Robyn Sarah was born in New York City, but she grew up in Montreal, where she still lives. This poem is written to her child, from whom she has not heard, in a while:

To N In Absentia

I do not know how you went out of my life

or when exactly. The leaves of the Norway maple

are beginning to turn yellow, fall has come.

I last saw you on an evening at the end of July

but I think you were already gone then,

I think by then you had been gone for a long time.

And so it seems meaningless to count the days

yet still I count them, August, September,

October now half over, terrible days,

And I do not know where you are

or when I may have news of you again.

But I remember as if yesterday the day

you came out of my body into this world,

a fine splash in full midsummer, a small cry

like the meow of a Siamese cat,

your eyes wide open and looking all around;

remember how in the early hours of that morning,

before you arrived, I heard pass down our street

(as I had heard each morning that summer

of my thirtieth year) the clopping sound

of a lone horse pulling a calèche,

his sleepy driver bound for the road

that climbs Mount Royal's slope.

No one can take away that morning

or the exactness of its place in time.

I go there often.

I visit it like a temple.

 

This Tuesday marks the 10^{th anniversary of the death of Jerry Garcia, one of the founders of the Grateful}

Dead. He died of a heart attack while at a drug abuse rehabilitation center. This is the eulogy delivered by his long-time friend and songwriting partner, Robert Hunter:

Jerry, my friend,

you've done it again,

even in your silence

the familiar pressure

comes to bear, demanding

I pull words from the air

with only this morning

and part of the afternoon

to compose an ode worthy

of one so particular

about every turn of phrase,

demanding it hit home

in a thousand ways

before making it his own,

and this I can't do alone.

Now that the singer is gone,

where shall I go for the song?

Without your melody and taste

to lend an attitude of grace

a lyric is an orphan thing,

a hive with neither honey's taste

nor power to truly sting.

What choice have I but to dare and

call your muse who thought to rest

out of the thin blue air

that out of the field of shared time,

a line or two might chance to shine --

As ever when we called,

in hope if not in words,

the muse descends.

How should she desert us now?

Scars of battle on her brow,

bedraggled feathers on her wings,

and yet she sings, she sings!

May she bear thee to thy rest,

the ancient bower of flowers

beyond the solitude of days,

the tyranny of hours--

the wreath of shining laurel lie

upon your shaggy head

bestowing power to play the lyre

to legions of the dead

If some part of that music

is heard in deepest dream,

or on some breeze of Summer

a snatch of golden theme,

we'll know you live inside us

with love that never parts

our good old Jack O'Diamonds

become the King of Hearts.

I feel your silent laughter

at sentiments so bold

that dare to step across the line

to tell what must be told,

so I'll just say I love you,

which I never said before

and let it go at that old friend

the rest you may ignore.

 

How many of you, when you were a child, attended a funeral or memorial service? How many of you have had to decide whether or not to take a child to such a service?

My niece, Hailey Elizabeth, is now eight years old. She was four when she witnessed the first funeral at which I officiated. The service was for one of my uncles, Hailey’s great uncle Bill.

I was a strict humanist at the time, so I did not mention heaven at all. I did say that he would live forever in our memories, and that we could derive comfort from that thought.

I did not know if Hailey paid attention to anything we did or said that day—except for the snacks afterwards, of course—but she must have.

A month or so later, while visiting my 90-year-old great aunt, she looked at her very seriously and said,

“when you die, we’ll remember you forever.”

I think my aunt took it pretty well; she said thank you for the thought, but she wasn’t ready to go quite yet, something like that. Clearly, my eulogy had made an impression on little Hailey.

Since then, I have done a few more memorial services. I am sometimes complimented, that the service was one of the best the person has attended. While part of me wants to take credit, and honor my deep compassion or my absolutely superior oratory skills, the real credit probably belongs to the style of the service.

