with us always, and in this shared truth of our human existence, we are never alone.
Meditation
There is no medicine to unlock the mystery and finality of death. No wisdom, no courage, no piety can spare the heart its moment of agony and terror and refusal to accept the death of a beloved other. That experience is part of human living.
What saves us from madness and despair is also the experience of human living, of memory and community. In remembering those who have touched our lives and passed through the mystery, in honoring those memories and making what was admirable in those people a part of our own lives, we dignify their living with a meaning that lives beyond them, and create their immortality.
In communities like this, where we care and are cared for, we bind ourselves into the ongoing; in the face of death, we make a promise to life, for the sake of those who need us still, who hold us to the earth with their love, and who offer us the constant grace of the here and now.
In the face of death, let us make a promise to life,
Even as we cherish our memories, let us bind ourselves into the ongoing;
for the sake of those who need us still,
who hold us to the earth with their love,
who offer us the constant grace of the here and now.
