So It Goes

All Souls Day service
by Chris Edwards
Nov. 1,  2009:

These few days are observed as Halloween, Samhain, All Souls Day, All Saints’ Day, Dia De Los Muertos…days when nature slows down toward winter and legend says the veil between living and dead becomes most thin.

I took our title from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse 5. The character Billy Pilgrim gets abducted and taken to the planet, Tralfamadore, where past, present and future are one. When Tralfamadorians encounter death, they say, “So It Goes.” Billy had first survived the same WW2 traumas Vonnegut had…so the story contains many instances of death. Each one –from the most hideous carnage down to the demise of an insect– concludes, “So it goes.”

I found that mantra running through my mind one summer evening here, watering the new plants. A laurel had died: So it goes. A truck full of birds headed to the plant for butchering: So it goes. And… around the bend to the east, a cross bears the name of Tiffany, a girl killed there in an accident two years ago. So it goes.

Commentators have called “So it goes” a memento mori (remembering we will die), comic relief, “fatalism, stoicism and the acceptance that no use will come of shrinking away when the worst has happened.”

To me, it just says what is.

I’ll offer two other accounts, about ways of dealing with death:

1 (one): In a memoir whose title I’ve forgotten, the author visits a small Irish village and gets to know her in-laws’ extended family. They often talk about a relative named Fred—not somberly; they tell funny stories about him—but she can tell this man is especially loved. One day she says “I can’t wait to meet Fred.” They tell her, “Oh, Fred lies in the churchyard under the roses . . .but I guess we still can’t think of him as gone.”

2 (two): In Watership Down, the rabbit heroes meet a colony of rabbits who seem to live in great luxury. Fresh carrots appear each morning for these rabbits, who are big and sleek, but somehow sad and spiritless. They have a taboo: never ask where another rabbit is. Truth is, the same invisible hand that sets out the carrots sets snares. If you ask where Flopsy’s gone, the others just turn away. If she doesn’t come back, her name is not mentioned again.

Which of these is more like our culture in dealing with death: the nonfiction memoir, or the talking-rabbit fantasy?

During El Dia de Los Muertos, the Mexican custom of grave-side picnics with the departed one’s favorite foods sounds like the Irish memoir in spirit. But for most middle-class, fairly healthy 21^st Century Americans, death is a far-off abstraction. Except when it isn’t.

Both my parents died before I turned 24. More recently I’ve lost a few friends, and a nephew who’d been like my little brother growing up, and my former husband, who was a member here. The passing of generations brings sadness, but it’s natural. My son, Albert, died eight years ago from an auto accident. That wasn’t natural. Albert’s life was a work in progress, filled with struggles and promise. He was 31.

I’ll read you a piece of literature from a support group for bereaved parents, The Compassionate Friends.

“Listen, gentle people, and hear my truest needs…

“I hear you stumbling for words. Relax. There are no words… You don’t have to give me answers, for I will learn to live without them. You don’t have to pretend my loved one never existed, thinking I will forget if you do…”

I took part in the local chapter of that group while it operated.

When I talked there about friends being more supportive when our dog died, and when I had minor surgery, than they were after the death of my son, people nodded, YES – that happened to them, too.

We compared notes on handling small-talk questions: Like, HOW ARE YOU? (A Ukrainian friend calls that American, ritual question disconcerting. No one wants the answer if it’s complicated or sad.) Another stickler is HOW MANY CHILDREN DO YOU HAVE? Most of us didn’t want to just number the living and leave out the child we lost. We move on, we engage with life, but we don’t forget that child; don’t want to. My answer is not two, but three.

I met parents who seemed like basket cases at first but ended up coping well, maybe better than some of us who functioned on autopilot (like me). The morning a month to the day after we lost Albert, standing in line at the Mason Street post office, I thought I heard people around me talking about a disaster movie. A clerk who’d been crying said “The Pentagon is on fire.” I vaguely thought I’d turn on a radio…but once I got out to the car, I focused on whatever my next autopiloting task was, and that surreal news totally slipped my mind.

A support group speaker advised that in reaching out to someone with a loss, “Don’t try to give them Prozac, or Jesus.”  I’d add, don’t try to give them Job’s friends (those three guys who keep insisting Job must have done some terrible sin to bring on his disasters… maybe in a past life?) And, don’t give them Dr. Pangloss — that comic philosopher in Voltaire’s Candide who kept insisting “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” I guess it’s only human to want the world tidy….but arguments like those made me wish I was out in a desert, throwing rocks at God.

Some context: Albert, from early on, thought outside the box. When he and Eddie and Steve were small, asking big questions, I told them God was invisible, but everywhere. So, once when Albert was about three, he got mad over some frustration and threw a shoe across the room at God. He said, “I hit him! God is everywhere, right?”

How helpful are pep talks about self-improvement, or other consolations? My favorite columnist, the late Molly Ivins, said ”I’m sorry to say (cancer) CAN kill you, but it doesn’t make you a better person.” Harold Kushner thought he had acquired more empathy, and become a better rabbi, after the loss of his son, but if only it could turn out to be a long bad dream, and his son growing up, healthy, he’d gladly lose whatever he’d gained.

Of course we always know of people who worse things happen to. That’s a cure for self-pity, not a consolation. If we have empathy, don’t their misfortunes make us sadder?

UU’s like to talk about how our molecules will one day be blended into rivers, worms and stars. That’s nice – and for me, a reason to be cremated and scattered, to help the process – but not a consolation.

So, the most helpful thing to tell someone who’s had a severe loss may just be, “I’m sorry.” Or help in some practical way, as the friends did who walked our dog and fed our cats after Albert’s accident. Or if that person wants to talk, listen. If they say life isn’t fair, don’t argue.