Most UU memorials focus on the life of the deceased, instead of using the occasion as one more opportunity to pour guilt and fear into the attendees. There is almost always a time for family members and friends to get up and share their memories about the person who has died. In my opinion, this can be the best part of the service, and I think it is what prompts the compliments. Our memorials really are celebrations of the life of the decedent, and of the memories we share about her or him. When our memories are all we have left, it is important to share them, and revisit them occasionally.

Of course, at least at first, our memories can also bring us pain: they remind us of what we no longer have. Edna St. Vincent Millay expressed that feeling in her Sonnet:

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!
 
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go, – so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

Her loss pours eloquently through her words, and I do hope eventually her memories brought her peace instead of pain.

That kind of suffering is why the concept of an afterlife is so appealing. If we expect to reunite with our loved ones, on the other side of our deaths, then we may be less afraid of our own demise, and less troubled by theirs. Metaphor or not, the idea of a heaven can provide relief to many people.

Virtually all Christians and Muslims believe in a heaven, as do many secular people raised in those cultures.

Some Jews believe in a heaven, and some believe in reincarnation, although many Jews do not concern themselves with any afterlife—they rather keep their focus on this lifetime, and this world. Many Buddhists and Hindus believe in multiple heavens, but those are simply more pleasant levels of existence into which we can be reincarnated in our ultimate efforts to reach nirvana. Nirvana is not a heaven; it can be translated as “extinction” or “emptiness.” It means getting off of the wheel of rebirth. Theravada Buddhists believe that all life involves suffering, and so they seek to escape reincarnation, to not be reborn into yet another life of suffering. Mahayana Buddhists also believe that life involves suffering, but they see nirvana as more of an awakening than an extinction. They believe that no one person can reach nirvana until all persons do; for them, nirvana is more of a process than an end result.

The members of the Grateful Dead were all raised in the Western tradition; they do use phrases such as “heaven help the fool” or “the bells of heaven ring.” They also sing at least one song that could be about reincarnation:

Won’t you try just a little bit harder?

They sing about life being a dream, in the song Stella Blue, which we’ll hear in a few minutes, and in Box of Rain, with the lyric:

It’s all a dream we dreamed one afternoon, long ago.

And sometimes, it seems that the band is humanist—that is, that they think there may or may not be an afterlife, but we have to work on enjoyment and justice in this lifetime. In the song Black Peter, Jerry sings about a man who is dying—his fever went up to a hundred and five. The man fears that “tomorrow maybe go beneath the ground.”

Nothing about any heaven or reincarnation there.

Whether you believe in an afterlife or not, whether you expect to end up “beneath the ground,” or believe that we rejoin the great unity underlying our seemingly-separate lives and bodies, it does not really matter. When someone we love dies, all we have left on this plane are our memories.

Much like the woman in our first reading, we may visit our loved ones in the temple of our memory. The first time I read that poem, I was struck by the beauty and power of its emotion, by the strength of the bond between the poet and her child.

In retrospect, however, I found it very sad. If we build temples in our memories, then we may be cutting ourselves off from the rest of our lives.

The singer in It Must Have Been the Roses, which we heard as the offertory, sings,

Ten years pass in the song, and his house falls into disrepair around him. The singer muses:

Faded is the crimson from the ribbons that she wore

On the one hand, I bow before the awesome power of love that makes people erect temples in their memory, or live with their loved one’s corpse in their living room. On the other hand, such behaviors isolate us from the rest of the world.

Some of you may be thinking, “that preacher sure has a lot of gall to tell me not to remember those whom I love and miss.”

I am not saying that you should forget about your loved ones. I agree with Saint John of Liverpool, who sang, “whatever gets you through the night is alright.” We should remember our loved ones. We should have conversations with them, we should think about them, and what they would say or feel about some current event or circumstance in our lives. We should revel in our memories of them whenever we smell a certain scent, or use that particular gravy boat, or hear a certain phrase. We should remember them, and appreciate those memories.

