First Parish Unitarian UniversalistA Proper Goodbye
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane D. Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
December 2, 2007
This sermon had its origins in our Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos service on November 4 th, when time ran out and I didn’t get to give my homily. Since then and, actually because of that service, I found myself in conversation with a Mexican woman who pointed me in a whole new and surprising direction, which I will share with you today, turning the homily into a full sermon.
But, first, I want to share some sad news with you, from my own life. In recent weeks, I lost a loved one. Had it happened before November 4th, I well might have placed a memento in her honor on the ofrenda, the colorful altar we create every year for Dia de los Muertos.
Of all the people in our family, I knew her better than anyone else. But, sadly, I didn’t get to give her a proper goodbye.
She had been important in my life for nearly ten years, going way back to the days when I was still a soccer mom. She took me to my kids’ games, sometimes also transporting other players, and occasionally another soccer mom. She had been to many family gatherings, in New York where my family is and to Baltimore where my spouse Don is from. She’d gone on vacation with us often, even when we took each of our children to college for the first time. We were close.
But, I didn’t get to give her a proper goodbye. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
She’d been here, to First Parish, nearly as often as I’ve been here, but never once came inside…. her name was… Sienna… [my mini-van, as many in the congregation have guessed by this point, and are laughing].
…It’s true that I loved her and felt badly that I didn’t get to say goodbye. Funny how you can feel close to your car!
She’d been around. She had more than 178,000 miles on her. The insurance company declared her totaled. My spouse, Don, was with her at the end.
And I didn’t get to say a proper goodbye.
And that is what this sermon is about, saying a proper goodbye to our loved ones at the end of life. Actually, that’s why we honor the Mexican Dia de los Muertos every year here at First Parish.
It isn’t to be appealing to the Latino people who might come through our doors, though that’s a good thing to be. And it isn’t to be knowledgeable about the religious traditions of other cultures, though that is a good thing to be, too.
I include this celebration in our liturgical year because I believe we North Americans need help in saying a proper goodbye to our loved ones, and I think this Mexican tradition can help us. Its wisdom can help us.
This, then, is a good example of what we were talking about six weeks ago when we said that our living tradition, Unitarian Universalism, draws from many Sources, and that one of them, as you may recall (or as you may read on the back of your Order of Worship) is “Wisdom from the world’s religions that inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life.”
Why do I believe we need help from Dia de los Muertos?
Because I think we live in a culture that has a hard time with dying and with death. So I hope we can learn from and be inspired by a culture that makes meaning of death, in part, by having fun remembering loved ones.
So, this is what I found myself explaining to a Mexican professor of public health, a few weeks ago at a potluck for the Work Environment department at U Mass Lowell where Don works, in which the students are from all over the world. I worried a bit that Dr. Rossy Alvarez would take offense. But, I was speaking from the heart and she responded in kind. She proudly told me that she grew up in the part of Mexico where Dia de los Muertos began. “When I came to the United States, I was interested in your funeral practices and found them very different than ours,” she explained, “more removed,” I believe she said. So we got to talking.
Then she told me about a paper she’d written about “sustainable funeral practices” (almost an oxymoron, isn’t it?) and the green cemetery movement. She said it started in the United Kingdom and is more common in Europe, where they are generally more environmentally aware than we are here, with far less open space. She told me there are only six green cemeteries in the US, with four more in the planning stages. I looked on-line http://www.naturalburial.coop/ and confirmed this; the only green cemetery in New England is in Maine. I asked her for a copy of her paper and want to share some of what I learned with you.
In what seems to me to be the best kind of green cemetery, the body is buried in a biodegradable coffin, at a specified location in the cemetery, at which a tree is planted, on which a memorial plaque is attached.
A green cemetery is low-impact on the earth (no embalming is allowed, so therefore no formaldehyde or other chemicals seep into the soil, and the wood or cardboard caskets have no plastic or metal parts). It is low-energy (cremation requires a massive amount of energy), and it’s low-maintenance too (no lawn to be seeded, mown or fertilized which causes water pollution). And it is sustainable (in time, I imagine, the oldest gravesites can be reused, plaques added, and trees replaced to create space for new burials).
Also, the physical actions of digging the gravesite, lowering the casket, filling the grave, and planting the tree will be part of the healing process for the mourners. And, in the future, they and their descendants can sit under the tree, look up to its highest branches, knowing that their loved one, who lives no more, nourished that living tree.
There is something healthy and holy about these physical actions. They are our final acts of care-taking for our loved ones. They make real, in a physical way, what is so un-real, that our loved one is gone. In that way, our bodies tell us what our spirits don’t want to accept. It’s a proper goodbye.
Our culture today is great at making us think we can postpone forever the
ultimate inevitable, death, by taking a certain drug or having some kind
of surgery. Think of the television, magazine and subway ads for pharmaceuticals... “Ask
your doctor about….”
Also, our culture today is great at shielding us from death, denying it, hiding
it. Many Americans are reluctant to talk with our loved ones about our deaths,
our beliefs about it, or our wishes in regard to it. Many of us are equally
reluctant to talk with our loved ones about their deaths, beliefs
and wishes.
And, when death comes to someone we love, our culture—think of hospital and funeral home practices—shields us from their dead body, and many Americans are fine with that, too.
