Walking in the Shadow

A Sermon by
Mallory LaSonde

Delivered Sunday, October 29, 2000

At The First Parish in Bedford

OPENING WORDS:

The opening words this morning are from an essay entitled Death in the Open by Lewis Thomas. In it he talks about the choice of most animals to die in private.

In our way, we conform as best we can to the rest of nature. The obituary pages tell us of the news that we are dying away, while the birth announcements in finer print, off at the side of the page, inform us of our replacements, but we get no grasp from this of the enormity of scale. There are 3 billion of us on the earth, and all 3 billion must be dead, on a schedule, within this lifetime. The vast mortality, involving something over 50 million of us each year, takes place in relative secrecy. We can only really know of the deaths in our households, or among our friends. These, detached in our minds from all the rest, we take to be anomalies, outrages. We speak of our own dead in low voices; struck down, we say, as though visible death can only happen for cause, by disease or violence, avoidably. We send off flowers, grieve, make ceremonies, scatter bones, unaware of the rest of the 3 billion on the same schedule.

Less than a half century from now, our replacements will have more than doubled the numbers. It is hard to see how we can continue to keep the secret, with such multitudes doing the dying. We will have to give up the notion that death is catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or even strange. We will need to learn more about the cycling of life in the rest of the system, and about our connection to that process. Everything that comes alive seems to be in trade for something that dies, cell for cell. There might be some comfort in the recognition of synchrony, in the formation that we all go down together, in the best of company.

STORY:

There was a woman many years ago who had a child. A beautiful child. The woman did everything for the child, loving and caring for it. But the child became ill and died. The woman was so sad. She did not want to believe that her child was dead. Tenderly she wrapped the child’s body in a blanket and took it out of the city to the nearby monastery to the Buddha. He would know what to do, she thought. She approached the Buddha and said to him, "O, Great Buddha, you alone have the power to bring my child back to life. For I love my child. Please help me." The Buddha felt the woman’s pain. He thought about her request and said to her, "There is only one thing to be done. You must go into the city and bring me mustard seeds from a house that has known no death." "Certainly," the woman replied, "I will go right away and bring you what you ask." And so she went back into the city and knocked on the first door she saw and asked the man who answered, "Please, sir, I need mustard seed from a house that has known no death, so that the Buddha can bring my child back to life." "Mustard seed I have," the man replied, "and gladly I would give it to you, but my wife died three years ago, so it will be of no use to you because this house has known death." At the next house she was told about the death of a grandfather, and an uncle at the next. She searched, but as time went on she realized that there was no house like the one she sought. Each and every home had known death. Finally she took the child’s body to the burying grounds. She was still sad, but she had learned that everyone in the city knew what it feels like when someone they loved dies. And so it is here. Everyone in this congregation knows what that feels like and when someone you care about dies you will know that all of these people know what that feels like. And part of being part of a community is that you can share those things and people here will understand and hold you in their hearts.

Death — there is perhaps no word which puts us less at ease than this one. That it is fodder for comedians and playwrights and poets should be no great surprise. It is the stuff of ambiguity. It is our reality and yet we deal with it most readily in fiction. Death is a huge and complicated topic, impossible to cover in a year, never mind an hour. What we can hope for here is the start of a conversation, knowing that shared knowledge is our best defense against the fear of the unknown.

Walking in the shadow of death is a strange thing. I have been privileged to be with death twice. I have lost other people in my life, but I have been in the room twice. It is a very powerful thing to be that close to someone as they die. Not everything about it was beautiful and angels choirs did not sing. But I have never experienced anything more profound than to be in presence of death.

Sometime during our lives we each become aware of our mortality. It is what makes us human, this awareness. Whether we believe death is an end, a beginning, or a transition along the way, we realize that this life will finish with death. You, me, everyone we know will face death. It truly is the only thing we all have in common, since there are people who don’t pay taxes. The realization is sudden for some and gradual for others. And afterwards there comes the long learning about death through the deaths of others, through books and movies, through the news. It enters our consciousness in many ways and is all around us. But if we live, as it were, in the shadow of death, then why are so many of us unprepared? Why do we push it away from conscious thought? Why do we do our best to ignore it as completely as possible?

