I had a nice phone conversation recently with Ms. Selma Sparks. Ms. Selma Sparks was the only female journalist to interview Malcolm X while he was alive. Ms. Sparks was born and lived most of her life in New York City, and when I spoke with her, she still had a recognizable Brooklyn accent. We became connected because she is a member of a small Unitarian Univeralist Fellowship in North Carolina, and the congregation has decided to honor the day that Malcolm X was assassinated, and they were looking for materials from our denomination. There weren’t many, and they easily found a sermon I gave last year online, and Ms. Sparks read it and said they should use the sermon as part of the service. She also asked if she could have a phone conversation with me. I felt kind of nervous to call her, but excited. She shared with me that Malcolm X had asked her to interview him, through her publisher. He had read what she wrote, and felt she would be the right person.
It was very moving for me to talk with Ms. Sparks, a woman who is now 90 years old, who has seen only what I have heard secondhand, saying that in my sermon I got something most never did about Malcolm. She wanted to read parts of the sermon during the service next Sunday, February 20th, and I’m going to see if I can get the link so you can all enjoy it too and have a chance to meet her virtually. I thought to myself, it will probably be an even better sermon to have her read it: it’s an honor, and a connection I will never forget. She told me something that I’ll never forget: never be afraid of another human being. Even if they’re scary, use common sense, but don’t be afraid of any human being.
I took what she said to heart: never be afraid of any human being. And I also interpreted that to also mean don’t be afraid of ourselves, don’t be afraid of our own experiences and reactions, even the really hard ones. And I’ve been thinking about how we can honor our experience, especially the experience of loss, in a way that is honest and life giving.
Ms. Sparks helped me find a way into that question. An African American woman born of a different generation in New York City, finds a resonance in something created by a man born in the 1980’s, of mixed race. How is this possible? The answer is it happens all the time. Even in our circumstantial differences we share a common life. And something you might have already discovered: when something is meaningful for us personally, often someone out there will also find it meaningful, authentic, worthy. It’s an everyday miracle, and in my humble opinion, makes life worth living. We share a common life through our differences, that common life is a fact, a fact just like death.
Trent Reznor was born and raised near New Castle, PA, the lead singer of Nine Inch Nails, and the person who originally wrote Hurt, the song played by Jeff. I learned from Jeff that Trent is from this area. He and NIne Inch Nails recorded Hurt, and fans appreciated it. Later, Johnny Cash is in the throes of grief after his wife June Carter dies in 2003.
He is grief stricken, and he knows he’s near the end of his life, the end of a legendary musical career, his life as a husband, father, grandfather: he can see that all of it is about to come to an end. He hears Trent Reznor’s song “Hurt,” and there is a resonance, a deep resonance: there is it, that common life. He is hurt and in pain, and he recognizes that hurt and pain in that song. He covers the song, and as Trent Reznor says freely: he owned it. It became his song. His experience, his resonance, deepened the song.
Grief is one of those resonances, not pleasant or wanted, but true. Joan Didion did something with her book The Year of Magical Thinking that had never been done before in literature. She wrote about the grief she experienced at the sudden and unexpected loss of her husband of over 30 years, without talking about grief as a process, something to get through. She did not take the reader through a journey of how she got over her grief, or how she came to a place of acceptance.
She did come to a place of acceptance, but not because she wanted to, but because she felt forced to. She wrote about the bewilderment of grief, what she calls insanity, the kind of grief that short circuits your reasoning ability and your thoughts about what the world is, and how it actually functions. She writes time and time again, grief is not something you know about, it’s something you experience. It has to happen to you. It happened dramatically and suddenly one evening for Joan Didion when her husband John was eating dinner with her, and then died suddenly in front of her from a heart attack. It was sudden and swift, so sudden that it didn’t make any sense to Joan. How could he be alive two minutes ago, and now not? Intellectually, we can try to make sense of it, but in experience it is maddening. In experience, it seems unreal, in experience it doesn’t make any sense.
I remember that sense of bewilderment after my father died. He died on Valentine’s Day, and this Monday will be the 20th anniversary of his death. I always thought there was some wisdom in that coincidence: a day for me of destabalizing, bewildering grief, and a day about love and connection,a day that celebrates relationship. It’s taken me nearly 20 years, but now I sense the wisdom of that: how grief is a partner of love, how grief does give us a new life whether we want it or not, how depth of grief at its heart is about love, how much we love the person, and the person we were with them. It’s taken me a long time to appreciate that. And now of course Jennifer and I celebrate our relationship on that day, the rare and precious opportunity to get to love each other in the flesh. It is rare and precious. It’s taken me a while to learn that my love for others deepens my love and relationship for those I’ve lost and vice versa. In remembering the person I was, I connect more deeply to the person I am now, and that gives this moment for depth, poignancy, and joy. It gives me joy to feel, even when the feelings are difficult.
