I used to have more of a "Four weddings and a funeral" life, but get old enough, and things start to shift. In the last month, I've attended four funerals and a wedding: celebrations of life, memorial services and the like for a friend's mom, one of Ken's uncles, and two local artists who gave so much to our community.
Then there was the wedding, one I officiated for some very intelligent, charming and beautiful 20-somethings. The funny thing is that the wedding and the funerals were quilted out of the same crazy collection of colors, shapes, and textures.
At all these events, we told of how the newly or dearly beloved met his or her mate, mused on their quirks and surprising tendencies, NS listened to short speeches about what made this person exceptionally gifted in sharing kindness, attention, inspiration, friendship, and creative pizzazz. I learned how Uncle Murle joined Aunt Edna's choir to get to see her on a regular basis, and when they were apart for 18 months, how he wrote her a letter every single day.
Turns out newlyweds Apollonia and Gabriel wrote a lot of emails back and forth when they were half a continent apart. George catalyzed a whole community to not just embrace their impossible dreams of what to build or sell or create, but dove right into the necessary details, even if they included hauling (or trying to haul) giant stones home from Italy.
Sally collaborated with other artists and writers throughout her final months, and entertained us all by instructing us not to post prayers on her Facebook page but truly fun and amazing things, such as cats dressed up as turkeys, squirrels performing interpretative dance, mice cuddling up with miniature teddy bears, and even a man wearing nothing but pumpkins.
Alice's mom loved Klondike bars, playing a mean game of bridge, and she even got to fulfill her dream to lunch in the Russian Tea Room. In all of these celebrations, there were photographs and videos, images of the newly-departed in a smart 1940s suit, complete with pillbox hat, or sitting on the patio in the sun, covered in his grandchildren, or the bouquet flying backwards over the bride's shoulder down the stairs to land in the arms of a woman recently engaged.
What makes a poem a poem are the images: the specific details that connect to our senses and give us a specific door to enter into, walking on the feet of our own specifics. The same is true of a life, and although the abstract words (generous, kind, committed, loving) trying to sum up a life also speak to us, the take home for me are the small moments we share or make: how Murle measured the height of his tomato vines, or when Apollonia and Gabriel had everyone at the wedding, one by one, plant a succulent in a square of soil so they could bring home a miniature cactus farm of their wedding. We toss out and catch stories from one another, and in those stories, we see what love and living well really look like up close and ultimately personal.
We also dance to the Crumpletons, singing along while leaning into old and older friends. We marvel over a giant box of fried chicken from Chicken Annie's (yes, that Chicken Annie's of Pittsburg, Kansas fame). We giggle over tiny glasses of chocolate mousse and baby photos of the dearly departed learning to walk in black and white. The pain of loss -- with the reality of what Theodore Roethke says - "What falls away is always/ and is near" -- is acute as well as the lingering goodbyes to people soon to leave us to travel across the country. What's also and always real is what we make and enter into when coming together, at a wedding or funeral, to dwell in the house of love.
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