One answer is the pain of loss and the natural human inclination to avoid things which cause us pain. It is the recognition of this pain that we will call to mind as we remember those who have died later in the service. The other answer is fear, fear of our own limitations, fear of our death, or the deaths of those we love. One writer calls this "the wound of our mortality.’ We carry this wound with us from the time we become aware of death. It aches. But unlike other wounds which we check constantly and treat and worry about, this one is so deep that we don’t even want to look at it.

There are many ways to approach the topic of death. But it’s hard to know where to begin. Maybe a statistic will help. Besides the obvious 100% statistic of which we are each an important part, in this country fully 80% of us will die of illness under the care of the medical profession. In this election year, the specter of HMOs looms large and the holes in the system around insurance, the nursing home system, hospice care, and the allocation of medical resources are all very real. What to do about these problems is less clear, particularly as the population ages and the strains on the system increase. So clearly this is an area of fear. A big one. We worry about getting lost in that system. We worry about getting the care we need. We worry about getting care we don’t want. We worry about someone prolonging our death and we worry about someone shortening our life. In short we worry about our inability to control this part of our lives. We imagine ourselves in this 80% and we are afraid.

Then there is the other 20%. These are the people who die in accidents, murders, suicides, combat, and natural disasters. And we worry about this, too. These are the people who don’t get the chance to say goodbye, to make peace with estranged family members and friends. These are the people whose bodies may not come home. We imagine ourselves as one of this 20% and we are afraid.

Then there is what happens after death. In our culture we have a mix of understandings: a linear progression of two lives, one this world and one in the next and a more cyclical tradition of multiple lives in this world with birth, death, and rebirth. From this combination comes a mixture of ideas and fears. Some of us fear that there is nothing after death—that we truly only pass this way once and what we make of it is all we leave behind. Some of us fear that there is a hell. I know we’re not supposed to believe that one, but somewhere deep down inside, some of us still wonder about judgment and retribution. Some of us worry about the next life here on earth. Will we be with the people we love again? We will come back as an ant or a goat? Will we be punished in the next life for the bad things we did or thought in this one, just as we sometimes wonder whether we are being punished in this life for something we did the last time around. Some of us believe in heaven, but that’s no perfect solution either, because eternity is a very long time and what if we don’t like it and the wings are too heavy and we don’t look good in white. And besides there are plenty of perfectly nice people who could end up in heaven who we really don’t want to see, especially for eternity.

But for some of us the problem is more immediate than the afterlife: for some of us the problem is the funeral. Supposing no one comes? If there is a time of sharing, what if nobody has anything to say? What if the minister pronounces my name wrong? What if everyone comes because they are so happy that I’m gone? And for those with the open casket as part of the plan there is a whole host of problems around the outfit, the hair, the makeup—things could get really ugly in this area alone. Those of you who saw "Postcards From the Edge" and heard Shirley Maclaine’s character talking about her missing eyebrows you know what I mean. Now most of us can be pretty sure that we won’t actually be there for the funeral. But that doesn’t stop us from worrying about it now.

And for some of us the problem is more immediate still. These are people who have been declared dead all evidence to the contrary, since they are still with us arguing the point. This includes anyone who has gotten on the bad side of the Social Security Administration and a number of people in India, whose family members want their land and have found that by declaring the owner dead they can inherit. If we think the bureaucracies we have are bad, it reaches the level of the unbelievable when the government official telling you that you are dead is a neighbor with whom you just had tea. But Lal Bahari, founder of the Association of Dead People (yes, there are enough of them to form an association), had just such an experience. He did his best to force the issue by running for office, suing people, and having his wife apply for widow’s benefits—all in an attempt to be named in the public record. And on the plus side it finally worked—it only took 19 years, during which time, luckily he did not die. Who knows what kind of tailspin his actual demise might have caused in the middle of this protracted battle.

