GOOD INCARNATIONAL GRIEF [Sun, 5-16-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

GOOD INCARNATIONAL GRIEF  [Sun, 5-16-21]

 

Last week I received an email request from a woman who was seeking information about an aunt. She enclosed her aunt’s short funeral notice. It said that it was a graveside service only, and that I had conducted it.

She had only recently learned that she even had an aunt. The aunt was Downs Syndrome and had been in a care institution in a slightly distant town. She died in her early 50s, in 1992.

I have only the vaguest remembrance of that funeral. I had never met the woman being buried. In addition, I was still  recovering from a year of chemotherapy and suffering the memory losses of “chemo brain.” I probably would not remember her funeral anyway, for it was one of those occasional “convenience” funerals, meaning she was a Methodist from somewhere, and I was the Methodist pastor in the town where she was being buried, so the funeral director had called on me.

Neither the niece nor I knew why she was buried in that town, though. Neither of us knew anyone with the name of that family—not a very common name-- who lived there. Now, when the niece had just learned about her aunt, there was no one in the family left alive who could give her any information.

So she’s left to wonder… and to grieve… grieve for a woman she didn’t even know existed until… or is that really grief… Can you feel a sense of loss for something you never had? Maybe.

We are thinking more these days about grief and mourning and what it means and how to do it well—good grief—because the covid19 pandemic has not only caused so many occasions for grief, killed so many people, but also made it difficult for us to use our traditional methods for coping with grief.

In our congregation, St. Mark’s, the past year has seen the deaths of several major members of the church, folks who were church leaders not just officially but emotionally. Only one was from covid, but they were all unexpected. Our pastors were able to do private services for families, masked, and I’m sure those helped, even though they were faceless. They did not help the rest of us, though. And those deceased folks deserved the traditional full-church funeral. Through this pandemic, our grief has been so open-ended, no “closure.” {I don’t like that word. It is used so much, and often so shallowly, but it fits here.}

As a society, we were already in the process of change in the procedures of grief. Pandemic isolation has increased that change exponentially.

 The most obvious change is the cemetery. As more people choose cremation and columbaria and such, cemeteries no longer provide a place for grief, either at the time of burial or for continuing in memory.

And place is important. Christians are incarnation people. We call Jesus of Nazareth the Christ, meaning he is the incarnation of God, the divine in the flesh. Everything spiritual, everything divine, in this world exists in material form. Having a place to focus our grieving is important.

We need to be able to come together in a church building, or a funeral home--which is culturally accepted as a substitute for a church--or a spot in nature, or a favorite hangout, to do a funeral/memorial service. We also need a place for “burial,” a “final resting place,” where we can continue working toward good grief through memory in space.

The traditional places, though, aren’t the only ones that work. The gathering for “saying the words,” and the scattering of ashes in a spot important to the deceased, provides a place for memory and grief work in the same way that a cemetery does.  

Helen says that the only thing we’ll be doing for a year after society really opens up again is attending memorial services, for so many have been put off until it’s safe to gather again. I look forward to that. In the meantime, I try to concentrate on good memories and good hopes.

John Robert McFarland