Tag Archives: funerals

Many wonderful things.

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The turtle is an old pool toy.

As summer warmth makes the lizards and bees busier, so it works on me. The point of Too Much Heat might lie ahead at some point, but evidently I am still on the continuum with no end in sight. New opportunities and fun things have recently come into my life, so that my calendar has been over-full for a couple of weeks, and my heart the same. So far I haven’t reached the stage where I am craving empty days… but today I am a little bit at loose ends, and probably distracted by the wildfire smoke that is drifting south from the Woodside Fire up on the coast, not close to us, but making the air unhealthy.

I don’t like having to keep the house closed up against smoke, but I am glad the indoor spaces had cooled off the night before the smoke blew in; I had closed all the windows and shades that morning, and in the evening it was still cool, so we didn’t open the windows when the sun went down. Our only “AC” is the marine air that almost always flows into the neighborhood in the evenings or at least at night. So far, the heat (about 90 degrees at the moment) has not seeped indoors very much.

Leaving comfort behind me, I walked out the door into the smoky heat to add water to the fountain, to see new things that have bloomed, and to deadhead a little. I tend to focus on garden “problems” that need fixing — transplanting, weeding, trimming, irrigating. But when I don’t have it in me to do actual work, I usually can remember to just look around and be thankful — for my patch of paradise.

At church, we had a funeral this week, and I was able to participate in commending a 90-year-old child of God to her Father. Our funerals are so nourishing to the soul, as the hymns and prayers acknowledge our grief, and help us grieve in what is ultimately a healing way. The Church and her sacraments are truly full of Christ, His Life and Love, and I come out of every funeral full to the brim.

I told my priest that I wish I had a book into which I had transcribed over the years all the short homilies he has given at the end of funerals. Each is unique to the person and the situation, but they all are incredibly rich and edifying. Next week will be another funeral, for a priest dear to me, and I am very interested to learn how that is different from other funerals in the Orthodox Church.

I trimmed all the lavender but two bushes that the bees were still visiting, though they are faded quite a bit. Another purple note showed up in soup I made, using gifted carrots, cabbage from the freezer, a few ingredients from my garden: Painted Lady beans, kale, parsley, and tarragon.

I have joined a small in-person book group reading The Ethics of Beauty (by Timothy Patitsas) together every week, and an on-line class to study Universal History. I’m planning a trip to see my granddaughter Ivy in a youth musical production, and will continue visits about once a month to the nearby house of a family at church, to read stories to three young children. This is one of my very favorite activities, and it’s so sweet how this arrangement benefits all of us.

My new housemate Bea has been with me now for about a week. We are already having a good time brainstorming about various events we’d like to collaborate on, around books, high schoolers, tea, cooking… She’s baking a cake at this moment, and almost every day she is playing the piano, and that makes the house feel right.

Our usual women’s book group continues, and we have been reading Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger. It’s the second time I’ve read it, and I love it still. I’ve been reading Death Comes for the Archbishop over and over, because the narrator and the story are very calming, when I wake in the night and can’t go back to sleep on my own. For the first time ever I’m reading The Iliad in the original (translated), and that has been satisfying. Because I haven’t read the whole of the Odyssey before, either, I’m a little reluctant to jump into watching the new movie based on it. But I’ve read plenty of interesting reviews!

My large Nodding Violet plant I have been planning to give away as soon as it started blooming again, which is Now! If you live nearby and want it, let me know in a direct message. It needs protection from frost, so I bring it indoors in winter, but many people in my area leave them under a roof outdoors.

Here is a clearer photo of it from a year ago:

At the moment I can’t remember what this plant is… I think a salvia. But it is the one that pulled me outside this afternoon when I saw it out the window. One of the bright and wonderful things in my life right now.

Death is a change, but not an end.

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AT UNIVERSITY

Puritans reckoned the cadavers
in Anatomy were drunks off the street;
idealists said they were benefactors
who had willed their bodies to science,
but the averted manila-colored
people on the tables had pinned-back
graves excavated in them
around which they lay scattered in the end
as if exhumed from themselves.

-Les Murray

This month marks ten years since my husband’s departing from his earthly life, which leads me to meditate again on this topic. And today is one of the Memorial Saturdays we Orthodox have during Lent:

“Saturday is the day which the Church has set aside for the commemoration of faithful Orthodox Christians departed this life in the hope of resurrection to eternal life. Since the Divine Liturgy cannot be served on weekdays during Great Lent, the second, third, and fourth Saturdays of the Fast are appointed as Soul Saturdays when the departed are remembered at Liturgy.” (OCA)

Les Murray’s poem recognizes something about human beings that our modern consciousness rarely grasps: the unity that exists between soul and body, and the brutality of violating the physical aspect of a fellow human.

Father John Whiteford writes that sometimes,

“…you will hear people say that the deceased is not in the coffin but with Christ, for example. However, if a person dies in Christ, their souls will be with Christ, but until the general resurrection, their body remains a part of them that will one day be reunited with their souls (though their body will be transformed) — and as such, the soul apart from the body is not the whole person (2 Corinthians 5:1-5). 

If you are interested to know more about the Orthodox perspective on end-of-life issues, you might check out the Ancient Faith podcast “A Christian Ending” from Deacon Mark Barna, who has also co-authored a book by that title. Episodes of the podcast include: “Understanding Death,” “Cremation,” and “Preparing the Body for Burial,” and about a dozen more.

My late husband’s casket in our house.

In the wholeness of Orthodox vision and practice, “…death is a change, but not an end. That which we see, the body, remains important and worthy of honor. A funeral, the service of remembrance, is a sacramental gathering in the presence of God. The body is honored, even venerated. The life of remembrance, eternal remembrance, begins.”

