I attended a funeral today. I am fortunate that it is the first one I've been to in quite a while. It was for the husband of a colleague at work who died tragically and unexpectedly at the age of 41, leaving behind my friend and her two daughters. Daughters the same age as mine who seemed numb and bewildered during the funeral service. Pictures of her husband, who I had never met, covered poster boards in the back of the church and I found myself trying to create a memory of him as I looked at them, even though I had none.
The church was overflowing with attendees, including a large number of us from work coming out to support our friend in this most crushing of times. As the traditional Catholic service proceeded, the casket was wheeled in, a blessing was said, we sang and said prayers and the emotions steadily mounted. Then my friend had the unfathomable courage and strength to take to the podium and speak with inexplicable composure, warmth and humor about her husband. Those not teary-eyed before that moment suddenly became so and the tears streamed down cheeks male and female. We all moved silently in time as we dabbed one eye, then the other. But there was palpable strength and unity in the room. We were here together to help this family and each other and it felt as though we could have stood against a line of tanks. There must have been several hundred in attendance, and although none of us from work knew the extended family, neighbors and childhood friends of our colleague's husband, it didn't matter. In this moment, we were together. We cried together and grieved together and sang together and shared what it is to be human together.
Watching her and her daughters struggle and cry as the service concluded and the casket processional exited the church was wrenching in every possible way. It undid me more than I was prepared for. Because in these moments, we see our own lives in an alternate reality. It could happen to any of us. It did happen to her. The plans and the assumptions of future days to be lived a certain way and in a certain measure suddenly rendered null and void.
Back in the office, focus and concentration were predictably elusive. We shared knowing glances and nods, but exchanged few words about the funeral. What is there to say? The mundane details of the day were exposed for what they are.
I sat at my desk, looked out my window and thought back to that feeling of strength and solidarity in the church. I visualized drawing a circle around the room and the positive force present within it -- undiluted compassion and goodwill and earnestness. I wondered how much bigger we could draw that circle and still maintain its strength. What if we drew it just outside the church into the surrounding St. Paul neighborhood? Would it still hold? It seemed like it would. What about into downtown St. Paul or all the way to Minneapolis? What about into the beleaguered neighborhoods of North Minneapolis? What about around Minnesota? The upper Midwest? The entire United States? Europe? Africa? The Middle East? It seemed clear that the circle would fail long before I ran out of places to include within it. Our ability to support and empathize and stand together fractures the further away we get from the center. The more the person suffering the loss, oppression, joblessness, homelessness, discrimination, hunger, neglect, torture or abuse is a stranger, the less we are moved to help.
I have many deep concerns about and disagreements with organized religion of all stripes, but this is not the time for those discussions. Nevertheless, it is undeniable, I think, that houses of worship excel in bringing people together and creating a sense of community and fellowship. From my perspective, this is less a result of the content of what is espoused in churches, synagogues and mosques than a function of the processes they facilitate: reflection, contemplation, and community. When you bring people together for a common purpose, you create community and in community you create strength and bridge divides. I am certain that the individuals at the funeral spanned nearly all possible spectra-- Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, atheists and Catholics, gay and straight, white and black, union and management, the 99% and the 1%, smokers and non-smokers, health nuts and addicts, yet there were no censors at the door. We weren't segregated into sub-groups by race, religion or creed. In the face of death and loss and grief, these dividing lines are magically erased, at least for a little while.
It is certainly simplistic and naive to extrapolate from one tragic death to all of global civilization and ask why can't we draw the circle that large, but I am going to ask anyway. I would really like to know the answer.
This is really lovely, Robin. Such good questions. I might posit that it's not so much a circle that happens, although it feels like it in the moment, but rather something more scattershot--the dashes and dots from random spaces of life, converging and receding. It's one thing to be a community for an hour, but it's something else entirely to remain cohesive for longer. Put another way, that circle will not remain around your colleague, as beautiful as it felt. Mostly, like everyone on the planet, she'll be alone with her own dark nights of the soul, and then, here and there, dashes and dots of scattershot love and support will come to her.
ReplyDeleteAnother way to cast this would be: everyone steps up with feeling in the moment and during the formal process. It's the unique individual--not the larger community--who will drop off a meal for her in a month...in six months...who will call and say, "Let me take your girls for a day so you can go for a run or to get a haircut."
Ultimately, while there feels like power in people coming together, I guess my faith comes down to the individual.
I completley agree, Jocelyn. Yet I can't resist the idea that we should be able to do more -- collectively and individually. It is interesting how we can each have the clarity of insight into what is important in certain settings, yet we are often challenged to remember that and extrapolate from it. That if the person whom we know is suffering and needs help, there are also people we don't know who are suffering similarly and also need help. We seem to lose our bearings the more we move from the concrete to the abstract and I wish we didn't.
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