The Full Dimension of Loss

It was a near-perfect homecoming. Back to my familiar zazen pillow and oatmeal breakfast. The pleasure of unpacking. The delight of shopping at Trader Joe’s. A lunchtime phone conversation with my daughter in Portland. Then off to get a haircut, take a new bus to my daughter’s house in San Francisco and a lovely walk in McLaren Park near her house.

 

That’s where we stumbled into a Day of the Dead celebration and I marveled at the beautiful tributes to loved ones passed on. (see photos). Here is a culture that knows how to properly mourn the dead, with such care, attention and artistry. No mass formula or pre-made bought altars, but each one unique and personal. The use of different colored seeds and flowers connecting the design with the simple bounties of the natural world alongside food, candles, stones, photos of the deceased, sometimes clothes they wore and more. 

 

I’ve had the privilege of attending funerals in Ghana and Bali, where it’s music and dance that carry the full dimension of loss, its heartbreaking sorrow and great joy that you had the good fortune to share life with the person who has passed on. Alongside the New Orleans funerals (which I’ve only seen on film, but not attended live), dynamic, soul-stirring music and dance that touch the depths of emotion and allow all gathered together to feel it all down to their bones. No polite little sermons with finger food, but life at its most raw and vibrant. 

 

This a bit on my mind I as just attended the Memory Hour at the recent Orff Conference honoring six Orff teachers who passed on this year, each one with whom I had some kind of contact. Most were five or ten years on either side of my age. The people who spoke about them were sincere and tender, speaking often with cracking voices and some appropriate tears and that felt right. 

But for somebody (me) so deeply invested in ritual and wanting to rip the façade off of polite society when the occasion calls for wailing and exulting, it just didn’t feel wholly right. I prefer flowing tears that gush so forcefully that you don’t look good, alongside belly laughter and tender silences. If anybody present there reads this, please know none of this is a personal criticism. 

 

But the lighting was wrong, the sterile hotel room was wrong, the random round tables with people sitting with backs to others was wrong, the speeches read from phones was wrong, the sight-read canons that fell short of music’s fuller possibility was wrong. I know at least one of the departed had a deeper three-hour ceremony held elsewhere and I imagine and hope the others did as well. But to try to hold such momentous passings in this hour-long container in the brightly lit room just fell so short of the artistry grief deserves that it made me wonder if it’s worth doing at all. When we do these things too casually and then rush out to the next workshop, I imagine the Spirit of the departed feels confused and disappointed. In some traditions, they believe that it is the depth of the laughter and tears and music and dance and attention that helps carry the dead person's spirit across to the land where their ancestors await them with open arms. Funerals and memorial services are partly to help those left behind bear up, but in these traditions, they also help the one who passed on complete the journey to the Land of the Ancestors. I don't think our little hour got them too far on that trip.

 

Again, I know (and hope) that memorial services elsewhere held the deeper dimension, but it just makes me wonder if we could do these things differently at future Orff Conferences. Devote a longer time to make Day of the Dead style altars, sing the songs or dance the dances our departed colleagues loved, with depth and gusto, unleash the full storm of our feelings within the artistic containers that allow us to feel the full dimension of loss. 

 

Just a thought.