“Lives Celebrated, Living Remembered” – Memorial Day Sunday – May 30, 2010
“Lives Celebrated, Living Remembered”
An Invitation to Celebrating and Remembering
on Memorial Day Sunday
by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
May 30, 2010
It may sound strange, but as a minister I find the process of planning a memorial service immensely gratifying. Not because someone died, though we all will. Not because I speak with family and friends of the deceased in the intimacy of their grieving, though we have all been there in the land of grief. Rather because I receive from family and friends a treasure of stories of a life lived and living remembered. The memorial service that unfolds is a celebration of that life through those stories. Almost always there is laughter as well as tears; sometimes there is relief over pain ended; and sometimes there is shock over a life ended abruptly.
I remember as a young child the first memorial service I experienced. I had no knowledge of death; I was barely born myself. I just knew that my Great Uncle Joe had done something my family called “dying.” So being the curious child I was, I wondered: what did this mean? And then, why was my Aunt Annie crying all the time? And then, why didn’t Uncle Joe get up? Why did he just lie there? Those were the days and that was a culture of beholding the remains of the one who had died. As for me, I just stared, fascinated. I had no clue that death is as natural as birth, not a clue, or that memory was how we kept that person alive in our hearts.
Then there was the loss of animals, family pets. Soon enough, I was part of a neighborhood funeral team—kids who staged the most elaborate of celebrations for a beloved cat or dog who had been hit by a car, or even for a cherished goldfish whom we perhaps forgot to feed or fed too much or just died of old age. When my daughter, Sarah, and her friend Kristen produced such a ceremony, it was high church, so to speak. A goldfish had died. So these two eight-year-olds earnestly planned how to memorialize Flipper. They wore their finest party dresses, then presided over a “goldfish communion” – goldfish crackers, as you can imagine, and grape juice. Interestingly, neither of them had been exposed to communion in their young lives. They just went ahead confident that they were paying proper tribute to their beloved Flipper. Chairs were set up in our backyard, and the rest of us were proper mourners at this memorable rite of passage.
Celebrating a life lived—human or otherwise—allows us to hone in on the meaning of that creature’s life through the heart-felt reflections and stories and anecdotes of those of us who were closest to the one we have lost.
Just this past week, we lost a long-time member of this congregation. At the age of 91, Lou Eaton left this life as we know it. On Saturday afternoon, June 12th at 2 PM in this Meeting House, I’ll preside at a celebration of Lou’s life. Lou is an exemplar of why I find such a rite of passage so gratifying. The varied facets of his life weave a many-splendored web, so complex, so luminous, that I hope each of you who attend this service will walk away knowing more of Lou than you had when you arrived. It will be a weaving of stories from many sources. Yet the whole is inevitably greater than the sum of those stories, for the whole speaks of a life lived in all its complexity, with all its strands—many of them unknowable even to daughters and spouses and dear friends who knew him well.
So it is with each of us as we celebrate on this Memorial Day Sunday lives once vibrant in our midst and living remembered. In the words of Steve Smith:
“Each of us has a thousand, a million tendrils of
other souls wrapped
around us and through us.
And this is who we are to ourselves.”
In the spirit of this circle of sharing, I invite you to come forward, light a candle as long as the candles last; and when they give out, light a virtual candle. Come forward in silence if you will and light your candle. Come forward in voice if you will, tell us your name—please, tell us your name—and share briefly please a story of a life celebrated and remembered.
Sources:
Steven F. Smith, “A Little Piece of Our Souls,” in How We Are Called: A Meditation Anthology, Mary Benard and Kirstie Anderson, Editors, Skinner House Books, Boston, 2003, 43-45.
