They had missed these things after their father died. The arrangements for him were so practical and efficient that their emotional needs had gone unmet. As it happened, their father’s ashes had not ever actually been scattered but had been kept in a closet in the son’s house, and the children wanted both sets of remains in the same place. Martha agreed. And knew why she agreed. It was what they wanted and needed.
To be as helpful and useful as possible, Martha joined the People’s Memorial Society—a cooperative organization that had negotiated a special set of arrangements and fees with an open-minded funeral director. For her membership fee, Martha was given help in filling out forms describing her funeral plans. The society recorded the information necessary for the death certificate and the newspaper obituary. When Martha died, all the family had to do was call the memorial society—they and the funeral director took care of the rest. A great deal of worry and anxiety and confusion were lifted from her family.
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With her daughter and son, Martha selected and purchased a plot in the cemetery and talked about the funeral service along the way. She gave them suggestions. Her only insistence was that it be a celebration of life—and that nobody wear black. She didn’t like black, for one thing. And she had read somewhere that the reason black was the color of mourning was because in ancient times, people believed that the spirits of the dead could enter the bodies of the living. To keep from being possessed, mourners disguised themselves by painting their bodies black or covering themselves with black garments. The custom of women wearing black veils is an extension of this precaution.
After talking with her doctor and her lawyer, Martha made a Living Will, which prescribed the limits of care she wanted. She made arrangements with the Hospice Society regarding home care.
The most difficult discussion revolved around Martha’s desire to die at home and to have some part in the decision to die when life on the dialysis machine became unbearable for her. She didn’t want to become a financial or emotional burden to her family, and she didn’t want to be kept alive by heroic means. She wanted some say in her demise.
As it turned out, Martha died pretty much as she wished.
After being bedridden at home for a week, she felt her time had come and made the decision not to have any further dialysis. Her children and grandchildren took turns staying with her, and a visiting nurse came in every day. Sleep turned into a deep coma, and with her family gathered around her on April Fool’s morning, she took one last breath and passed on.
Martha was lucky. That’s what many people said. She had time.
No, that’s not it. I think Martha was wise. She took time.
Time to think, time to learn, time to consider others.
All of this seems a lot of work.
It’s not. Martha put her affairs in order in about a month’s time.
If she had not, it would have taken a year out of the lives of her heirs.
Her knowledge made death a compatible reality instead of a fearful enemy.
Her funeral was held on the other side of fear.
How she died was based on how she lived.
Much of what she accomplished can be accomplished by any of us.
Consistently, I have seen that those who take time to plan arrangements with death end up having made new arrangements with life. We all know stories of what happens when people find out they have a limited time to live. Many finally start living well. They simplify their lives, spend time with those they love, slow down, and get around to doing many things they had put off.
What about sudden death, you may ask?
What rituals apply then? When no thought has been given to death?
Death is always expected—always nearby.
Preparing for it is like wearing an existential seat belt.
With forethought you’ve increased the odds of living through it.
What Martha Carter did was right for her.
It is not what you are supposed to do.
You should do what’s right for you and your family.
But you should do it.
After they know they are going to die, people often live and die well.
Let me announce, then, to you:
You have a limited time to live.
REVIVAL
The remedy for dirt is soap and water.
The remedy for dying is living.
CHINESE PROVERB
Between the first inhale at birth and the last exhale at death are all the little deaths and revivals. Some part of us is always dying. For an impatient person like me, just waiting—in line or in traffic or on hold—waiting, waiting, waiting … is deadly. “I’d rather die than wait.”
And I die each night, buried under the coffin cover of darkness.
Only to revive—come to waking life again—at dawn.
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When I graduated from school and left home, a world died.
Most of the people I had seen every day, I never saw again, as surely as if they were dead. And the same thing happened when I changed jobs, moved to a new city, or from one part of town to another. The people and places, the habits of a day, the routes to work, the sidewalk scenery, and the framework of a way of life became history—finished, dead. Those who leave their native land to take up life in a new country know about this. As do those who get divorced.
When we’ve changed our religious views or political convictions, a part of our past dies. When love ends, be it the first mad romance of adolescence, the love that will not sustain a marriage, or the love of failed friendship, it is the same. A death.
Likewise in the event of a miscarriage or an abortion: a possibility is dead. And there is no public or even private funeral. Sometimes only regret and nostalgia mark the passage. And the last rites are held in the solitude of one’s most secret self—a service of mourning in the tabernacle of the soul.
Nevertheless, most of us seem to be stubborn about surviving these lesser deaths, finding ways to get up off our knees and get on with it. We fight back—reach out to find new ways and new friends and new places and new reasons for scrambling on. Crossing these thresholds is a rite of passage. Revival is a lifelong ritual.
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Nothing about being human amazes me more than this capacity for revival.