Of course this is not always the case. Sometimes it feels too much, especially in that first year after losing someone dear. I’ve personally found the second year even harder, because by then most everyone else has moved on, and it can feel like your own private grief. But the fact of the matter is, it’s not private: it’s acute, and overwhelming at times, but not private. This is the great contribution of The Year of Magical Thinking – in chronicling her private thoughts and moods, we all could experience with her our own fear of death, our own bewilderment, our own yearning and hopes. Didion calls that first year The Year of Magical Thinking because that year some part of her is still in disbelief that her husband is gone in the flesh, and some part of her is waiting for his return. She refuses to throw away his shoes. She asks if they can do another autopsy, in case he might be in a coma. For Didion, magical thinking is the thinking that if we think or act a certain way, we can manage our reality, we can manage what happens to us.
Most of us will invest a good amount into magical thinking. We will seek some form of security whether it be material security or the security of a particular relationship being a certain way. Most of us will do some version of that at some point. But I’ve talked with enough people about this to understand that powerful and immediate grief does make it clear in a very down to earth way how mysterious and tenuous our life really is. And some discover for the first time all the effort that was put into managing something that ultimately is unmanageable can be let go of. And in that letting go, a new life emerges. A new life that is not better, but different.
I remember someone telling me after my father died that grief was like putting your hand on a hot stove, and that right now it is bright hot, but over time it cools: you can remember the burn, but it doesn’t burn you anymore. I’ve never found analogies work very well when talking about loss. They always fall short. All I can say for myself is that life is different.
My relationship to loss, my relationship to what I can manage and what I can’t: it’s just different now. In some ways more freeing, and in some ways more sad, more poignant. I wouldn’t say I’d recommend it, but over the years I feel more and more that my experience is part of a common resonance, something other people feel too even though they’re experiences are different.
Joan Didion let the reader into her struggle to try to make sense, and she let the reader into her vulnerability, into her inability to make total sense of what was happening to her. That’s a very brave thing. It’s very brave because it’s common, except most of us don’t show it, not even to our loved ones or close friends. Most of us have been trained to only show others what we can manage and make sense of. We’ve learned to keep what doesn’t make sense to us to ourselves, and in that we feel like it’s our own private pain. But it’s not, it’s common. Joan Didion had the courage to show us that.
Eric Clapton lost his son in an accident tragically. He wrote “Tears in Heaven,” soon after and started performing it. Many remarked in awe how he could perform in public something that was so personal and painful. I’ve known artists and musicians, and my sense is that it’s a relief in a way. It’s a relief to be able to do what you can do, to use what you’ve got, to share with the world something, to make some kind of offering to honor your experience and the experience of all of us. Joan Didion repeatedly says that she has words, and there were times when the words did not go far or deep enough, but it’s what she had. So she used what she had: she had words, so she wrote a memoir. Eric Clapton can write music, and he offered what he could do, he wrote a song. The same with Trent Reznor and Johnny Cash. It was not just performance, it was their life. And they offered what they had, and it was beautiful.
I learned pretty early I could do memorial services. I led my father’s, and strange as it may sound, I’m glad I did. It felt good to offer something. Now I can offer that to other families, and I enjoy it. It’s what I can do. It reminds me that our experience is common, not the same, not identical, but common. It’s not private, it’s shared. I’m still not sick of my benediction. I don’t think I’ve exhausted it for myself at least. When I wrote it, I remember thinking that Unitarians are not really interested in truths, but they like facts. And I haven’t exhausted the fact even when I feel certain my pain is unique and private, when I’m completely convinced that I’m all alone in this singular way, isolated from the rest of creation, that it’s a feeling state not a fact. The paradox is that even my very convincing feeling that I’m all alone in the universe connects me to billions of people who have felt the exact same way at some point. Even felt loneliness is part of the common experience of being alive. Even unutterable grief is held in that common experience, that common embrace, whether we feel it or not.
It is so odd that our feeling of being completely alone, completely cut off from the rest of the human population is the bridge to real, authentic connection. It doesn’t make the felt loneliness go away, and it doesn’t make grief or pain go away, but we can see it is or what it could be: a bridge, a bridge to connect with other grieving, lonely creatures, a bridge to a more real relationship with the world, a poignant connection, a poignant love. On this Valentine’s Day, whatever your personal circumstances are, that is my desire for you: that you see your experience as a possible bridge, a way to be in greater relationship. This is not to presume any person’s experience is identical to another, but there is a strong resonance, a feeling for what it means to be alive, a resonance that includes hurt, bewilderment, a felt sense of loneliness at times. These are all bridges, and when we can feel that for ourselves, the circle is widened to include all those throughout space and time, all those who have passed on, to encourage us to cherish the relationships we have today, and perhaps forever.
Topics: Valentine's Day