I would just urge us to avoid the temptation to build temples in our memories—to visit them, certainly, but to always return to the present as soon as it is possible.

Dr. George Vaillant has written several books on successful aging. One thing he recommends to help us remain vital and to live long, healthy, happy lives, is to make and maintain new friendships. As we age, we may fall out of touch with our friends, and, to be perfectly blunt, our friends and family members may die before we do. If we do not create new friendships, we may wind up isolated and lonely, and therefore more prone to sickness and depression.

The word “Ubuntu” comes from the Zulu and Xhosa languages. It can be translated as “humanity to “others” or “I am because others are.” It is a poetic way of stating the scientific fact that our relationships make us who we are. Just as we speak and behave differently, depending upon who else is in the room with us, we also develop and grow differently depending upon who affects us as we age. We take into ourselves the people and patterns around us. We are affected and changed by the relationships we participate in.

New relationships can keep us young; old relationships can keep us grounded. We are, because others are.

We don’t have to build temples in our memories, because our lives are already temples to the various people who have helped us build them. That scent, that gravy boat, that phrase—they are already sacred objects on the altars of our lives. The childhood rhyme that we heard growing up, and that we have already passed on to our children; the way we shuffle a deck of cards; the music we listen to; the exact sequence in which we turn on the car and check the knobs and mirrors—all of these things may be artifacts of people whom we know and love. They are part of us.

Even if, may all the gods forbid, in a senile dementia I forget where and who I am, I will still wear my watch the way my father did. Even if the temples of memory disappear, the lived experience of our lives will continue to show the architecture of our loved ones.

Our beloved dead may be in heaven, or they may be in the ground. They may be reincarnated as other beings or subsumed back into the cosmic unity of light and dark. Wherever they are, we still show the marks of their passing, in our brains and our bones, in our memories and in our mannerisms.

So may we be.

I will ask the “All Souls Grateful Jam Band” to please come forward and play one last tune in our summer concert.

Stella Blue

All the years combine, they melt into a dream,

A broken angel sings from a guitar.

In the end there’s just a song comes cryin’ up the night

Thru all the broken dreams and vanished years.

Stella blue. stella blue.

When all the cards are down, there’s nothing left to see,

There’s just the pavement left and broken dreams.

In the end there’s still that song comes cryin’ like the wind.

Down every lonely street that’s ever been

Stella blue. stella blue.

I’ve stayed in every blue-light cheap hotel, can’t win for trying.

Dust off those rusty strings just one more time,

Gonna make them shine, shine

It all rolls into one and nothing comes for free,

There’s nothing you can hold, for very long.

And when you hear that song come crying like the wind,

It seems like all this life was just a dream.

Stella blue. stella blue.

Someone once remarked that “bittersweet” is the most sublime of all emotions. I don’t know if you agree, but I do. It carries the combination of love and loss, communicates the whole of human experience in one simple swelling of the heart. The song we just heard, Stella Blue, has a bittersweet feel to it, a melancholy which is appropriate for goodbyes, I guess. But I also find hope in it: The line “It all rolls into one” reminds me of the mysterious wholeness underlying all creation, and “dust off those rusty strings just one more time—gonna make ‘em shine” seems to imply there is a little life, a little enjoyment, a little justice, still left to us.

The title of this service comes from one of the band’s biggest-selling songs, Truckin’ in which they sing “what a long strange trip it’s been.” This summer hasn’t been very long, but I do hope it has been a little strange!

I have very much enjoyed my time here. I will remember this congregation fondly for the rest of my life. More importantly, as I said a few minutes ago, you have changed me—you now live in me and I’m very grateful for that.

We are in each other. The great interconnected web of life has become a little tighter, as we are all one step closer than we were a few months ago.

I wish you all the best in your new home, and wherever your life paths take you. May the four winds blow you safely home.

Amen

In the words of Grateful Dead lyricist, John Perry Barlow, “Let the words be yours I am done with mine”

Go in peace; go be peace.

So may we be.