by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, May 25, 2003
Tomorrow is Memorial Day. For some of us, that means parades in our various small towns, something special to mark the day for our kids. In each parade there will be a small vestige of a reminder of the original focus of Memorial Day: remembering and honoring our war dead. In Durham where I live, we've attended the Memorial Day parade every year for the ten years we've lived there, and every year the most solemn part of the procession comes at the end, after all the floats and marchers, school bands and fire trucks have gone by. The parade route dissolves and everyone gathers around on the town green to hear whoever is First Selectman give a rote and usually boring patriotic speech. Then a single trumpet plays taps, as those who have fallen in war are silently remembered and honored.
That solitary instrument floating its haunting notes out into the air almost always makes me teary. The tears are not just sadness for those, nameless to me, who died so young in the violence of war as our soldiers. It's also because of the terrible ongoing ambivalence inherent in these Memorial Day gatherings, in which a remembrance of the dead always seems foiled by a form of patriotism that glorifies war and makes it appear noble and even desirable. My sadness is evoked by our unending willingness to enter into this form of destruction with one another. For all the generations that have hoped and prayed that their war might be the last, that their sons and daughters might be spared the slaughter and the sorrow, we just can't seem to grow ourselves out of the pathways that lead us there, again and again.
Four or five years ago when we gathered on the green after the parade for the standard mayoral speech, I was startled to hear something new. The First Selectman was a conservative Republican with whom I seldom saw eye to eye except in his commitment to land preservation. He was a veteran of Vietnam, though; and in this particular speech he left behind all of the usual patriotic rhetoric to speak with passion straight from his heart.
The gist of what he said was that we are completely missing the point if all we do on Memorial Day is remember those who died during war-time. He said that the sacrifice and suffering of war comes in a multitude of forms, and he cited the grim statistic that more Vietnam veterans died by their own hands in the thirty years following that war than were killed in combat. And he concluded by saying that it's in remembering those still living and suffering that we most authentically honor those who have already died.
This brings me to the question Kendyl Gibbons asked in her essay. What do the living owe to the dead? The idea behind Memorial Day was to honor the war dead, to acknowledge a sacrifice, to pay attention to the fact that our lives have been blessed, protected and enhanced by the choice someone else made to live, and ultimately die, sacrificially. But the question of what the living owe the dead goes far beyond those who have died as soldiers, because there have been so many others who have created the possibilities of our lives by how they chose to live their own lives. All of them deserve our remembrance and our honor. But it isn't enough just to notice the difference they made. We need a way to name the reality that our lives are still peopled not only by those who breathe around us, but also by our beloved dead.
In our country and culture there isn't much room made for any form of collective remembrance and grief. We tend to honor our dead as we do most other things: quickly, efficiently, with eyes resolutely turned forward. We have a funeral or memorial service soon after the death. Friends and relatives gather, share our grief and try to comfort us. But then, within a matter of weeks or at most a few months, life has returned to normal -- at least in theory.
In a book called The Ability to Mourn, Peter Homans writes, "In America, there is a tradition, almost a truism, that part of our national identity is to be progressive and forward-looking…Americans are not accustomed to looking back." The continuance of grief and loss, the permanence of the change in our lives in the wake of a death, is largely private and mostly invisible. And after the worst of the grief has passed by, there is no ritual or practice, no prayer or celebration, to help us name and lay claim to the continuing love and connection we feel for those who have died.
But there are some who have figured out a way to do it that seem to me profoundly grounded and healing, because in their traditions looking back is deeply incorporated into moving forward. In Nicaragua, and in much of Latin America, the rhythm of loss is prescribed and involves the whole community. A person is buried within a day of their death, a practice made urgent by the tropical climate. The family gathers and mourns, and sometimes special flowering branches are laid around the door.
Nine days later comes the Novena -- the real memorial service, usually held in the home. An altar is built in the house, usually displacing furniture in the main living area, with a photo of the dead person and offerings of flowers, candles and memorabilia, and it often remains for a month or more. On the one month anniversary of the death and again at the one-year mark there are additional memorial services. And often, especially for those who died in combat, there is a deliberate evocation at any time at all, for years into the future, as their names are called out three times, with the echoing response, "Presente!" each time: "present", with us.
Jewish tradition has the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. It's supposed to be recited daily for an entire year by those whose loss is most intimate: a parent or sibling, a spouse or a child. But there's a public, communal dimension as well: during Sabbath service each week the Kaddish is recited. All those within the congregation who are in their one year of mourning stand while the prayer is spoken. Thus in a vivid and intimate way, mourners are linked to one another as well as to their wider community. They are reminded that they are not alone in their grief, and they are held and nurtured by community as they move through to the healing of their loss.
One of my favorite traditions lives in Mexico. There the celebration of the Day of the Dead is a time not just for remembrance of the dead but for communing with them. Entire families spend the day together in the graveyards, cleaning the graves and planting new flowers, picnicking and leaving plates full of the favorite foods of those who are buried there, remembering them, speaking their names, allowing themselves to feel again the bonds that bind them together, even through the mystery of death.
