Rob Baker - Planning Memorial Celebrations: A Sourcebook

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material: Wendell Berry for Stanza I from Testament, from The Country of Marriage, 1973 by Wendell Berry, used by permission of the author; Catherine A. Falk for selections from Hmong Funeral in Australia in 1992, Internet article, 1994 Catherine Falk, used by permission of the author; the Funeral Consumer Information Society of Connecticut, Inc. for material by Josephine Black Pesaresi printed in FCISC Newsletter, Winter 1998 (Vol. 1, No. 1); Alfred A. Knopf for selection from Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English, copyright 1972 by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English, reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.; The Phoenix, from Old English Poetry, edited and translated by Charles Kennedy, translation copyright 1961 by Oxford University Press, Inc., used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.; University of Chicago Press for selection from Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean, 1992 by University of Chicago Press; John Bierhorst for selection from The Night Chant, translated by Washington Matthews in Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature, edited by John Bierhorst, 1974 by John Bierhorst, published by University of Arizona Press, Charles E. Tuttle Company for selections from Japanese Death Poems, compiled and with an introduction by Yoel Hoffmann, 1986 by Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc.; Little, Brown and Co. and Curtis Brown, Ltd. for The Purist, from I Wouldnt Have Missed It by Ogden Nash, copyright 1935 by Ogden Nash, first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, by permission of Little, Brown and Company and Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Copyright 1999 by Rob Baker

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baker, Rob.
Planning memorial celebrations: a sourcebook / Rob Baker.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Memorial service. I. Title.
BV199.M4B35 1999
265.85dc21 99-13085
eISBN: 978-0-307-83318-1

v3.1

For
Doro Dooling,
Helen Luke,
And
my father,
Paul Baker:
In Memoriam

Contents

No matter what the circumstances may be, the death of someone you love is always a jolt, a sudden shock. Even if you are taking care of a person who has been sick for a long time, you never really expect the exact moment of death; in spite of months or even years of preparation, you are never completely ready.

Time turns upside down on such occasions; it no longer has any steadiness, any reassurance. An hour may seem endless; a week may fly by in an instant. You are in limbo, where any kind of balance or grounding seems difficult, if not impossible.

You face an emptiness, a void, which seems to be yours alone, which you are convinced no one else, no matter how well-meaning, can really understand.

When I confronted my own greatest loss ten years ago, a woman whose counsel I sought put things into perspective: You now have a very big hole in your life. How do you intend to fill it? It took me several years to fully understand her meaning: Nothing could fill that vacuum except the very process of grief itself. No person, no thing or activity could substitute or suffice. The loss, the hole, had to be seen, acknowledged, accepted, remembered, again and again.

Yet within this limbo, there are immediate important decisions that must be made, difficult responsibilities that you may never have considered. What do you do with the body? Will there be a burial or a cremation? Who will supervise such arrangements? How will friends and relatives be informed?

When you lose someone you love, you are first of all overwhelmed by the loss itself, by the mere fact of no longer being in companionship with your spouse, your lover, your friend or relative who is gone. This book offers a simple checklist for getting through this initial crisis, as well as dealing with another, less easily definable fear: of beginning to forget, to lose touch with, the person youve lostsimply no longer remembering, with the same clarity and vividness, all that you have shared.

It is this second lossthis fear of forgettingthat a memorial celebration can especially address. Such services and acts, both private and public, help you confront your loss and keep alive the memory of those who have diedboth on a personal, individual level and in a broader, more general way.

This book suggests various methods for nurturing such remembering. There are no exact formulas or prescriptions; each remembrance begins and grows in your own heart, at its own speed. Help can come from many sources: looking at old photographs, listening to music, reading poetry or scripture, being alone in nature, performing a ritual ceremony or celebration with others who also remember.

Often you may feel drawn to do or make some thing in memory of the person: a poem or other type of eulogy, a calligraphic work, painting, or other handcrafted celebration of the persons life. A special niche may be set aside where photos and mementos are kept, not exactly as a shrine, but not exactly not as one, either. A kind of very private sanctuary.

Remembering the best and deepest aspects of relationship is akin to remembering the best and deepest aspect of yourselfnot your ego, but your soul. This self-remembering brings about a powerful, and empowering, acknowledgment of your own mortalitya rigorous honesty that triggers a new sense of being or presence, which helps you through the crisis by linking you with what is best or most essential in all peopleour shared humanity. This new sense also links you with something higher still, something that various religions have described as remembrance of God: Sufi dhikr, or invocation of the Holy Name; Hindu japa; Buddhist mantra; centering prayer or prayer of the heart in Christianity. So this simple remembering is something very big indeed.

There, at the center of such remembering, the hole becomes whole again, without completely vanishing. Grief replenishes you, bringing a certain peace and fulfillment. Time begins to flow again. You have learned to let go in remembrance, and, mysteriously, nothing has been truly lost.

Love is not changed by Death,
And nothing is lost and all in the end is harvest.

EDITH SITWELL , EURYDICE

Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life,