How dull and meaningless and hopeless life can seem—only to become exciting, vibrant, and filled with hope the next day. Whole nations come back from destruction and oppression—when great problems get addressed and resolved.
All our exits may become entrances.
The human capacity to take whatever life dishes out and to come back is never to be underestimated. How amazing it is, knowing we are all going to die anyhow, that we are so determined to live as well as we can, no matter what. For all our little deaths, we defy our fate and come to life again and again, and yet again. Daily, we redeem ourselves in unspoken rituals of renewal. Daily, we get up and go to work in the construction business of building and repairing and remodeling a life.
The ritual of revival has many names: “born again” and “healing” or simply “getting our act together.” Whatever the name, however large or small the act, the urge to reassemble the fragments of our lives into a whole is the same.
Last Sunday afternoon I went through my “drawer ritual.”
Restless, with time on my hands and too many things to do on my mind, I paced around the house trying unsuccessfully to get my energy focused. I turned almost unconsciously to “the drawers.” Or, as I’ve come to think of them, the “somewhere drawers,” as in, “It’s in here somewhere.”
Because the space in our houseboat is limited, my wife and I share a small room that serves as a kind of focus for personal life. The room is carefully and clearly divided between us by a long wooden table, and on our respective sides we each have a clothes closet and a chest of drawers.
This common room also serves as the family loading dock—where we leave the baggage we carry back and forth fr
om work: briefcases, books, umbrellas, mail, and coats. In my half, there is an old Japanese tansu chest that I bought because it has many drawers of many sizes and I thought it would keep my possessions and clothes organized. This, and the table beside it, form an L-shaped corner that is my basic life workstation. I dress and undress here, and equip and unequip myself for each day.
Here’s what belongs in the series of small drawers at the top of the chest: wallet, keys, spare eyeglasses and sunglasses, gloves, watch, ring, pen and pencil, address book, notepad, small camera, checkbook, Swiss Army knife, small tape recorder, small tape measure, handkerchiefs, penlight, and small pocket comb. All useful objects. There are several small wicker baskets distributed among the drawers to keep things efficiently ordered and handy.
Impressed?
Don’t be.
Over time, in the daily scramble of coming and going, anything small and loose gets dumped higgledy-piggledy into the drawers. All the odds and ends out of pockets and briefcase, and all the bits and pieces that seem to turn up on the table, and all those loose parts that are handed to me by my wife with the comment, “Here, this is yours, put it somewhere.” In the “somewhere” drawers, of course. Inevitably, there comes the crisis when what I put somewhere is nowhere to be found.
Last Sunday I carefully emptied out all the drawers and laid out the pieces as if they had been found in an archaeological dig. A small-scale museum display of a life. In addition to most of the items listed above that are supposed to be there, I found these:
loose change, matches (both unused and used), Kleenex (ditto), nails, screws, nuts and bolts and washers, miscellaneous mechanical parts of unknown purpose, pipe cleaners, a computer disc, one of my wife’s lipsticks, various notes scribbled on scraps of paper, two unmailed letters, three opened rolls of Rolaids, four Chap Sticks (mostly used up), five assorted small batteries, six odd buttons, loose pipe tobacco, one sock, one cuff link, two pencil stubs, refill cartridges for fountain pen and ballpoint pen (used and unused), bicycle wrench, a clothespin, a deck of cards, an unsmoked cigar, a partially smoked cigar, a nail file and toenail clippers, gum wrappers but no gum, used and unused Band-Aids, the corpses of a fly, a moth and two tiny beetly bugs, and a lot of dust and tiny trash.
I kid you not.
But then, you aren’t surprised, are you?
Industriously, I washed out the drawers with soap and water, re-lined them with brown Kraft paper (carefully fitted), and ruthlessly triaged the former contents. Much of it went in the trash can.
A sack of the possibly useful items got dumped into the even bigger drawer in the kitchen. This is called putting things “somewhere else.” (Someday, someday, I’ll sort that one out.)
Carefully, thoughtfully, I replaced the proper contents in their proper little wicker baskets in their proper drawers and slid the drawers home into their slots in the chest.
There.
The drawer ritual is complete.
My drawers are clean, neat, and worthy of respect.
And on some level, for at least a little while, so is my life.
The ritual of the drawer is deeply satisfying.
Such an accomplishment!
How can something so mundane seem so important?
It has ritual value—as a metaphor of larger designs.
I wonder how many times in my life I have done this?
Often enough to know I will go through this cycle again sometime next year.
Often enough to know this ritual for what it is: not tidying drawers but a symbolic manipulation of the paradoxical nature of my life in general. Order and purpose giving way to disorder and confusion giving way to getting organized again. On a secret level, the ritual of revival.
Even undressing, taking a shower and washing my hair and trimming my beard and filing my nails, and then getting into clean, fresh clothes will suffice sometimes. Same deal. Getting my act together. Revival. Whatever it takes, whatever works to lever the wheels back onto the tracks.
