Locked In

There are some advantages to being “locked in”. I have finally re-organized my basement, a project I have been putting off since my beloved left me to deal with his clutter, a fact I mutter to myself on a regular basis. I have not finished the project but I have have done enough that I can sigh slightly with satisfaction when I trundle down the steps and look around. Doing something like that does feel like an accomplishment.

One of the pleasures I had found hard to return to over the past few years was reading. My mind did not want to settle. I was happier being distracted with mindless activity, even boring television was easier than focusing on reading. Only the grieving will fully understand this. It is a weird reality that calming the mind is hard and restlessness dominates. So things like sleeping, reading, listening to music were a challenge to me because they required a stillness that grief does not lend itself to. Even as I write this I hold in my mind that odd juxtaposition of the paralyzing inertia and lack of energy that accompanies said restlessness. It is a weird state and that is the only way I can describe it. Weird.

Like you, I have heard the many complaints about being locked in and staying home because of Covid. Loss of companionship and seeing family and friends, loss of singing, loss of travel, and on and on. But there are some rewards. I have been able to listen to some of my favourite radio programs in real time. One of them was Michael Enright on CBC’s Sunday morning program. Sure, I could always hear the podcasts but in the spring (before Michael retired) I so enjoyed drinking my coffee and sitting in my rocking chair and listening to Michael. In one of his shows he introduced me to a writer and poet that I had not heard of although, according to their conversation, he had been on the show before. His name is Thomas Lynch. Lynch is, as I said, a poet and a writer but he is also an undertaker. He lives in Michigan. He is interesting. He is a man of faith, and he speaks and writes very well. After hearing him on the show I immediately ordered three of his books. ‘The Undertaking – Life Studies From the Dismal Trade’, ‘Bodies in Motion and At Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality’ and ‘The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be’.

I know that this line of reading will not appeal to everyone. Given what I do I have an ease or at least a comfort level about funerals that is not shared by all. I am well into ‘The Undertaking’ and, believe it or not, I can hardly put it down. Lynch reflects on his life as a Funeral Director, or Undertaker, in a small town and how his life is impacted by responding to people at their hour of deepest need. He talks about faith and God’s presence in that holy time when the living face the death of a loved one. He wrote, “Death is the moment of truth when the truth that we die makes relevant the claims of our prophets and apostles… Faith is for the time of our dying and the time of the dying of the ones we love… I count among the great blessings of my calling that I have known men and women of such bold faith, such powerful witness, that they stand upright between the dead and the living and say, ‘Behold I tell you a mystery…”

There are many aspects of that quote that cause me to pause and chew over. I have gone back to that page several times and reread that paragraph. I like that he calls his work a calling (call being the subject of this week’s sermon). I appreciate his sensitivity towards the powerful mystery of being alive one minute and, with one last breath, being dead the next. I treasure his recognition of the cloud of witnesses who, in the face of all that screams doubt and fear and disbelief, there is faith.

I have officiated at funerals of believers and funerals where they ask me to downplay the whole religious aspect. I have stood at the graveside with parents and siblings and children of the deceased. It is never easy but there is a different depth of understanding for those who have a faith that informs the holiness of the moment. There is much about this time of isolation and aloneness that I don’t appreciate but I am glad that I am getting to read Thomas Lynch.