Then there is the problem of the disposition of the remains. My mother solved this dilemma for us by leaving specific instructions about almost every aspect of her funeral, including instructions about her ashes. Knowing that we inherited her love of travel she left a list of suggested places for her ashes to be scattered—giving us a solidly good reason to continue travelling. She is, therefore, now spread across 4 states, and 6 countries, in places she knew and loved and new places which reminded us of her. And we are still working on it. I must confess that it gives me pause to go through customs and immigration with her in my suitcase, but so far, so good. I know this seems bizarre to some people and morbid to others, but a surprising number of people understand this process when I describe it to them. And it feels right to me that she is not limited to one place. Just as it feels right that my grandparents are each buried in a plot in a cemetery.

And while we’re on the topic of burial: there was a television program produced in 1993 called "Death: The Trip of a Lifetime," written and narrated by Greg Palmer, a self-defined UU without a church. He traveled to a number of countries in his quest to understand the experience of death from the perspective of the living. Palmer spent some time learning about the props of death. He watched the dyeing of Ghanian mourning cloth and the stamping of it with patterns representing symbols of death and afterlife and the life of the particular individual, including that universal symbol of wealth, the Mercedes-Benz symbol. Down the road a bit he visited with a man who makes coffins. Not the traditional ones we are used to, but a cow and a fish and a Yamaha outboard motor built for the first person in town who ever owned one. And, yes, a wooden Mercedes Benz. It’s not what I would pick myself, but somehow it beats the thought of being buried in a large wooden cow. And in New York he talked to a funeral director who didn’t even have the grace to wince when he discussed the opportunity to spend $89K on a casket and service. I’m not sure what I’d expect my casket to do for that much money, but I’ll bet it doesn’t do much more than the traditional pine box. That’s New York City for you.

On a more serious note, the nightmare for some of us is the thought of dying alone, while some desperately hope that no loved one will have to suffer through watching them die. Some want to die at home, for others that would be terrible. And for many of us there is a true and profound fear of dying in pain.

Greg Palmer visited with the students of St. John’s, an elementary school in Seattle. These children study death alongside math and social studies. When a schoolmate and two parents died in the same year the school board decided that grief counseling after the fact was not enough. Their take on it was that the more the kids knew, the better they would be able to cope. So these kids talk about death, what it means, what they believe about it, and what scares them about it. On the day Palmer visited, they were writing their own epitaphs, with the instruction to think about what they want people to remember about them, not their accomplishments, but themselves. One that stood out was ‘here lies a person with no special talents, except the talent to love.’

When you think about the anomaly of a school teaching children about death you can’t help but be reminded of how much we talk about this subject and how little we say. We use euphemisms like passed on and passed over and took the big ride. As a society we are surrounded by death in movies, on the news, in video games. We worry that our children will become somehow hardened to the ideas of death and killing, that the value of human life is somehow less than it ought to be. And we pay money to flirt with death by bungie-jumping and extreme sports. We hold off the reality of death sometimes by extreme behavior—whether it be of health food, exercise, surgery. We talk openly about advances which will make it possible for us to live 150 years believing that once we reach that point there will be other advances to prolong life further. And when all else fails and reality approaches we have cryonics.

And we talk about good death. What we mean by good death depends on the context. In some quarters this means death in the service of one’s country. We understand intellectually the concept of a military version of good death even if we don’t always agree with the objectives of service which might lead to such a death. But I wonder how comfortable many of us are with the idea of dying for one’s beliefs. This is an accepted and conscious choice in many parts of the world. To become martyr for a cause is very important in a number of cultures. We have martyrs, too. But they are largely not volunteers. I think Matthew Shepard, for example, would just as soon not have become a rallying cry. We made him into what we needed to make sense of and find value in an otherwise senseless death. So, too, with the children of Columbine. We turned them into icons within days of their deaths—killers and victims alike, so deep is our need to make meaning of death. To not die in vain is a deeply held wish. This can mean that the life had value, but in the absence of that it can mean that the death had some value. This is for some the definition of good death. Finally, the good death is death which has dignity and peace and choice to the extent possible. It is this last definition which most of us envision when we talk about wanting to have a good death. It implies being ready, accepting the reality of death, and maintaining some measure of control.