The Unitarian Universalist Rev. Kate Braestrup wrote a memoir, Here if You Need Me, about her work as a chaplain with the game wardens in Maine. She ministers to families of people lost in the forests. Once they found a young woman who had killed herself. The woman’s griefstricken brother asked, “Would a Christian church do a funeral for a suicide?” This minister surprised herself with her answer: she talked about the searchers combing the woods for many hours in icy rain, and said, “One thing I am sure of. God is not less kind…than a Maine game warden.” They said a prayer together, and she gave him the names of some local ministers she knew, “fairly conservative pastors who knew the earth was round” and would know depression can be a fatal illness.

Rev. Kate had found her vocation after a personal tragedy. When this excerpt appeared in UU World, I suspect a few atheist-missionaries in our fold disapproved of what she said and didn’t say, but I wish there were more like her. She never tried to impose her worldview. She only offered comfort, in terms that could reach the young man.

Charles Darwin, once a Christian, became an agnostic. He said that was not because of science. Biographers such as his descendant, Randal Keynes, think Darwin lost his faith in a loving God when his young daughter died. He was human. I’m skeptical when anyone claims to get their metaphysical worldview from pure, detached reason, unaffected by slogging through life.

A hundred years ago, people talked of wanting “a good death.” That was tied up with traditional theology, but also with facing each day as if it could be the last (which existentialists would also come to do).

How many deathbed scenes show the person fully conscious but comfortable, surrounded by loved ones, reconciling conflicts and expressing love? We might not have it that way. We need to show love and forgiveness now; and, yes, stay mindful that each day could be our last.

In “Six Feet Under,” one of those short opening scenes where we knew someone would die began with an older couple asleep one morning. He wakes up and asks her, “Hey, bitch, where’s my coffee? . . . It’s 9 o’clock, get your lazy tush up, bitch!” We think, what a jerk! (Will we see him killed?) But his wife has died in her sleep. Later, at the Fishers’ funeral home, he sits, dignified, in quiet despair, beside her casket round the clock, for two or three days – won’t leave when they close for the night. The morning before the burial he’s found, in the same position – dead, someone says, from a broken heart.

I saw two solid morals in that piece from an R-rated series: treating people well while we have them with us, and withholding judgment.

One thing I know (and anyone here can be my witness): I want to live as long as I can have a clear mind, a fairly able body, and my life be of some benefit to others and myself –NOT a day longer.

I respect those who’d hang on to the last glimmer. What matters is facing it. I suspect all the paranoia about end-of-life counseling and living wills as part of an evil plot comes from our consumerist culture’s almost fanatical denial in the face of death. This may only make our deaths harder. Whatever our wishes, getting them on paper and telling loved ones, while we’re still healthy, could be a very compassionate act, relieving them of having to make painful choices for us.

Two of the things I hope to do before kicking the bucket are see the big redwoods, and maybe gain some wisdom. In “Bucket List,” Morgan Freeman’s and Jack Nicholson’s characters take on their dreams, with Hollywood-buddy adventures like skydiving. Later we learn each of these men is estranged from someone he cares deeply about. Knocking on their doors may take more courage than jumping from planes.

To love takes courage. Loved ones are our hostages to fate. I pity those who once had a dog or cat that died and never got another because they couldn’t bear it. But caring has a price. It binds us to the world. As a student in the 60s, I wasn’t very political. The Vietnam war was bad, but far away. A moment of terrible realization came later, with baby Albert beside me, as I listened to reports of the My Lai massacre. It hit me that the children killed in that village were as precious in the eyes of the universe as my child, and our fates were different purely by chance, and no one was truly safe. How do we cope with knowing this? I delight now in watching my baby grandson, Benjamin, becoming each day more aware of this world, flexing his tiny hands as if to grasp it in total joy and wonder…this crazy world he’s cast upon.

Several people in my support group said they were no longer afraid to die. The worst had already happened to us, and it wasn’t our own deaths.

I’m 64 now – the age my mother was when she passed, and a year younger than my father was. I’m healthy (knock on wood, like my mother used to say), but that milestone is a mortality-reminder.

I hope it’s no time soon, but I feel I could meet the eyes of the Grim Reaper without blinking. That is, provided she came for me (not another of my loved ones).

I don’t believe in Hell.

My sister wrote to me once, “Tell me what you’d like to inherit when I go on that great garbage scow to nowhere.” That made us laugh, and you know, we can sing, “On That Great Garbage Scow To Nowhere,” to the melody of “Twas the Last Rose of Summer.” I doubt it would get in a hymnal, though, even a Unitarian one. Hymns are stuck on hope. And I like Peter Pan’s idea much better: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”

I don’t want to be frozen, and I hope humans don’t find a way to bioengineer our own immortality. New generations should take over. They might do better. Maybe -– in a few billion years, before the sun goes dark — other life forms should get a try. But I hope very much that humanity can thrive into the 22^nd Century (our grandkids are likely to live that long). Failures to consider the 7^th generation make me sad.

To be fully alive is to accept sadness….AND fleeting joys. The glowing maple we pass each morning. Surprises, like Friday when Robin and I hiked on Loft Mountain, expecting to find that kind of bright foliage but instead, finding bare, gnarled branches immersed in blowing fog, just as lovely in their way…and a large doe who maintained eye contact for some time. The joy of the children around us: the things they do each day, as they change and grow so fast.

We get the mix, joy and sorrow.  So it goes.

–Chris Edwards
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After a quiet moment of reflection, we invite all who are so moved to join in a calling-out of names. . . Speaking the names of those whose lives you remember and wish to celebrate.