Humor is twined through the holiday, with skulls made of candy and little skeleton statues dressed in zoot suits or elegant dresses, playing jazz or riding upside-down on motorcycles or set up in creative, often bawdy poses. The message is a double one but it's clear enough. One part of the message is: Death is real, it's a part of life and we might as well get over our angst and accept it: lighten up! The other part is: Honor the dead. Remember them. Recognize that they have shaped you and therefore continue to play a part in your life through the way you've incorporated them -- literally embodied them -- in who you are.
Terry Tempest Williams wrote about a trip to Mexico made during this Day of the Dead: "Carrying a lit candle I entered the procession of masked individuals walking toward the cemetery. We followed the pathway of petals -- marigold petals sprinkled so the dead could follow. …Hundreds of candles were flickering as families left offerings on the graves of their kin: photographs, flowers and food…Men and women washed the blue-tiled tombs that rose from the ground like altars, while other relatives cut back the vines that obscured the names of their loved ones. There were no tears here.
Porque esta aqui? asked the old woman whose arms were wide with marigolds. I looked up and stood. Mi madre esta muerta [my mother is dead…]. She points down. Aqui? 'No, not here'. I try to explain in poor Spanish. 'She is buried back home, Los Estados Unidos, but this is a good place to remember her.' We both pause. The woman motions me to another place in the cemetery. I follow her until she turns around. She slowly sweeps her hand across five or six graves. Mi familia, she says smiling. 'My husband, my mother and father, my children.' Then her hand moves up as she recklessly waves to the sky. 'It's very beautiful -- this sky above us, the clouds like roses…'[She looks at me again and says kindly], 'The dead are among us.' She hands me a marigold. 'Gracias', I say to her; 'This is the flower my mother planted every spring.'"
Such a practice, such an attitude, seems very far away from what we're accustomed to in modern American life. Here we tend to think in straight, clean lines. We imagine there must be a path to follow when someone we love has died, some kind of 'right' way to move through our grieving and leave the sorrow behind us. We want to have in mind some timeframe, the way we know roughly how long it should take for a bad cold to run its course. But no one has a map to give us. No one knows the way because our love was unique, our loss one of a kind, and the comfort of the collective -- the affirmation that each of us has a unique love and loss -- is mostly not available to us. Our grief is private, our remembrance is largely private, and there is no collective opportunity to say aloud the truth that we have in fact not left our dead behind us -- not ever.
That's why I sometimes envy the deep-rooted tradition in Mexico. I wish for myself, and for others, the communal practice that could bring us together to a place of comfort with our dead and with death itself, a place where grieving is lessened and thinned among the many who grieve until it is simply woven into our lives, a strand among others. That's what would enable us to stand among the graves and still feel connected and able to smile when we say, 'my family'.
And maybe it would let us think more clearly about that question from Kendyl Gibbons: What do the living owe to the dead? Especially on Memorial Day, when we consider those who died not from illness or accident or the whittling away of age, but from bullets and bombs flying madly toward them, as well as out of their own hands toward the enemy soldiers. All of them, all of these brothers and sons and now daughters too, dead in the name of protecting those of us who go on living: what do we owe them?
It's a question made urgent by the war of our own day, a war that is in no sense over, as our thousands and thousands of soldiers continue a military occupation that cannot in any accurate sense be called "peace". What do we owe the ones who died there, the others who will die before it's over? Not just remembrance; not a shrine like the Vietnam Memorial; not a victory parade.
We owe great care to the ways their comrades, the soldiers who are still living, are treated and attended to on their return. We must remember the years of denial, of deceit and refusal of benefits and medical care to the nearly fifty percent of veterans who suffered illness after the first Gulf War. To these new Gulf veterans, we owe swift and complete care. We owe alert attention to the budget games now underway, under which massive tax cuts will inevitably damage every social program that sustains the vulnerable among us, including veterans. We owe a relentless insistence on accountability: why was it again that these latest sons and daughters died? Since it is now clear that Iraq's dictator posed nothing close to the threat that was so often and hysterically proclaimed, who was lying to us? And what do they owe to the dead?
If we begin with these questions focused on our war dead, it is a small stretch to extend them in another way to all of those we've loved and lost, because fundamentally the question of what we owe to all of our dead has to do with how we remember, and how we let the memory deepen the integrity of our living. Both by memory and by the way we bring conscious will and attention to how we live our lives, we acknowledge that the dead are still with us.
The loss is real -- but so is the mystery of connection born of love, born of companionship, and born of the ways we've been shaped and changed and made who we are by the touch of hands no longer with us. When we remember and honor our dead we allow ourselves to see that even when those hands have vanished, their fingerprints continue to appear in our lives up until the day we ourselves will die. To name the reality of that touch and shaping together, to name together both the pain of loss and the joy of love, is the best service of any community
[Those who wish to may name those they've loved who have died]
Closing meditation from Senegal:
Listen to things more often than beings.
Hear the voice of the fire, hear the voice of the water,
Listen in the wind to the sighing of the bush:
This is the ancestors breathing.
Those who are dead are never gone;…
The dead are not down in the earth:
They are in the trembling of the trees,
In the groaning of the woods,
In the water that runs, in the water that sleeps,
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd…
Those who are dead are not ever gone;
They are in the woman's breast, they are in the wailing of a child,
They are in the burning log and in the moaning rock..
They are in the weeping grasses, in the forest and the home…
Listen to things more often than beings.
Hear the voice of fire, hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind to the sighing of the bush.
This is the ancestors breathing. AMEN.