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It’s not that I really needed to know about condoms and sex, and my father probably knew that. But I did need for my father to say, in his own way, “I see and affirm that you have become a man.” And I wonder when his father did that for him and wonder if I have done that for my sons, as well.
This is the ritual dance between parents and children. We are always both ahead of and way behind one another in our rites of passage. Everything we do in our growing up has been done before. But it needs recognition and validation each time for each one of us—public, private, and secret. The rituals must be observed. The rituals are cairns marking the path behind us and ahead of us. Without them we lose our way.
As these anecdotes illustrate, ritual refers to two kinds of acts: those things we do for the first time that, in fact, have been done by the human race again and again forever—and those patterns that we ourselves repeat again and again because they bring structure and meaning to our individual and collective lives.
A consideration of human and personal history will remind us that rituals are not set in concrete—that public forms, private celebrations, and even secret acts get modified over time to more nearly satisfy changing needs. This re-formation comes when we choose or are forced to consider the patterns of our lives.
I shall tell you of such a time of reconsideration.
But first, I’ll show you a photograph.
A CEMETERY VIEW
The art of living well and dying well are one.
EPICURUS
A caption for this photograph: A man sitting in a chair in a cemetery, as a light rain fell and the sun shone at the same time, on the fourth day of June in 1994.
If you were there, standing close by, you would notice that the sod beneath his chair was laid down in small square sections, suggesting it had been removed and then carefully replaced.
The man owns the property upon which he sits. He has paid for the site, paid to have the ground dug up, to have a cement vault installed, and to have the ground restored.
He is sitting on his own grave. Not because his death is imminent—he’s in pretty good shape, actually. And not because he was in a morbid state of mind—he was in a fine mood when the picture was taken. In fact, he has had one of the most affirmative afternoons of his life.
Sitting for an afternoon on his own grave, he has had one of those potent experiences when the large pattern of his life has been unexpectedly reviewed: the past, birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, career, the present, and the future. He has confronted finitude—the limits of life. The fact of his own death lies before him and beneath him—raising the questions of the when and the where and the how of it. What shall he do with his life between now and then?
–
I tell you these things with such certainty because the man is me. I speak of him in third person because I often think of him in third person.
He’s the man in the bathroom mirror I see every day. For as long as I can remember, I have gone to meet him each morning. And I see him each night before I go to bed. Sometimes I ask myself: Who is he? What will become of him? This daily consideration of the reflection of the man in the mirror is the oldest ritual of my life. A sacred habit.
I recall when he was a kid going through puberty. I anxiously checked to see if he was becoming taller, growing hair, and getting pimples. I felt older than the kid in the mirror. Now I notice he’s going through middle age, and I worry when I see he is growing wider, losing hair, and getting wrinkles. That man in the mirror is older than I am now. While I’ve been thirty for many years, he’ll be fifty-eight next June.
I see his white hair and beard, the lines in his face, the liver spots and scars on his hands, the sagging of his flesh. And I wonder how far from making use of his gravesite he might be? He certainly looks closer to death than I am.
–
I’ve spent more time around death than most people. Thirty-four years as a minister: responding to late-night calls to come to the bedsides of the dying, comforting those who grieve and mourn, and officiating at well over a hundred funerals and memorial services. Death and I have been professional colleagues for most of my adult life.
Still, there has always been a distance between my thoughts about my own death and what I was called upon to do about the deaths of others. After all, I was a “professional.” I can empathize with the funeral director who said to me, “I make the mistake of thinking death happens to other people, but not undertakers.”
As I have become more aware of the aging of the man in the mirror, I realize he needs to attend to some necessary business—to do what I have often encouraged others to do: update his will, write out his funeral instructions, and fill out the necessary forms clarifying decisions with the People’s Memorial Society to which he belongs. A practical tidying-up. And an existential clarification of the place of death in his life. The writing of this book provided a timely provocation to put his house in order.
My family was a little surprised when I broached the subject. They didn’t realize how much thought I had been giving to death. They also respected the reasonableness of what I was doing. All of us know we should do this, but most of us just don’t get around to it. Our survivors have to sort it out, and thereby we leave confusing decisions if not painful problems as our immediate legacy.
–
The first question: What was to become of the body of the man in the mirror when he dies? My family and I agreed on cremation, but they weren’t comfortable with the scattering of ashes. The burial solution was close by. The Lake View Cemetery on Capitol Hill in Seattle has already been part of my life for many years. It’s on my route when I go for early-morning walks, and I’ve officiated at burials there several times. The oldest cemetery in Seattle, it’s quiet, peaceful, and unpretentious. I like the diversity of its population—names on tombstones suggest the occupants’ roots are Chinese, Russian, Greek, French, Japanese, German, English, Norwegian, Italian, and more—an amazing mix of the immigrant stock from which this city has grown. I used to take my art history students there to see the remnant influence of the burial monuments of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and ancient Chinese. Obelisks, columns, arches, and urns. The cemetery is small in acreage, but it’s deep and wide in my imagination.