-Father Stephen Freeman, “A Secular Death”

Prayers rise like incense from funerals.

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Last week, I returned from Washington and my grandson’s wedding. On that travel day, before I left my Airbnb for the airport, I learned that a beloved sister in Christ, C., only 40 years old, had passed from this life after many years of suffering. It was arranged via texts while I was going through security at Sea-Tac that a friend of hers named Tia, who was coming from New York for the funeral, would stay at my house.

I’d left my place fairly disorderly, but as soon as I got in the house I changed the sheets on the guest bed, and made sure that a table was cleared, where we might sit to eat. I remembered to restore the setting on the water heater to normal. A brief glance out at the garden gave me hope that it could wait to be tended to. Soon came bedtime and I was very glad.

Tia and I met for the first time at the funeral the next morning. It was a typically lengthy Orthodox funeral, but it didn’t feel long, maybe because all the many and repetitive prayers seemed necessary to satisfy our hearts, and to proclaim the conquering light of the Resurrection in the face of death. Friends from three different parishes met that morning to pray at C.’s funeral, and it was comforting to be with so many people with whom we shared a love for this dear woman. If more time had been given, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see some of them pulling up chairs near the casket, just to sit a while with her sweet spirit. But that’s not the tradition. Instead, we will pray especially for her for 40 days, and be with her that way…

“For Thou art the Resurrection, the Life, and the Repose of Thy servants who have fallen asleep, O Christ our God, and unto Thee we ascribe glory, together with Thy Father, who is from everlasting, and Thine all-holy, good, and life-creating Spirit, now and ever unto ages of ages. Amen.” -From the Prayer for the Departed

The evening of her funeral happened to be the beginning of our celebration of the Feast of the Cross. Tia and I attended the Vigil for the feast, after a busy afternoon visiting with church friends. She was suffering jet lag, and I a more general travel fatigue, but we lasted till the end of the beautiful service. I still hadn’t been out to water the garden when we came home and crashed; I finally got to that after she departed the next morning.

The repose of such a young wife and mother, who had been a bright light in the world, was hard to feel easy about, even though we were glad that her suffering was ended. Not a month before, we’d said good-bye to a man in his 80’s who also had been ill for a while, and who no doubt is happy to have finished his race; but he had found the Church and a wife late in life, and it wasn’t comfortable in his case, either, for her or for any of us to let go of him. Is any human death insignificant, that we who are left behind can be left unchanged?

The day after the feast, another death in the parish. Lord, have mercy! Stephen’s passing has affected me the most, I think, of any since I became a part of this parish, because the total time the two of us were worshiping together in church far exceeds that of anyone else who has died. I heard early in the morning that he had died, and the whole day my mind and heart were so full of him, I could not attend to anything else. He was a good example of a living icon of Christ, always ready, “instant in season and out of season,” (II Timothy) to sing, to pray, to help anyone in need. And he loved my late husband, which means a lot. “He had love in his veins,” our rector said.

Last night the church was filled, for the singing of the first panikhida service for this brother. The gathering in God’s temple of our communal love, grief and Blessed Hope was a powerful experience for me, in a way I hadn’t known in the hundred other panikhidas I’ve sung in the past.

I realized that I was joining my heart – and my tears – with my late husband too, by my prayers, and with every soul whom God loves, no matter which side of death they are on. It made me oh so thankful for the Church and her traditions that impart these vital realities to us. Metropolitan Anthony Bloom expresses it very well:

“The life of each one of us does not end at death on this earth and birth into heaven. We place a seal on everyone we meet. This responsibility continues after death, and the living are related to the dead for whom they pray. In the dead we no longer belong completely to the world; in us the dead still belong to history. Prayer for the dead is vital; it expresses the totality of our common life.”

My grief is being changed into joy.

A long caravan of evenings.

death, grief, poetry, , , , , ,

Two of my friends fell asleep in death last week. One was a monk who was buried at his monastery some distance from here, and the other, John, was a member of our parish. His funeral was today, and I was able to attend it.

I’ve written a lot about funerals and death since my husband died, and am at the point where, though I continue to experience grief, these days the loss and its pain primarily show themselves as elements of the same stuff that every single human experiences, we who live as part of this creation that we also live in. The creation that is waiting:

“For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body.”  -Romans 8

John had been married to his wife for 64 years, since she was 18 years old. He had suffered great pain and disability for much of his life — his particular “stuff,” but while waiting for his full redemption, he was busy doing good works. Maybe his spirit was groaning for its deliverance from corruption, but he expressed his eagerness in generosity and encouraging words and cooking for people.

I was looking for a poem to post this evening, because I had no good story of my own to share. It turns out there was no poem at hand that would serve very well, but here is one from the archives that reminds us to keep on keeping on, through whatever losses we suffer. I’ll see you in the morning!

PASSAGE

And there was evening, humid
with lightning, when my father

fell to the earth like summer hail,
scattered. I gathered

my mother, we threw in
a handful of pebbles. And

there was morning, bitterly.
There was evening news

bluing walls, violet morning
on thunderheads, and the evening

when morning
would never again light our bodies in bed.

Morning caravans, headlights,
evening. A long caravan of evenings. Then

there was only me, morning. Awake in a room
in a building vast with rooms. Everyone

evening. Everyone morning. And God
had finished all the work he had been doing—

babies, honeybees, spreadsheets, winter
mornings. I said,

I will not stop here, evening. I’ll see you
in the morning.

–Thomas Dooley