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This week I am moving my office and studio. From an industrial warehouse where I have been for thirty years to a building in a suburban neighborhood. The difference between the drawer ritual and this move is only a matter of scale. The files and records, the photographs and treasures, the bones and stones and altars. I can’t bear to give you the full list—it would fill a book on its own. As it says on the sign in the window of the rug merchant down the street, “Everything Must Go.” In the trash, to the Goodwill, or in the moving van. Everything must go. A new era, a clear deck. Until next time.
And I recall other forms this drawer ritual has taken—moving from one job to another, one town to another, one house to another. Moving out of one marriage into another. Moving out of one image of myself into another. Always discarding, repacking, always moving on and at the same time taking some of the accumulated patterns and possessions of a lifetime with me.
What provokes this restless ritual of revision and revival?
A need for meaningful structure, purpose, order in life? Yes.
Boredom, confusion, anxiety? Yes, those, too.
And sometimes sorrow, failure, and fear set us in motion.
“You’re fired.”
“I want a divorce.”
“You have cancer.”
“You’re an alcoholic.”
“She’s dead.”
“It’s over.”
We take it. Deal with it. Get on with it.
Cleansing and revival are called for.
And the question now is how to die this death and come to life again.
One of the most remarkable developments in our culture in the last twenty years is the understanding of the need for community in the process of recovery from these disasters. This is a revival in itself. Support groups, friends, family—other people.
Alcoholics Anonymous and its famed twelve-step program stand out.
It doesn’t matter who you are, what your religion or race might be, or your economic status. If you can get to the meeting, stand up and say your name, and say, “I’m an alcoholic,” then you’ve made the first step back. Beyond that come the stages of renewal—centered on exchanging demonic behavior for sacred habits. It’s simple, really—we need each other. And have an amazing capacity to assist one another in these rites of passage from death to life again.
Confession and repentance are old rituals.
Every year the Jews observe the Day of Atonement, when they confront their failures and transgressions and sins—and get squared away with God and their families, friends, and neighbors.
Catholics pursue the same end in the confessional with a priest.
Protestant prayers often begin with, “I confess to Almighty God.”
In the secular world, we turn to counselors, psychiatrists, and to organized groups of people who have our failings or griefs and our hopes and intentions.
This is the ritual of reconciliation.
It involves the ritual of recognition of damage done to ourselves and others, the ritual of reunion with the better parts of ourselves, the ritual of reaffirmation of the power of human beings to help one another.
On a daily scale, from an early age we learn a fundamental value of human community: to apologize—to say simply “I’m sorry.” And thereby not only to keep our bonds with others intact, but to keep our self-image from the fragmentation caused by anger. A Buddhist would call this the ritual of right action.
I remember being at a summer conference—during an evening lecture.
It was raining buckets outside, and about fifty of us were doing serious business inside, talking about the war in Vietnam—agonizing over our impotence in the face of the horrors of that war.
Suddenly, a very wet, muddy young man burst into the rear of the hall.
“Help me, help me,” he cried. He was driving too fast, had missed a turn and spun off the road in the dark, and was himself thrown out onto the road because he was not wearing his seat belt. His pickup truc
k was hanging on the edge of a ravine. With his wife and child still in it, so scared they couldn’t move. “Help me, help me.”
As one body we rose and poured out of the hall, running into the rainy night behind the terrified young man. As one we grabbed onto the small truck and pulled it back from the edge, and as one we lifted the truck back onto the road and spun it around onto the shoulder for safety.
The mother and child were in shock, but otherwise uninjured. Tenderly, they were carried back to the conference grounds to someone’s room—dried off, wrapped in blankets, comforted. A doctor among us examined them. Warm tea was brewed. Mechanics in the group made sure the truck was in safe working order.
The young man admitted how foolish he had been, how sorry he was to have risked his life and the life of his family, and how deeply he felt our compassion. Within a couple of hours, the young man and his family were on the road again. He will never forget. Nor will those who helped.
This response to crisis—with strangers or friends or family—is part of our nature. Every day, every week, every year since time began, whatever the size or nature of the crisis, this has been true of the human community. A fact that must be laid alongside all we know of the horror of man’s inhumanity to man. Few of us do not have a story to tell—of what we gave or what was given to us in response to “Help me, help me.” We are capable of being agents of one another’s revival. None of us can go all the way alone.
Even in the midst of the unbearable agonies of prisons and concentration camps, there are those who choose to help—to give to others: bread, shoes, comfort, whatever. These acts of compassion are the shining, diamond-tough confirmations of human dignity. This is keeping our affairs in order at the highest level. This is communion in its highest form. The ritual of the keeping of the living flame. Held daily in the unfinished cathedral of the human spirit.
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