I like being there alive.
It’s a good place to be dead.
–
So I made arrangements to select and purchase a plot. What an odd shopping experience. The rule of thumb in real estate decisions is “location, location, location.” But for a grave, what difference does a view really make? Does it matter to me who my nearest neighbors are? And resale value is not really a concern, is it?
Still undecided, I asked my children to help me make the decision. They have to live with it, not me. Our discussion was awkward. Like something out of the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”
“No, this ones too—well—public. No, this one’s depressingly damp and moldy and down in a ravine—not a good place to come in winter. How about this one by the tree? Or this one by the funny tombstone. Or how about down by the Greeks—you like Greeks.”
In It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It, I wrote about the special respect I have for a bench marking a grave in this same cemetery. A bench indicating that someone went out of the way to think about the living who come here and wanted to say to them, in effect, “Sit down—make yourself comfortable.” The words carved into the edge of the bench call your attention east to the mountains, west to the sea, north to the university, and to a magnificent dawn redwood tree close by to the south. It’s an inspiring place to sit. Just twenty feet from that bench was an empty plot. Of course. Right there.
Once we agreed on the site, the cemetery workmen had to dig the grave before it could be sold to me. Because this is an old cemetery, and records were not always well kept, they had to be sure the site had no unrecorded occupant.
I came to the cemetery the day the workmen were digging my grave.
N
ow, I had stood beside empty graves before. But never beside my own. I was stunned by the experience. For days I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. Not only was the man in the mirror going to be buried there. I was.
So, on New Year’s Day of 1994, I took a folding chair up to the gravesite and sat down to think. And thought about the next twenty-one years.
Why twenty-one? I had asked a life-insurance agent to find out what my life expectancy was as of my next birthday. After a few questions about family and personal health and habits, he gave me twenty-one years. He would literally bet money on it—sell me an insurance policy.
Sure, anything can happen. But just suppose, for the sake of discussion, I knew for sure that the actuarial tables were accurate and I could count on those twenty-one years? What difference would it make?
As a minister, I am familiar with the thinking that people do when they are suddenly given six months to live by a doctor. And I’m familiar with similar life occasions when the recognition of your finitude suddenly brings you to some high place where your life is spread out before you: major surgery or a terrible accident, the death of a close friend or family member, the breakup of a family through divorce, recovery from alcoholism. Getting fired in midcareer, an emotional breakdown and recovery, and a major high school or college or family reunion are other such promptings. The ordinary flow of life stops, and you see your existence as a whole. You make some decisions about what gives it meaning and what takes away from a meaningful existence.
Success and failure come to mind.
And you are likely to notice patterns, seasons, and transitions.
Both in your life and in the lives of others.
It’s useful to know that people have been deliberating just as you are for a long, long, long time. The most familiar expression of this awareness of the big picture was written more than two thousand years ago. We don’t really know much about who wrote it or why. It’s in what is often called the most puzzling book in the Bible. It’s a succinct summary statement often used at weddings, birth celebrations, and funerals. It turns up in greeting cards, and I’ve even seen it on coffee mugs and T-shirts. Still, nothing diminishes its elegant declaration of truth. You may know parts of it by heart.
In Hebrew, to remind you of its age, it looks like this:
Translated into modern English, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 reads:
For everything there is a season,
And a time and purpose for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal,
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war and a time for peace.
For everything there is a season,
And a time and purpose for every matter under heaven.
With an image of the writer of those words in Ecclesiastes for company, I spent an unforgettable New Year’s Day, sitting on my grave, considering the meaning of life. I’ve often sat in that same place since then, as I have worked out ways to share my thinking with you. I had that photograph made on my birthday to hang on my office wall to keep me focused in my task. More than a grave, the site has become a workshop and laboratory. I go there when the muddy springs of my mind need clearing. A ritual of reckoning.
ONCE
The most difficult mountain to cross is the threshold.
DANISH PROVERB
You’ve cleared away the dinner dishes, and you’re sitting at the table with close friends having coffee and tea. A conversation about kissing in movies leads to can-you-top-this stories, beginning with the line, “I’ll never forget the first time I …” The first-kiss and first-date tales are painfully funny. Slowly but surely, the conversation turns to deeper reflections about first times. This is more than the sharing of random memories. These stories are the accounts of crossing thresholds between stages of life. These are no less crucial than the tales pilgrims tell about crossing high mountain passes from one valley to another, on the way to some longed-for destination. Only at some distance in time and place do you understand the significance of the crossing over—finding in the ritual retelling a way of sanctifying the memory.
