I've been thinking about how awkward we are at facing the realities of death.
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I remember how hard I laughed the first time I heard Tom Paxton’s parody about Forest Lawn, LA's sprawling behemoth of a cemetery. Here are a few of the song’s dozens of hilarious lines:
Oh lay me down in Forest Lawn in a silver casket.
Put golden flowers over my head in a silver basket. . . .
I’ll sleep beneath the sand,
With piped-in tapes of Billy Graham.
Oh take me when I’m gone to Forest Lawn.
Over the past six decades I’ve buried literally dozens of my Beloveds in this cemetery: family members, close friends, parishioners. Each of their grave sites is holy ground, and I continue to love and mourn these dear ones. But what the place itself represents about our culture’s difficulty in dealing with death I find increasingly abhorrent because, for decades, death has been a grim experience for me.
I was the fifteen-year-old leader of a group of ten-year-old boys in the Sunday School I grew up in, when one of the boys, Jimmy, died from a disease I cannot remember. For some reason, his mother asked our Youth Minister if he thought it would be okay to ask me to deliver the eulogy at this little boy’s memorial service. How could that possibly be a good idea? I was still a kid myself, and what could I possibly know or say about such a tragedy? But they asked, I said, Yes, of course, and all I remember of my eulogy is the sense that I was in way over my head.
The same thing happened to me when I was in my late twenties and early thirties and a pastor at Community Church in San Marino, California. For all of its elegant splendor, the people who worshipped here were as plagued by death as all congregations are. And so was I.
On the phone, planning a memorial service with the young father of a seriously ill new-born little girl, when I was a young father myself holding my own three-year-old little girl tightly on my lap as I spoke with him.
Burying the seventeen-year-old who had been homecoming queen two weeks before she got into a fight with her boyfriend, ran home and swallowed dozens of her mother’s tranquilizers, then ran back to the party to tell him what she’d done. She died four days later, and I led the service packed with hundreds of her friends and their terrified parents.
Conducting the September wedding for a beautiful twenty-five-year old woman, then returning to the same sanctuary in December to conduct her memorial service when ovarian cancer snuck in and killed her.
Not long after these experiences, a 42-year-old tennis partner and close friend died suddenly of a brain aneurism, leaving his wife and two teenaged kids bereft. I, too, should have felt this loss, but I didn’t shed a tear. Couldn’t. Something in me had been battered into numbness by too much death and too much unacknowledged grief, such an emotional anesthesia that I couldn’t feel a thing when this dear friend close to my own age was suddenly gone. At least I was aware enough of the trauma in me that, the following week, I called a therapist and started the process of trying to get my soul back.
Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Los Angeles, CA.
This grim litany is in such stark contrast to the atmosphere of Forest Lawn that I find myself enraged by the cemetery’s efforts to diminish or disguise death’s realities. There are verdant gardens at every turn, and though people weep in chapels and beside open grave sites, the environment is serene. There are simple brass plaques to mark each grave site, but no blunt headstones are allowed; reproductions of Michelangelo’s statue of David and Da Vinci’s Last Supper in stained glass are among the myriad distractive art works that draw our attention away from the harsh tragedies that bring us here: illnesses and accidents, gun deaths and overdoses, embalming and cremation and lowering our loved ones into holes in the dirt.
There is one example at Forest Lawn that ignites my fury like no other. As a Christian, I now define myself as a person devoted to Jesus of Nazareth. I’m particularly drawn to that moment at the end of his life when he faces death with courage, integrity and compassion. Soldiers arrest him, beat him, drive spikes through his hands and feet, and leave him to bleed to death in the rising heat. It is Christianity’s defining event.
And here is Forest Lawn’s huge painting of that ugly moment:
No signs of the beating. No blood. No spikes. No limp bodies. No death. Just empty crosses, Jesus in a spotless white robe looking more like a light-haired Anglo saint than a battered, dark skinned middle-eastern Jewish peasant, already glowing with resurrection light as if he were never a broken, bloody mess. It’s a disgusting disgrace to his memory, but a perfect expression of Forest Lawn’s painless, soft-lit, grief-free view of dying and death, the same view that dominates our culture.
So I find myself drawn toward the vibrant, more authentically human experience of death in the Mexican celebration of The Day of the Dead. I encountered this vision many years ago in the framed poster in the kitchen of our daughter and son-in-law’s home in the Mission District of San Francisco, the section of the city inhabited early on and, despite gentrification, still dominated by Latino families. The inscriptions along the edges read DIA DE LOST MUERTOS 2 DE NOVIEMBRE, and BARRIO DE LA MISION SAN FRANCISCO. At the center are a female and a male skeleton, embracing one another as if they’re clasping death together, not running from it. No color, no comfort, no rejoicing, simply clutching the death they share. It’s a far cry from the insipid painting of the crucifixion at Forest Lawn.
Skeletons coupling N.Y.C., 1983. Nan Goldin.
I’ve made a commitment to myself that, from now on, I’m going to deal with dying and death like this couple does: face to face. There is a life to celebrate, tales to tell and cherish, and a unique and warm and real person to remember. So, when death comes to one of my Beloveds or when it creeps up on me, I want to embrace it. Dying, like living, is best done in a swirl of emotion, bursts of life-bearing energy, and a full bodied acceptance of the blunt fact that even the best stories have an ending.