Remembering
Well: Rituals
for Celebrating Life and Mourning Death
Remembering Well:
Rituals for Celebrating Life and Mourning Death
by
Sarah York
ISBN:
0-7879-5507-8W01,
Jossey-Bass, Format: Hardcover,
Publication Date: Available Now, 208 pages, $20.00
Remembering Well offers family members, clergy, funeral professionals,
and hospice workers ways to plan services and rituals that honor the spirit of
the deceased and are faithful to that person's values and beliefs, while also
respecting the needs and wishes of those who will attend the services. It is an
essential resource for anyone who yearns to put death in a spiritual context
but is unsure how to do so-including both those who have broken with tradition
and those who wish to give new meaning to the time-honored rituals of their
faith.
The real-life stories, examples, and practical guidelines in this book address
a wide array of important issues, including the difficult decisions that
survivors must make quickly when a death occurs-and the sensitive topic of
family alienation, where possibilities for healing, forgiveness, and hope are
explored. The invaluable insights offered here will help those who grieve to
prepare mind and spirit for life's final rites of passage.
Praise
for this Book:
'All persons touched by the death of
loved ones, and the friends and professionals summoned to shelter and encourage
them, will benefit greatly from this comprehensive and compassionate, gifted
and grace-filled book.'
--Bill Wallace, rector,
Emmanuel Church in the City of Boston, and founder of the nation's first acute
inpatient AIDS hospice, The Hospice at Mission Hill
'Sarah York knows the terrain of the
human heart. Her capacity to assess cultural hungers and her imaginative
development of meaningful rituals that combine ancient forms with new
sensibilities is outstanding. Remembering Well is a gem to treasure and use.'
--Sharon Daloz Parks,
coauthor, Common Fire: Leading Lives of Commitment in a Complex World
'A unique and remarkable gift for those
who suffer a devastating loss and don't know where to turn or what to do. Make
sure you have it on your shelves for a very, very rainy day.'
--Forrest Church, author, Lifecraft:
The Art of Meaning in the Everyday
'In this beautifully written book,
Sarah York teaches us how to be courageous in the face of death. I would trust
her with my grief.'
--Sylvia Ann Hewlett,
economist and writer, fellow, Center for the Study of Values in Public Life,
Harvard Divinity School
'Sarah York's book offers the
compassionate guidance we need when grieving to heal our hearts. I can't
recommend this book highly enough.'
--Jennifer Louden, author, The
Women's Comfort Book and The Comfort Queen's Guide to Life
From the Press:
Publishers Weekly: 
starred review
“This book is a treasure for religious
leaders and ordinary people who face the challenges of grief and mourning.
Without offering pat answers, religious dogma or platitudes of any kind, the
author …provides heartfelt stories and wise words to guide the reader through
the many kinds of issues that surface when a loved one has died. She speaks
eloquently of the need to give authentic expression to grief and offers
practical guidelines for planning a memorial service that involves the mourners
and suits the unique context and person whose life is being remembered.”
Booklist: starred review
“[Sarah York] addresses life’s ending in a
direct and moving way. Emphasizing that memorial services are a necessary part
of the grieving process, she lead the reader through questions both practical,
such as whether to inter or scatter ashes, and emotional, such as how to
acknowledge violence and anger. Dozens of stories of individual rituals serve
as inspiring examples of how a uniquely fitting memorial—one that will bond and
sustain those left behind—may be crafted.”
USA Today:
“[Remembering Well] offers ways to
adapt traditional rituals to contemporary lives and gives guidance to those who
find religion empty, awkward, or irrelevant.”
The Dallas Morning News:
“Ms. York offers practical,
well-thought-out ways for personalizing rituals in a way that may be meaningful
for survivors because they are faithful to the values and beliefs of the deceased.
The guide is full of stories and provides an array of practical and spiritual
insights on the difficult decisions that people encountering grief must face.
Anyone interested in honoring the dignity of the dead will find this guide
useful, including families, clergy, funeral professionals and health-care
providers.”