Death holds great ambiguity for us. On the one hand, we are aware of it daily; on the other, we push it away when it gets too close. During the recent discussions here an interesting pair of opinions was expressed. One person spoke eloquently about the limitations of the Unitarian Universalist response to death, by saying that the traditional memorial service as a celebration of life prevents us from expressing our grief, somehow bypassing grief on the way to celebration. When we share stories during these services they are rarely about how we feel, but rather about happy memories or the special talents of the person being remembered. This may give a comfortable distance for some for whom an overt display of grief would be troubling, but for others it may in fact be too remote and not allow the needed emotional release. On another night someone talked about the power that the celebration of life represents for them because it is the chance for the entire community to share together a sense of loss. It is an interesting combination of views and I offer it to you because it demonstrates the boundary between experience and expectation which is so much a part of our discomfort around death.

Some of our expectations are very deeply seated in traditions from childhood or societal norms. And unlike so many other areas where we talk openly about debunking childhood beliefs and myths and superstitions, we don’t do that with death. So the ideas we have about death sometimes don’t see the light of day until we are in the midst of dealing with it directly. And then we may feel ill at ease with our response without really understanding why.

Discomfort about death is not limited to our congregations. That disease is a good deal more widespread than among UUs. Bit it is interesting in an association which talks openly, often, and much about so many topics of concern, that death remains an area where we tread cautiously if at all. We recognize sex as an integral part of life and we stand ahead of many denominations in our willingness to teach and learn about this important part of life. Not so with death.

So what to do. Talk more often and more openly. It is interesting that the last time death was the single topic of a Sunday service here seems to have been 1993. And there are people who expressed real anxiety about this service and what I would be presenting and how I would be handling it. I am not suggesting that we all take this opportunity to fixate on death and spend our lives doing nothing but preparing for it. There is much too much living to concentrate too much on dying. But sharing information and stories is critical. People need to talk about their experiences and their fears. We need to know that our concerns are not ours alone. And when we suffer a loss, we need to share it openly without fear of people’s discomfort. Death is unavoidably part of the cycle of life in the community. Part of the richness of our relationships is in their boundaries, they are finite and we should not miss the chance to broaden and deepen them. They are the very stuff of life. They are what allow us to walk in the shadow and still live in the sunshine.

MEDITATION WITH POETRY:

The molecules of your body
are the same molecules that make up this station,
...and the nebula outside,
...that burn inside the stars themselves.
We are starstuff.
We are the universe made manifest trying to figure itself out.
Sometimes the universe requires a change of perspective.

If I should ever leave you,
whom I love
To go along the Silent Way,
grieve not,
Nor speak of me with tears,
but laugh and talk
Of me as if I were
Beside you there.
(I’d come, I’d come,
could I but find a way!
But would not tears and grief
be barriers?)
And when you hear a song
or see a bird
I loved, please do not let
the thought of me

Be sad… For I am
Loving you just as
I always have…
You were so good to me!
There are so many things
I wanted still
To do — so many things
to say to you…
Remember that I
did not fear… It was
Just leaving you
that was so hard to face…
We cannot see beyond…
But this I know:
I loved you so — ‘twas heaven
here with you.

As a child I learned to celebrate endings.
Years end in birthdays,
and school ends in summer or proms or graduation.

But careers and friendships and lives end
in argument or silence,
with spectacular failure or long, slow fading.

I wish that I could graduate from life;
be valedictorian of my dying class,
and see my honors listed in the program.

Waving my diploma above my head,
I would invite everyone to the party
at the house of my ancestors.

Together, we would make our plans
for three lazy months in the Summer Lands,
and a new beginning at some invisible college far away.

BENEDICTION:

Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by my old familiar name, speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone; wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effort, without the ghost of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was; there is absolutely unbroken continuity. What is death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of your mind because I am out of your sight?

I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near—just round the corner. All is well.

AMEN and Blessed Be.