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Grief, Complexity, and Honor

By Charles Rush

November 28, 2010

[ Audio (mp3, 7.5Mb) ]

saw a fascinating television show about Crows. They are unlike most species of birds. They are much more socially sophisticated, which is probably why they have been revered in traditional societies as people have seen qualities in them quite like our own.

Among other things, they exist as part of an extended Clan or Tribe. They mate for life and they know who they are related to and they don't forget it their whole life. When one of them dies, a call goes out. And Crows have something like 250 distinct calls that scientists have identified a very rich vocabulary if you are a bird… The call goes out that a relative has died.

One by one, all of the relatives get the word and they all fly to the same tree and they sit there in solidarity in the face of death. We can be talking about a couple hundred birds all lining the branches of a tree, mourning together. It is pretty moving.

You probably know that all higher mammals have quite similar emotional responses to death. One that I found so recognizable was a video of elephants traveling across Kenya when researchers filmed them coming on a corpse of another elephant. The Matriarch of the tribe of Elephants went to investigate and recognized the corpse as a good friend of hers. The Matriarch lets out this cry that you just instantly recognize as the pain of grief for your beloved. She blows dust all over herself, the exact same ritual humans used up until about 2000 years ago. All of the other elephants surrounded her and basically hugged her up.

I've been walking people through death now for thirty years and I've seen so many different faces of it over the years. Grief is just such a complex phenomenon. Certainly, there is often just plain sadness, sometimes so great that it just spills over spontaneously.

I remember one funeral when a 45 year old man lost his wife. They had the coffin in the middle of the aisle and the family was walking up. He gets to the coffin and leans over and hugs it and keeps hugging it. I thought for a minute we'd have to pry him loose but I get that sadness. I often say that it is the price we pay for the privilege of love.

One time, we had a friend that died way too young, probably at 40. The guy was a genius, funny, broad minded. Everyone loved him. Then This terrible accident… A life cut short. We are all at the graveside and it started to pour out of nowhere. Hardly anyone had an umbrella, so we were all just getting soaked. The Minister said ‘Amen', they lowered the coffin into the ground, everyone is standing around the edge. One of his best friends, just so full of upset, kicked some of the dirt into the grave. Then another friend did the same. Then another one reached down his hands and pushed a big hunk of mud. Then everyone joined in. It went on for a bit until the grave was filled. And everyone stood there tears mixing with rain, suits completely ruined, skirts smeared with clay, complete messes. It was a spontaneous purge and everyone was on the same page with it. Odd as it seems, it was perfect. In that moment, liturgy reflected life.

But it is a lot more than that too. Fairly often, there is a component of anger that we rarely acknowledge. I got a helpful glimpse of that when I was very young. My first church out of college was a rural congregation when I had just started going to seminary. I learned a lot from country people. They are reserved but they also had an emotional bluntness that was a lot less polite and a lot more honest than the world I grew up in. I was out writing a sermon at the Church when I saw one of the Matriarchs of the church pull up in a pick up truck. She got out of the truck, reached in the bed of the truck, got a pitchfork, walked over to the graveyard, and stabbed that thing in the ground with some real force.

She walked back to her truck and sat in the front seat for a while. She got out of the truck, walked back to the grave, pulled that pitchfork out of the ground and stabbed the earth three or four more times for good measure and drove off. It left an indelible impression on me. It is not always what it seems. In fact, it is usually not what it seems and love is able to hold a lot of contradictory emotions together at one time. That is what makes love ‘love' in fact.

With some regularity, there is a dark humor that attends death. We had a woman that died from cancer in her thirties. She was vibrant, involved, and a public figure. So her funeral had a lot of public people there. The family decided that they wanted to do something a bit more private as well.

About a year later, they decided to get together at the beach, and spread her ashes in the ocean down near the family beach house that she loved so much. Her husband, some of her friends, her parents and some other relatives met at the beach house, toasted her honor, brought her dogs with them as they went to the beach. They said a few things Oceanside and then a couple of them waded out into the water which was much colder than they thought it was going to be, and they tossed all of the flower out into the waves. I'm sure they envisioned a misty moment right about now.

Of course, the dogs- Did I mention that they brought her dogs?- being dogs, ran headlong into the waves and retrieved the flowers. Reprimanded they tossed the flowers again but the moment they let the dogs off the leash, they retrieved the flowers again. They tried it a couple more times to no avail, so they gave up.

And they decided to just spread the ashes instead. Again, a few of them are out in the water knee deep and frigid. They say a farewell, open the lid on the urn of ashes. At just that moment, big gust of wind from off shore sweeps in. At the very moment they toss the ashes in the air, it gusts, and the ashes cover a whole bunch of the people there, not quite exactly what they'd planned. Everyone was laughing and crying at the same time. The woman they were honoring had a great sense of humor and it was something of a fitting tribute to her in an offbeat way.

And sometimes, it can just be overwhelmingly lonely. We lost a young woman in her early thirties. Among other things, she had been a volunteer at the Raptor Trust out in the Great Swamp in New Vernon. A few weeks after the funeral was over, her immediate family and friends gathered out in the field near the raptor trust, with a beautiful Red Shouldered Hawk that had been healed of a broken bone. And now they were ready to release it.