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:
“Remembering Well is a deeply
compassionate book that deals boldly and sensitively with human mortality.
Given the variety of religious practice and belief in contemporary America,
York’s book is likely to appeal to a large and needful audience.”
The Washington Post:
“Remembering Well deals with
complex and basic concerns related to bereavement. York explores issues,
including violent deaths from murder or suicide, the deaths of children, organ
donation and family estrangement. At a basic level, she offers families,
clergy, funeral professionals and hospice workers guidelines for planning
funerals and memorial services.
Columbus Ledger-Enquirer:
In [Remembering Well] are practical
ways to mark grief, and poignant stories about why people need to mourn.”
Excerpt/Preface
My mother died in April,
1983, in her home in the mountains of North Carolina. She didn’t want a
funeral. "Get together and have a party," she had said, when the
topic was allowed to come up. This life is all there is as far as she was concerned,
and when it’s over, it’s over--the less fuss the better.
We did
not honor her request. We needed the ritual. We needed to say good-bye, but we
also needed a ritual that would honor her spirit and would be faithful to her
values and beliefs. She was hostile toward any expression of organized
religion, so even though I was a minister, holding a memorial service in a
church was out of the question.
Our task
was to put together something that would honor and celebrate the life and
spirit of this complex woman. My mother was a concert pianist, sculptor,
equestrian, wife, and parent. She read at least one book a day, pieced quilts,
milked cows, made cheese, built a log cabin (the old way), took in stray dogs,
and wrote angry letters to her congressman and the IRS. Her best friends were
college professors and toothless farmers, and she was equally at ease with
either, hungry for the poetry of philosophy, art, and music as well as the
poetry of the land.
She was
full of contradictions: a naturalist who smoked too much, an atheist who knew
the Bible better than most Christians. She was a sculptor whose most joy-filled
work was chiseled out of the most painful depths of her soul. Generous and
warm, she was also often depressed and self-abusive. Caring of others, she did
not care enough for herself. A heavy smoker from the time she was thirteen, she
died of emphysema. An alcoholic who could will herself sober for years, she was
too proud to turn to AA or counseling when her will failed her. She was easy to
love and hard to live with.
My
father had made arrangements for cremation and a private service, but wanted to
give the neighbors in their small rural community an opportunity to “pay their
respects.” An evening visitation with a
viewing of an open casket, the typical ritual in western North Carolina, was
not appropriate. My father, an atheist who would never run his lawn mower on
Sunday out of respect for his Baptist neighbors, did not want to offend them.
So he rented an empty casket for the visitation in the funeral home, and topped
it with a beautiful spray of yellow roses. Neighbors filed by the closed
casket, some of them touching it. One man knelt before the casket to offer a
prayer.
On my
mother’s funeral day, we awakened to a clear, sun-filled spring morning, and
the family walked the land to select a burial site for the ashes (legal in
North Carolina). We were all drawn to the pond where she had built a waterfall
and had planted azaleas, narcissus, willows, water lilies, and spring bulbs.
She had called it her laughing place. Each of us took our turn with the shovel
and lovingly cleared an area for people to stand. On a rock just above the
site, we placed a large unfinished sculpture she had chiseled from a tree root
that was smooth and worn from years of river life. Then we prepared the house
for a small gathering of family and friends, placing flowers and some of her
sculpture along the deck rail outside and more sculptures inside.
The
simple service consisted of music and sharing. Knowing that my role was as
daughter, not minister, I asked a dear friend to lead the service--giving it
some form and setting a tone for our sharing. We laughed and cried through
memory, pausing to pet the dogs that wandered among us. Most of those present
told stories from their experiences with my mother. One person recalled the
time when she encountered my mother planting peas in February, and questioned
her about planting so early. My mother the atheist dug her fingers into the
thawing dirt and said, "You don’t want to miss out on the resurrection, do
you?” Another friend remembered the first time he met her. Without any sort of
greeting, she leaned on the fence, chin resting on folded arms and cigarette hanging
from the side of her mouth, looked him in the eye and said, “What do you know
about Spinoza?”