But, as a Unitarian Universalist, I believe that death is part of life, not the opposite of it. If we value death as part of life, then we accept it, and can plan for it with our loved ones rather than silently fear it alone. If we value death as part of life, we want to accompany our loved ones through their dying and give them a proper goodbye.
It has been and continues to be my privilege to accompany you through this journey of life unto death. To talk with you about your wishes for what will happen when you die. To sit with a family around the deathbed of a loved one. To plan a memorial service or graveside ceremony with a family, receiving their stories and memories as gifts which I give back in the form of a eulogy and a service which celebrates the life of their loved one and honors the love they’ve shared.
But, I’ll tell you, I’m not exemplary in my personal life. I
remember a few years ago telling our daughter about a relative’s will.
I admitted to her, with some embarrassment, that her parents don’t
have one. She was already over twenty one at the time… she looked
at me and said, “It’s a little late now, Mom!”
From the deaths of my father and my best friend, from my chaplaincy training,
and from my twelve years ministering to people, some of you, through the deaths
of people you love, I’ve been learning…
For example, I’ve come to see the wisdom in the Jewish custom of involving the mourners in filling the grave, whether for the casket or an urn of ashes. Traditional Jews will even dig the grave themselves. So, when I officiate at a graveside ceremony, I almost always ask that the casket be lowered while the mourners are still gathered or, if there has been a cremation, that they be allowed to place the box or urn of ashes in the grave themselves. I involve the family in placing flowers in the grave and throwing dirt into the spaces around the casket or urn as much as they wish.
There is something healthy and holy about these physical actions. They are our final acts of care-taking for our loved ones. They make real, in a physical way, what is so un-real, that our loved one is gone. In that way, our bodies tell us what our spirits don’t want to accept.
I remember being present at the Catholic burial of a Canton teenager who was killed by a train. His closest friends, among them some of our First Parish youth at the time, believed his death was a suicide, because he lived near the tracks and knew the danger. And because it happened on the morning of the day they knew his father was going to take him to see a psychiatrist, about being gay.
I remember that the usual formulaic words were said by the priests near
his grave, and then they left. But, the crowd of teenagers remained, milling
around the casket and flowers. Milling, talking, weeping, crying, milling.
After a while of being there with them, I sensed they were waiting for something.
But what? For their friend to rise from the dead? No…
I went over to the grave-diggers who were waiting a respectful distance away,
somewhat impatiently by now. And I suggested that it might help if they did
not wait for everyone to leave, as was their custom, before they lowered the
casket in the grave. That perhaps the young man’s friends needed a sense
of closure, such as seeing the burial actually take place.
They were glad to get started. The youth made way for them, and the sad, final task was done. Many youth laid flowers on the casket and some even threw dirt in around it. Some in anger, some in sadness, most in pain. Finally, there were hugs and they began to disperse. A proper goodbye.
Why should we leave the cemetery before the actual burial? Why shouldn’t we love our loved ones all the way to their grave?
I remember that when my best friend, Susan, died almost four years ago, I didn’t want her body to leave my sight. It seemed cruel for her to be swallowed up by the cold hospital, handled by people who probably had never met her when she was alive. Why couldn’t we who knew and loved her take care of her body? But, I thought at the time we had no choice but to let her go, and so we did.
But, I’ve learned since then that there are options. One of my favorite colleagues, our minister in Bedford MA [John Gibbons], offers to families in his congregation the possibility of preparing the body of their loved one for burial or cremation themselves. They do it on the stainless steel counter in the parish kitchen. (It sounds preposterous, but it’s true). I’ve heard him describe the intense love, the singing, the silence, the laughter, the praying as they bathe and dress the one to whom they will soon bid a fond farewell. Imagine. A proper goodbye.
Later the day of Susan’s death, her father, husband and I met with the funeral director. I told him I wanted to be present at the cremation, surprising myself almost as much as I surprised them. So instead of being shipped up to the usual crematorium in Seabrook NH, her body was cremated in nearby Mt. Auburn Cemetery, where she used to love to walk.
We, her very closest family and friends, were able to be there that cold, grey morning of her cremation, in the adjoining chapel, bringing readings, sharing silence, and singing songs, and then we took a long walk there, in a sprinkling snow, as she would have wanted us to do. A proper goodbye.
We have returned, some of us, to walk in Mt. Auburn Cemetery every January since. So, not only did that proper goodbye give us a wonderful way to remember Susan each year with a walk in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, it also turned out that the Seabrook crematorium was closed down not long after that. The operator was tried and found guilty of mis-placing bodies and mis-labeling cremains. If not for my simple, human desire to keep my friend company to the very end, it could have been somebody else’s ashes we scattered at Singing Beach in Manchester.
There is something healthy and holy about these physical actions, of preparing the body, attending the cremation, digging the grave, lowering the casket or urn, placing flowers on top, filling the grave with dirt, or scattering ashes.
They may be our final acts of care-taking for our loved ones. They make real, in a physical way, what is often so un-real to us after a death--that our loved one is gone. In that way, our bodies tell us, and help us understand, what our spirits can’t fathom and don’t want to accept.
So it is also, by our actions here on Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, when we place on the ofrenda mementos, photos, favorite foods or lit candles and naming, either aloud or silently, the names of those who died… in the comfort of this community of care, in this sanctuary of memory and of hope… that we express our love for them even after their deaths.
We bring them back in spirit, we cry, we laugh and we find, or re-discover once again, that their deaths have become a part of our lives.
We’ve said a proper goodbye.
Amen.