We said some prayers on behalf of the deceased woman. And then a man uncovered the bird, held it on his arm, and let it fly away. The huge hawk started flying in circles, higher and higher, higher and higher, so graceful and elegant. It was a touching and beautiful moment. I'm sitting there watching the bird in all of its majesty and then I keep watching her parents, her mother in particular. She is surrounded by the strength of all those friends and relatives around her and she needs it because letting go of your child is as lonely and soulful a challenge as we have in human existence. That is as tough as it gets.

Sometimes death can seem like a marathon. Several years ago, I got a call from a son. He had been to visit his mother in Florida where she was retired. The son had a rather halting conversation but the upshot of it was that his Mother was dating a man that he'd recently met on a visit. It was obvious that they were involved. The son thought it was too soon after his Dad had died and was, I suppose, calling me for some guidelines on what is the appropriate time-span for grief, perhaps hoping that I would talk to his Mother so that he didn't have too. I don't make those calls, so he was disappointed if that is what he hoped.

Many months went by, I happened to run into his Mother at a fundraising event in New York. Somehow the subject came up rather naturally, so I made the comment to her that her son had been concerned about this. She rolled her eyes and said “My children, bless them… The truth is, he's been the best thing that has happened to me in a long time, let me tell you. My kids knew that their Dad was dying but they live in San Francisco and Chicago. My beloved husband was dying for a year and a half. They have no idea what it was like day in and day out to live with that. There comes a time when you've just had enough. I need someone to hug me too.” I understand that completely.

And sometimes, it is just a shock. My first close encounter with death, I was 13. I was in Eighth Grade in the suburbs north of Chicago. I was walking to school one day with the other 3 guys from the football team that I always walked to school with. My best friend at the time was behind us and somehow stepped out in the street and was hit by an oncoming car.

I just remember the quarterback for our team yelling out emergency commands like he was calling a play and all of us getting my friend covered and warm, even though it was completely obvious that he was dead. Then we were standing around with the police and the authorities, each of us wondering how it was that grown men would respond to something like this, trying to assume a persona.

Different era, we had to go to school that day, and the principal came on the loud speaker right before the bell at the end of the day and announced that my friend was, indeed, dead. All day long, I never could figure out how a grown man would respond. I just remember running out of the school with supernatural speed and I kept running and running all the way home and I got under the covers and my Mom hugged me.

Death and grief is all of these things… and more. It is a very complex reality. It is just part of human existence, an integral, if difficult part of human existence. And you know, it is in the midst of this grief and sadness that the hope of the season is expressed.

Our texts in this season are so elevated, so rich because they speak to the deepest longing of the human heart in our sorrow and tragedy. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me, he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives… to comfort those who mourn; to give them a garland instead of ashes, the mantle of praise in the place of fear. They will be called Oaks of righteousness. They will build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the devastations of many generations.”

There is healing in the midst of brokenness. As sure as death is part of the natural order of our world, so is redemption and healing part of the transcendent order of our God. As the old spiritual puts it, “There is a balm in Gilead”. Everything can't all be cured or we would live forever… But we can be healed. We can make it better.

When I was a child, if something really bad happened- for that matter, if something really good happened- I wanted to be near my Grandmother, Nana. She was old school even for the World War 2 Generation. Her hair fell down to her waist but she always kept it up in a bun, except in front of her husband and her grandchildren.

If I would get scared in the middle of the night, she would come next to my bed in a nightgown that was flowing to the ground, silver hair flowing down to her waist. She'd pick me up and put my head on her chest and rock me and kiss me on the head. I don't care what is was, I got better. She would just pour the love into me. Bruce Springsteen calls it “The place you can't remember…. And you can't forget”.

God is like that. When people met Jesus, they called him ‘The Christ' because they experienced something like that. They got stronger and less afraid. They knew healing. They were loved. What those early Christians came to realize is that this love is so strong, it transcends death. It doesn't abnegate death or cancel it, but it does transcend it.

We still have a relationship with those loved ones that went before us, it is just not a relationship with a living person anymore. But those people that loved us, who gave us the confidence and the freedom to do something daring so that we could find our way, such as it is, we can still honor them, with our lives, the way we love down the next generation. We can heal others and bless them and make them stronger. At the end of our brief sojourn on this planet, you come to realize that we are no more, but no less, than conduits for God's grace, healing, and love. So we can look to the past, remember those that shaped us, for better and worse, and on our more mature days to realize that even the limitations we were given became for us those places of personal growth, so that even in our overcoming the past, this is how we became who we are in fact are.

We can see ourselves as conduits. We can channel the best, filter the worst. And through this, we find the meaning of honor for our generation and our families, in our community, in this era. The Gospel of John says of Jesus, “In him was the life and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.” Sometimes it is just a single candle, just a flicker of hope. But we add to that other flickers and it is amazing that collectively we can channel an effulgent presence that is inspiring and humane in its own beautiful way.

So that is what we are going to do right now, remember those that have gone before us and in gratitude and perhaps with a rather wide range of other emotions, we will honor them. I've asked Danny Rufolo to play a meditation for us as we sit in silence. As you are so moved to light a candle for someone, Rev. Julie will be up front with votive candles and tapers.

We will start with those that have lost relatives in the past year. I've asked the family of Bob Franks who died last April to start us off, so after listening to Danny for a minute, I'm going to walk to the back and get the girls as we light a candle for their Dad. Add your candles next to theirs when you are ready. Amen.