Ashes to Ashes

Last year was a very strange year for deaths for my family. The amount of pain experienced by me personally was not greater than in 2016, when I lost my mom and then 6 months later my unborn baby, but the amount of deaths last year was jolting. On my husband’s side of the family were lost two grandmas and an uncle, several dear friends lost a parent, a lifelong family friend who was like a grandfather to me, and my very dear aunt all passed on into eternity last year. Each of these deaths came with the jarring reminder that each of us will one day die. Every year on Ash Wednesday, ashes are smeared on our forehead in a cross shape and the words are said over us, “remember, you are made from dust and to dust you shall return.” It’s not something we enjoy remembering, yet I’m always surprised by the large attendance at the Ash Wednesday service. Maybe the honesty of the phrase “to dust you shall return,” calls to us to put things in perspective- maybe these little dramas I get so worked up about are not such a big deal. We can spend so much time avoiding certain truths, distracting ourselves from reality, we run the risk, the very tragic risk, of wasting away our one short life on things that don’t actually matter in the end!

I went to some beautiful funerals and burials this year. A Catholic funeral has 3 parts- the vigil (wake), the funeral Mass, and the Committal (burial or internment). It is meant to be a kind of journey through grief, as we accompany our loved ones through death into eternal life. I understand the desire to have “Celebrations of Life” instead of a solemn funeral and I don’t criticize or judge in any way those who wish to focus their grief on the positive that the person contributed in his or her life, but I do wonder if re-phrasing it in this way is one more way we attempt to deny the reality of death. I wonder if we do ourselves a disservice by framing the ultimate enemy, which is death, as something that can be ignored. It kind of seems like the ultimate example of our unhealthy, “just be positive” attitude. Death is not the end (for many belief systems) but it is very real and it is the door we all must pass through. Ignoring it can be harmful. I’m shocked by how little time most employers give for bereavement- a week for immediate family members. A week! Death is always an interruption. It was never good timing to make time for a funeral, but I didn’t regret attending any of the funerals I attended this year. In Honduras, deaths happened a lot more frequently, at least it seemed so, in our tight neighborhood that housed so many people in so little space. When deaths happened, the wake went on for days. All the neighborhood would stop what they were doing to be with the family, to sit and pray with the dead. On the anniversary of the death, they would set up a kind of memorial with pictures, people would come pray a novena with the family for 9 days and grieve their loved one. They would always share food and drink. They were much more aware of death, and I wonder if it helped their perspective on life.

Christians believe our bodies are good. They are not just shells or vessels to be used up and discarded. Sometimes Christians may act like their soul is separate and better than their body, but this is actually a heretical belief. Bodies are holy. A person is not separate from his or her body and even in death the body remains sacred. My family has many family members dating back many generations buried in one cemetery. We all go there annually, usually on Memorial Day. I am grateful for a place that so respectfully holds the bodies of so many family members. I know that is not common anymore. I am grateful for a place to visit my mom in a special way, her final resting place.  I will never forget the experience of my aunt’s vigil several years ago. She did not like open casket wakes, so my mom made sure her vigil was a closed casket. My son was a baby, everyone was greeting each other out in the hallway, and I needed to find a quiet place to quickly nurse him. I turned the corner into a room and it was as if I had bumped into my aunt! I was so overwhelmed by her presence. I looked to the front of the small room and there was her closed casket. I didn’t even need to see her body to sense that she was in this room.

There is a meditation called Memento Mori, which means, ‘remember death.’ St. France de Salles poses several questions to consider for a memento mori meditation like: considering the uncertainty of the day of your death, considering all the things of the world that will cease to be for you after your death, considering how quickly most people will forget about you. Many uncomfortable feelings were brought up when I attempted this meditation. I was reminded how very little control we actually have over most things, how time is such a small blip when compared to eternity, how material wealth is so worthless yet it occupies so much of our daily strivings. I recognized a parallel between this meditation and an event that happened several years ago. The main lodge and dining hall at the summer camp I worked at for years completely burned down overnight. The day after it burned, I walked through the literal ashes of what was a mere 24 hours before. I remembered the annoyance I had felt towards the camp cook for the uncleanliness of the kitchen. That annoyance seemed so silly and such a waste of my bad feelings compared to the complete and total loss that had happened so quickly.

Ashes make for fertile soil. Rotting decay does too. “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it remains a grain of wheat, but if it dies it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). Somehow, even death, is the passage into a more abundant life. I do not mean to glorify death, because death remains bad. I believe the loss of a loved one is the worst we have to experience in this world where everything eventually dies and decays. However, my point in bringing up the reality of death is to remind us to prioritize the only thing that lasts: love.