I’ve always been a fixer. Contentment has not come easily to me, nor acceptance. This sense that we can and must do better by each other fueled my work in my twenties, thirties and forties.
Then my first big initiation into dying and deathcare arrived, with something else to teach me. As Megan Devine puts it, “Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”
We’re in a time of crisis and moral injury nearly everyplace we look. It’s a time that asks us: Can we love what can’t be fixed? How can we carry, together, what’s too heavy to bear alone?
“The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed, exactly as it is.” ~ Parker Palmer
I’ve found in my 12+ years as a celebrant and community death educator that information and skills are helpful at times, in a culture that’s largely death and grief illiterate. But mostly what’s needed is for us to witness each other in our pain and grief and beauty, to help each other be more fully human in times that shut us down.
In a six-week span this May and June I’ve accepted the call to create ceremonies of mourning and remembrance to honor the long-anticipated death of a man who retained his twinkle into his mid-nineties. The sudden and shocking death of a 33 year-old with an undiagnosed heart condition. The merciful death of a woman in her late eighties who’d survived the deaths of three children and her beloved husband. The still unexplained and deeply devastating death of a lively little boy just a week shy of his first birthday.
None of these ceremonies fixed anything or saved anyone. But they were witness to the great love that needed to find its voice in a radically altered landscape.
Singing the praisesong that is grief. Finding a way to go on, not knowing how. Helping each other to carry what can’t be fixed. These are the extraordinary lessons I’m taught each day in my work. Lessons that help me keep my heart open in these heartbreaking times.
“Grief expressed out loud, unchoreographed and honest, for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”
~ Martin Prechtel, in The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise
Photo: The southern border wall, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.