A Memorial That Works
Or, permission to feel after I die
I write this after attending a memorial service for a family friend’s daughter. I’ll call her Erica. Erica committed suicide after struggling with depression for several years. Much of the memorial was sweet, with friends telling stories about her rock climbing adventures and her deep passion for mental health, which manifested in organizing mental health conferences. But these touching remembrances were punctuated by three moments that jarred and disturbed me.
The first came when a photo of Erica smiling appeared during a slideshow. Her mom jumped up and said, “Look, even at this point in time, and she was in a deep depression here, she’s still smiling. She was so strong.” She talked again and again about “how hard Erica tried.”
The second was when the well-groomed pastor who was leading the proceedings opened the floor for impromptu memory sharing, with one caveat: “Please, this is a celebration of her life, so we want you to share memories you have of her that made you smile.”
The last was when memory sharing concluded: “This is a party to celebrate her life, so let’s all leave with smiles on our faces.”
I was unsettled by these instructions of how to feel, how to share, and how to view Erica. There is a broad range of feelings that exist in our lives – among these are not just joy, but anger, fear, and sadness, too. Yet during the remembrance of a life, only one feeling was permitted. And was it the real Erica we saw in the slideshow or a fantastically curated projection?
As far as I could tell, these restrictions and this flattening of Erica served the purpose of making life “easier” for everyone. It’s easier to drive back to your San Francisco apartment with a smile on your face than after having cried. It’s easier for everyone’s comfort if you leave the scrunched-up faces and heaving sobs at home. It’s easier to cut off our feelings and emotions at their root, because they have the power to change our lives. They are gateways to our humanity and messages about What Matters To Us. If you acknowledge your feelings and emotions as real, you might also have to grapple with questions you’d rather not. In our numbed out states, we can carry on with our niceties, keep berating our sons for not getting a corporate job until you end up with a hollow and withdrawn mother-son relationship (a true story for Erica’s brother), keep insisting that our highly intelligent wives give up their careers and stay at home instead until they divorce us (a true story for Erica’s mother), and stand there stiffly without a single tear on our face while remembering our daughter who has just killed herself (a true story for Erica’s father).
In the face of these horrors – that this is what we’re doing inside our lives – it’s easier to keep bottling everything up so we can all keep saying that everything is working. I rue this awful bargain, not just because our collective absorption with this “everything is fine” fantasy world is what is also creating our deteriorating societal landscape and our trashing of the earth, but because it comes hand-in-hand with our spiritual degradation. Such a bargain means not daring to recount any stories that might impart the complexity of who Erica was and keeping solemnly still through the insanity that is watching a parade of smiling pictures of a deeply depressed woman.
A man named Lee Lozowick said the following:
The question is not “Does your life work?” but “Is it Real?”
If your life isn’t Real, how can it possibly be working?
The path to a Real life is long, but here’s one suggestion for how it could start. About a year ago, a friend’s father died. The group of us that were there divided a room into four quadrants: Anger, Sadness, Fear, and Joy. Together, we moved from quadrant to quadrant, feeling with full intensity how we felt about her father’s death: Anger about our powerlessness; Sadness about the loss of such an important relationship; Fear about the uncertainty of where to go from here and how life can change just like that; and Joy for who he was, the beauty of his life, and the Bright Principles he brought into the world. That memorial was Real. It was Real because everyone was participating with no one watching, because everyone felt with vulnerability instead of listening to a good-looking pastor with his sanitized prescriptions on how to remember, and because there was a space of permission and support that allowed people to undertake the courageous act of exploring the complexity of their feelings rather than just Hallmark joy and token sadness.
That memorial worked because there was no template for how to do it, just humans feeling in the moment. What more could you want to honor the passing of a life?
This article is Real