Most of
the stories told were of her brilliance, her creativity, her humor, and her
warmth. Several anecdotes involved animals she had rescued and nursed back to
health, like Sam the stray hound, whose mangy smell was repulsive enough to
make you gag, and Kleine, the neglected Doberman puppy spindly with
rickets.
We
briefly acknowledged my mother’s tendency toward self-abuse, and that was
enough. We did not need to dwell on it. To ignore it, however, would have been
to ignore a significant aspect of who she was. Her parents had abandoned her,
and she carried the scars of early wounds throughout her life. Her pain had
also given her compassion and had shaped her wonderful sense of humor.
After
the service, everyone was invited to take a flower (from a large vase in which
we had put yellow roses from the casket spray and flowers from my mother’s
garden) and create a procession down the road to the burial site. There a close
friend of my mother's read a poem she had written to her a few years before. My
older brother poured the ashes into the ground, and I read some words I had
written early that morning--some honest things I needed to say to her at that
moment. We each placed our flowers in the ground and sprinkled a handful of
earth into the grave. Our benediction was a recording of the opening fugue of
the Beethoven String Quartet in C sharp Minor--my mother's favorite piece. As
others moved back up the hill to share the wonderful bounty of food that had
been brought by friends and neighbors, a few of us lingered to finish filling
in the grave. My younger brother brought out some crocus bulbs and we planted
them around the site. "You don't plant bulbs in the spring," I
thought. Then I smiled. “Well, you don’t want to miss out on the resurrection,
do you?”
When I
walked back up the hill, I hurt. But I felt good, because I had not let anyone
protect me or my family from our grief. I had asked each of my mother's closest
friends to do something--lead the service, play the piano, share a poem,
preserve the tree-root sculpture for outdoor life--knowing that they needed to
participate in ways that helped them express their love and loss.
When my
father died three years later, we shaped a very different kind of memorial. He
was a well-known cartoonist, a person with a public following. So symbiotic was
he with the characters in his Gasoline Alley comic strip, that any
memorial for him would have to include strangers who ingested the gentle humor
of Walt Wallet and his family with their morning coffee. To conduct the
service, then, we asked the minister at the local Unitarian Universalist church
to be in charge. Although he was familiar with my father’s work, he had not known
my father personally, so we spent an hour or so sharing our stories of my
father’s gentle and humble spirit. We spoke of his devotion to family, and of
the loneliness he had suffered since the deaths of my mother and younger
brother (who died six months before my father). We sketched word pictures of
Daddy bent over his drawing board, sucking away at the ever-present pipe,
wearing old worn sweaters with holes where tobacco embers had dropped and
others of Daddy working in his small, cluttered studio, listening to a baseball
game on the radio while watching another on the television. We evoked memories
of simple pleasures, and smiled as we pictured him walking through the pasture,
long white hair blowing, his five large dogs running, sniffing, and exploring.
The minister would not need to use all of this in his remarks; it was just
therapeutic for us to offer up our love as we wandered through years of memory.
We had selected
speakers for the service, and we wanted people to have an opportunity to share
brief memories or images in an informal, spontaneous way. We put together a
service folder with one of his drawings on the back. Just as the earthy, informal living room service was right for my
mother, so this more traditional gathering was right for my father. I chose not
to speak at his service.
After a reception
at the church, we returned to the homestead to commit his ashes to the land.
You might expect that we would place his ashes with those of his wife and son.
With half of them, that is what we did. He liked to hike high up on the hill
behind his house, stopping off along the way at a couple of “resting
places.” So our silent procession of
family and close friends followed his favorite trail, with the dogs, as usual,
trotting along. We distributed the remainder of his ashes on the path and at
the highest resting place.
“Give sorrow words,” wrote Shakespeare in the tragedy
of Macbeth, “The grief that does not speak/ Whispers the o’erfraught
heart and bids it break.”
