Poetry and grief, pt 2: what we talk about when we talk at funerals

A curious side phenomenon of death in the family: for a while there I was surrounded by three distinct vocabularies.  There was the sterile, intensely neutral language of the medical world—stiff latinate ways to describe terrible things (hemiparesis, glioblastoma multiforme, cerebral edema) or else ultramodern made-up words for treatments that sort of help (dexamethasone, gamma knife, Keppra).  This is a form of comfort.  What is being experienced has a name, it is documented, it can be spoken of as an abstraction that exists outside your own story.  Ultimately you play a passive role.  This tumor behaves this way because tumors always do so.  The medicine will relieve these symptoms because its chemistry is designed that way.  The impression is of impersonal forces struggling somewhere only vaguely connected with the sterile room you're in. This vocabulary mitigates anger, makes it understandable when the impersonal struggle concludes with the familiar TV doctor's line: We did everything we could.

Contrast that with vocabulary #2, the clanging triumphalist imagery the evangelical church uses to speak of death.  Where medical jargon uses the passive voice, this is intensely active.  Illness is rewritten as battle, death as reward, the departed inevitably 'brave,' whether or not the speaker has any idea how they faced their suffering.  Because the personal narrative—I once was lost but now am found—is the driving force of evangelicalism, there's an intense pressure to put positive closure on tragedy, quickly.  We forget the pains Paul takes to remind us that death is the last enemy to be destroyed.  Hence the martial metaphors, mentions of glorified bodies and reunions in the afterlife, and ceaseless references to God's plan.¹  All of this encourages the crafting of a sentence whose fulcrum is the word 'but'.  Its crudest form goes something like, "life is hard, but God is good."  That little conjunction becomes a lifeline.  It marks the difference between sympathy and reassurance.  In nearly every conversation I had with someone from my parents' church, I felt a expectation to produce some variation on this sentiment, to add that 'but' clause.  And when I did, I imagined I could see my interlocutor's relief.  It was like resolving a dissonant chord.

These vocabularies are not, of course, universal, but there are always layers of language around death.  The actual raw data of the event is discussed (maybe) by the eceased's inner circle and by those outside it—"What happened?" "Really? Shit."— but never between the two.  Every other conversation is buffered, filtered through some narrative: the story the bereaved tell others, the story those others tell the bereaved, the story packaged for all involved by disinterested outsiders.  This last varies.  It could be and has been communal myths, rituals, orders, and liturgies.  Yet in America one type of external narrative is encountered by everyone but everyone, regardless of nation, color, or creed, in the third vocabulary, the flourescent pastoralism of the sympathy industry.  To interact with undertakers is to fall through the lookingglass into a place where everything looks like a (respectfully muted) Thomas Kincaid painting .  "Respect" is a big word in this world, as are "dignity," "fullness," "honor," "legacy," and so on.  Like the triumphal language of Evangelicals, this cant owes something to the military, or even better, to politics.  These are big words, they belong to a very public type of rhetoric, and as such they have been ballooned out to cover whole generations, people groups, and nations.  It is very hard to get them to shrink down again to the size of a single person.  They have lost whatever elasticity they might have once had.  They might work in a funeral oration in Shakespeare, but when a business applies them across the board² to people who by the nature of the enterprise could not have been known to them, well, it's like listening to a lush orchestration of "Chopsticks."  All of this is made more disconcerting by the constant back-of-the-mind fact that someone's making money from this.  The prayer card, for example, is obviously mass-produced.  You leaf through a book with about 200 options, each painting more saccharine than the last, the possible texts nauseating and false.³  You can see the focus group coordinator in her purple knit sweater: What words do you think of when I say 'memory'? How about 'compassion'? Can you arrange these pictures in order of most to least comforting? (We chose a simple picture of praying hands b/w Psalm 24.  They messed up and we got Psalm 23 instead.)  The really wild thing about this is that there are no other options.  Rules of supply and demand indicate that Kincaidiana is what I want, is the language I wish to speak in time of sorrow.

I'm unclear what was worse, the thick ironies that seemed to keep me from actually feeling anything during this time, or the fact that so many people around me seemed to feel this olla podrida of sentiments is totally normal.  Or the deep and gnawing intimation that I am somehow self-narcotizing, that I am truly missing something, not 'in touch with my feelings,' as the grief booklets say.  It is a source of tremendous comfort that Dickinson went down this road long before me.  But so at the time my mom died, those three vocabularies were clonking around attempting to lay claim to various pieces of my heart, and the whole thing started to feel like a bad postmodern dream, the ridiculous dining out on the sublime and vice versa.  That is to say, exactly like an Ashbery poem.⁴

[Footnotes after the jump, I'm experimenting with HTML.]



¹I don't want to be harsh to my parents' congregation.  Many of those people went beyond words to do tangible kindnesses for my family, for which I am still grateful.  Ben quipped to me that "the people who bring the casseroles bring the bad theology," and it's good for me to remember that the former outweighs the latter.

²Literally--I was shown a pricing table where each "level" of funeral arrangement was named with one of the words above, e.g. the "Dignity package.".

³"Even serenity can become something horrible," Tony Hoagland reminds us.

⁴Take "A Worldly Country" as a closing example:

Not the smoothness, not the insane clocks on the square,
the scent of manure in the municipal parterre,
not the fabrics, the sullen mockery of Tweety Bird,
not the fresh troops that needed freshening up.  If it occurred
in real time, it was OK, and if it was time in a novel
that was OK too.  From palace and hovel
the great parade flooded avenue and byway
and turnipfields became just another highway.
Leftover bonbons were thrown to the chickens
and geese, who squawked like the very dickens.
There was no peace in the bathroom, none in the china closet
or the banks, where no one came to make a deposit.
In short all hell broke loose that wide afternoon.
By evening everything was calm again.  A crescent moon
hung in the sky like a parrot on its perch.
Departing guests smiled and called, "See you in church!"
For night, as usual, knew what it was doing,
providing sleep to offset the great ungluing
that tomorrow again would surely bring.
As I gazed at the quiet rubble, one thing
puzzled me: What had happened, and why?
One minute we were up to our necks in rebelliousness,
and the next, peace had subdued the ranks of hellishness.

So often it happens that the time we turn around in
soon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground in.
And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea
we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free.