The Road to Rituals of Goodbyes
I updated my CV recently and was surprised to realize how long it is that I have been doing memorial services, or playing a part in shaping them. It’s been a thread that has been a part of life since my grandfather died in 1998. I was 31, and my mother asked if I could write the eulogy for her to read. “His shadow of influence was long.” I remember that line. In the end, she had too much grief to speak the words. I remember, standing up in front of this large gathering, having the sense that this was a sacred moment. That it transcended something I could not put words to. Yet.
I did some on call chaplain work at the Foothills Hospital in Calgary. This, while working for the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association… I know, a strange combo. One night, after a heavy snowfall, the pager went off and I found myself sitting with a family whose husband and father had suffered a heart attack while shoveling snow. The next day, they asked me to do the service. They did not have a lot of people in their lives and were not religious. They felt unprepared to think about tributes, music, readings. However, they said they needed something formal, traditional, they said, that would properly express their grief. That would confirm that their loss was significant. I had not yet learned about the importance of participating in ritual. And so, for that service, I picked the readings and music, lit the candle, and had them do a lot of standing up and sitting down.
For about 15 years I worked at a street agency called Servants Anonymous that supported women leaving the sex trade. I felt upset that the women who died during their attempts to heal did not receive a memorial service. As a community, we started creating memorials and celebrations of life. We often quoted the from The Velveteen Rabbit about how much the journey to becoming real hurt and how beautiful it was to be loved and free. It haunted me that so many women had not had a service. I wanted to go back to the time before we started coming together to remember to name the significance of their lives. The result was a memorial book commemorating each woman through reflections from their peers, past staff, and long-time volunteers.
Maybe because of this, I did find myself creating services with and for people. One day, after doing a service for a friend at McInnis and Holloway, I got talking with staff there who asked if I was a celebrant, if I did services regularly. Gosh no, just for friends. This conversation evolved into contracting with McInnis, and I am grateful to have co-created services that suited the stories: processing in to Johnny Cash, decorating a chapel with bracelets and gems, lighting trays full of candles that blazed and the warmth of the woman we were saying goodbye to that day.
My mother died. It seemed right to create a service around the imagery of quilts. Her life was a concerted effort to make something beautiful, to set unlikely pieces alongside each other in hopes they’d match, to tuck in the ragged edges and iron them straight for stitching together. Honouring a life does not mean we don’t name the hard parts of that life. Then my father died. Sitting at his desk, which he’d left as messy as mine typically is, I wrote his service. What emerged was a story of a vital, difficult, full-hearted man who sought to manage pain — his own internal pain from WWII trauma, and to numb the physical pain of people as an anesthesiologist. Sitting with the stories of parents is a whole different experience. I am still processing.
What I have learned in this strange journey of offering services is that saying goodbye well is all about stories. It is about looking carefully at a life: its meaning and significance in and of itself, as well as to the people with whom the person shared their days. Rituals of goodbye are what make stories sacred. A life’s meaning can be muted when it is not marked. I remember the feeling I had when offering up my grandpa’s eulogy, this sense that it was a sacred moment. While I could not, then, put words to it, I am coming to understand this sense of transcendence that occurs when we come together and let grief speak.
Give sorrow words…The grief that does not speak / Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.
- Shakespeare, Macbeth