The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
Cultural and religious customs with respect to death have changed dramatically since I entered the ministry in 1965. Back then, virtually everyone who died had a funeral, with the casket in the church or funeral home. Gradually, memorial services became more common, as cremation also became more common. Now, a sizeable majority of the deceased are cremated.
For the past ten or fifteen years, many families have chosen to have a celebration of the life of the person who died. Scriptures and prayers may or may not be part of such gatherings, but ordinarily family members, selected friends, or volunteers share memories of the one who has died.
In the last few years, I have noted a new phenomenon. Either by request of the deceased or of the family, there is no public event at all. I can understand why, for reasons of their own, the family might choose that course. However, in that instance there is no possibility for friends and acquaintances to acknowledge and collectively express their gratitude for the life of the person who has died.
Celebrations of life are both solemn and humorous, heavy and light, productive of tears as well as prolonged laughter. Families may resist having any sort of public acknowledgement of the death of their loved one, but everyone is also loved by others who are not related to the one who has died. They too need closure for how they feel and think about the death of a long-admired friend and confidant.
For eight years Lois and I have lived in The Seabrook, a retirement community on Hilton Head Island. Seeing people on a daily basis in the dining room or in community activities, we get to know one another rather well --- in all our virtues, quirks, and elderly eccentricities. When one of us dies, we relish the opportunity to share stories and reminiscences, either in the memorial service or the celebration of life and in the reception which follow these occasions. In a community where the average age in in the mid-eighties, we usually have one or more opportunities every month to focus our thoughts on those who graced our lives by their lives in our twilight years.
All members of the clergy are periodically reminded of the powerful welter of emotions which sweep over family members when one of their own dies. Many seem naturally to want to crawl into a shell in order to deal with the upheaval they are experiencing. Nevertheless, others who are less affected by a death also have a need to acknowledge and pay tribute to the deceased. If there is no public setting to do this, they may feel even more bereft, cheated of the gift of recalling together what made that person’s life so special and unique.
The poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod is washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s were or thine own were….Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
All of us are children of God. As such, we deserve to have a public recognition of our affinity with one another when we are no longer there to contemplate that affinity ourselves. Having some sort of gathering provides everyone a feeling of closure in the loss of a fellow traveler though this vale of tears. – December 30, 2022
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.