“I’ll never forget the first time I had my period.” Elizabeth, a woman in her early forties, speaks, and the shine of tears appears in her eyes. “My mother had prepared me for it. And since I was thirteen, I also knew about it from my friends who were already well into puberty. In fact, knowing exactly what it meant made the event even more powerful than if I had not known.
“When I saw the blood on my underpants, I remember thinking, So now I’m not a little girl anymore—I’m a woman. I went into the bathroom and stared at myself naked in the mirror. I couldn’t have looked much like a woman, but that’s what I saw. When I told my mother, she was very quiet. She must have felt the same way I did—excited and sad at the same time. She held me in her arms, and we both cried and cried. And then we laughed. And then we went shopping. My mother said, ‘A woman has got to have CLOTHES.’
“I had owned and worn a kind of token bra since the summer when my friends all got bras, though in fact I could have gotten by with a couple of pieces of tape at most. But what I had was a kids’ pretend bra—a play bra. Now I got my first serious bra—with a little reinforced shape and a little room for anticipated growth. I finally stuck out. I kept that bra long after I outgrew it. I guess it was a kind of public announcement of my new status. I wouldn’t be surprised if my mother has it somewhere—she probably had it bronzed.
“I’m sure my mother told my father what had happened, because at dinner that night he was very serious and formally polite. I suppose he knew what I knew. But nothing was said between us. I do remember that I was treated at the table like the young woman I felt I had become. Childhood was over.”
“I’ll never forget the first time I deliberately turned to crime.” Ernie, a man in his mid-thirties. “I think of it as my Adam experience—when despite everything I’d been told and everything I knew, I deliberately did what I was told to never, ever do. And I did it all at once. I stole money from my mother’s purse, crossed three streets I was forbidden to cross, went shopping for forbidden candy at the neighborhood grocery, and stole the candy instead of paying for it. I must have been six and a half—in my first year in school. I remember how scared and excited I was—the defiance of rules had such power in it. Even more powerful was the fact that I didn’t get caught. Not the first time. Not even the second time.
“But the third time, my mother caught me. She’d found candy wrappers in my pants pockets and extra change in my schoolbag the previous night, so she was lying in wait for me when I snuck into the house after school. Where had I been and what had I been doing? I lied. She searched me. Busted. She whipped me, lectured me, marched me up to the grocery store to confess, made me ask forgiveness from the grocer there and then and also forgiveness from God over evening prayers. In a strange way, she was merciful. She said she wouldn’t tell my father this time, but if I did it again, she would tell him for sure, and he would kill me.
“Getting caught and punished didn’t seem all that big a deal, really. I knew that happened. I saw it every day in school. It did impress me that while it was OK for God to know what I did, my mother would deceive my father about it.
“Still, the watershed moment was that first experience of theft and lie—having learned that sometimes you can deliberately do something wrong and not get caught. Right and wrong became a matt
er of weighing the chances and consequences of getting caught. Knowing that I could play with fire and not always get burned was the path that has led to trouble ever since.”
“I didn’t want to bring this up when you asked the question the other night. This example seems so damned dumb, but it’s really important to me.” Steve, a balding man in his middle years. “I never will forget the morning when I changed the part of my hair from one side of my head to another.
“I was born with what my mother called a cowlick—an unruly shock of hair my mother tried to plaster down on one side of my head. She was so concerned about this that I felt a cowlick was some kind of unattractive and unfortunate birthmark. She parted the hair on the right side of my head.
“At age sixteen, I spent a summer away from home working for a tree farmer. Terribly conscious of how young I looked, I tried growing a beard—no luck. And I tried combing my hair in some other fashion—swept back, parted in the middle, slicked up in the back. The moment I moved the part to the other side of my head, I felt as if I had also moved my mother out of a part of my life. And besides, it worked wonders for my looks—the cowlick worked for me instead of against me.
“It was such an important act for me. From that moment on, I combed my hair the way it pleased me, cowlick or no cowlick. My way.
“For forty years I combed my hair that way, and every time I did, I pushed my mother away from me. There was much she didn’t like about my life—and the parting of my hair became a ritual parting of the ways with her.
“After our dinner-table conversation last week, I did something that surprised me. I parted my hair back on the side of my childhood. It actually looks better and combs more naturally; the cowlick problem is now of no consequence because I’m bald in the front and the problem hair is gone.