It is Memorial Day Week-end, a holiday first called Decoration Day and that's how I remember my grandparents talking about the day. What my dad called it when I talked to him yesterday. I suppose the Decoration in mind was more in the way of the honors due soldiers or the American flags in the cemeteries.
To me Decoration meant geraniums planted at the grave stone of every person ever thought of to be part of the two sides of my mother's family. The trunk would literally be filled with geraniums, shovels and sprinkling cans of water. Now, my sisters and I help my dad do the same work and we also go to the grave sites of Dad's side of the family with all those geraniums. Even with cutting down the number of shirttail relatives receiving a geranium, it can be a two day affair!
Looking at material to check out Memorial Day's origins I discovered material that indicates it started in Waterloo, NY at the urging of a druggist named Henry Welles. The first held in May of 1866. It is an old holiday in this country and it has changed a great deal from its beginnings. The country doesn't, overall, think of this holiday in either the manner Henry Welles in Waterloo imagined or the way my family honored it. It is a week-end of hoped-for beautiful weather and BBQs. It is the real, if not official, beginning of summer.
Still, this week-end has its roots in the remembrance of sacrifice. And in that spirit, a sermon, "Necessary Losses." Necessary Losses that we all know are more than death. Some are little. Little ones like giving up long nails to garden or football to talk a walk with someone we love. Some are big.
Nine years ago, almost, my favorite television program was Northern Exposure, set in the fictional Cicely, Alaska, a town filled with quirky, insightful characters. Characters I bonded to as my own friends and relatives. I remember the night Ruth-Anne who owned and ran the store and the post office turned 75... Ed Chigliak wanted to give Ruth-Anne a gift. Ed was part native, part Euro, a filmmaker wannabee, both wise and awkward, about the age of 20. What to give an old, old (from Ed's point of view) woman? Ed agonized. He loved Ruth-Anne; he wanted the gift to be perfect.
The anniversary of Ruth-Anne's birth came and Ed took her to a mountain top cliffside, to the grave he'd purchased for her.How would Ruth-Anne receive this very unusual gift? What would she think Ed meant? That the only thing left to someone 75 is a place to be planted in at death?
She smiled. She smiled and she thanked her gift giver and then she invited him to dance with her on her grave. To dance with her on that grave while she could. I loved the beauty of the response, the grace, the joy, the understanding of its truth. I cried buckets of tears, not for these reasons -the beauty, the grace the joy or the understanding, although I loved it for these reasons.
The episode came to me when I needed it. My child was home, sleeping in her own bed for the first night after a week of hospitalization, diagnosis of Type I diabetes. We had come home too stupid to survive -- I thought - even though I'd studied hard all week at her bedside to understand this disease and how to help my ten year old manage it. Insulin injections, finger pokes, new diet, regular snacks, recognizing and responding to blood sugar lows. Everything was a crisis.
We had gathered our courage as best we could and moved from one question to the next as long as she was in the hospital. But when she came home from the hospital, the grief and the rage set in. Why my child? Why us? Why ANY child? Why this terrible affliction? It would be forever. I wanted to pound on somebody and demand this affliction be taken away.
And then Ruth-Anne dancing on her grave. The flood of tears. That Ruth-Anne's grave, announcing the necessary loss of her life, didn't get in the way of her living. My daughter's loss was less than death. If Ruth-Anne could dance, then so could we.
And that is what I want to say today. All life is necessary losses but that is not all. What are the words the children of this church recite every Sunday morning? "Life is a gift for which we are grateful. We gather in community to celebrate the glories and wonders of this great gift."
The title of the sermon "Necessary losses", is the title of Judith Viorst's book on what she describes as the "impossible expectations that all of us have to give up in order to grow". It is the phrase Scott Alexander used in our first reading this morning. Necessary Losses Life ongoing can be a "hard grace" as Susanne Nazien, said in our second reading AND we can choose to go on from our losses and set a path, exercising the ability to be "flexible enough to adapt and maturely move on past your necessary losses".
Ruth-Anne taught me that in the midst of the living, in the context, the intractable reality that there is death -that there are many kinds of losses, -- there is life ongoing. There IS glory and wonder in this great gift. That when we do, when we can - and I'm not claiming it's easy!! - then, as Scott Alexander says, and Judith Viorst and Susanne Nazien agree, "something new, altogether tolerable, and even joyful can be discovered along the way."
Hard Grace YES. My daughter has diabetes but I learned from a fictional television character that it wasn't the end of the world. Joy still existed and the grave of loss that the diabetes represented wouldn't go away but I could dance on it! And dance we have these last more than eight years, danced and cried and laughed and learned.
Necessary Losses -- A definition: Not being able to shape life to our own likes, or to alter the outcome of so many parts of life. We only have the power to choose and to set a path and the ability to manage our feelings about the inevitable, necessary, outcomes of life. Necessary Losses are conditions placed upon our very living. Living is not static; it is movement, changing shape.
Spirit Lake, near the base of Mt. St. Helen's endured pretty much as it was for hundreds-maybe thousands -- of years, until twenty years ago and the stunning impact of the volcano. Now Spirit Lake is an altogether different shape, deeper, entombing the lodges and cottages that had stood for decades. One man, who had lived on Mt. St. Helen's for most of his life, wouldn't consider leaving, couldn't imagine living anywhere else, and knowing he would confront death, stayed in his home. Leaving the mountain would have been a necessary loss in his life. He couldn't find the ability to be supple enough to endure it.
Life isn't static. Change is a condition placed on our lives that both creates possibilities and necessitates loss. We can't predict or imagine all that is possible in this living.
Loss is greatest, in my view, when we think things don't change. A cottage on the shore of Lake Ontario or one of the Finger Lakes can find itself without a front yard or beach when the lake rises. A house, a community, in the face of a hurricane, tornado, volcano or flood can disappear in a hurry.
We know this--but not MY house, not MY hometown. Not MY wife, husband, lover, partner. She, he does change. I don't change. Our children are always healthy and forever capable of what we dreamed of before their birth or before we adopted them. They are bright, accomplished, healthy, heterosexual and all the rest. But we as parents should know better about these necessary losses. We give up sleep to have an infant in the first place, quiet conversation and glass on low tables to have a toddler, the toddler's sweet affirmation of life to have a first grader who knows everything there is to know, and any sense of serenity to have a bicycle rider and a driver! Life is change: possibility AND loss.
And then I found this from Annie Dillard in her most recent book, For the Time Being:
"We live on mined land. Nature itself is a laid trap. No one makes it through; no one gets out.... More people have died at fishing, I read once, than at any other human activity including war. Now life expectancy for Britons is 76 years,...for people living in China 68 years..., for Kenyans 55 years. Americans live about 79 years.... How deeply have you cut into your life expectancy? ....To help a living space last while we live on it, we brush or haul away the blown sand and hack or burn the greenery. We are mowing the grass at the cutting edge."
Dillard packs a lot in these words: "We live on mined land. Nature itself is a laid trap. No one makes it through; no one gets out." Necessary Losses indeed. And at the end: "To help a living space last while we live on it, we brush or haul away the blown sand and hack or burn the greenery. We are mowing the grass at the cutting edge." We aren't in charge of the outcome. We do what we can, we don't give up, but we live on the edge. Anything can happen. Something WILL.
And then that remarkable piece in the middle of the quote. Life expectancies are higher now than they were a hundred years ago, particularly in our own country. 79 years of life. "How deeply have you cut into your life expectancy? ...." That to me is a remarkable comment in the middle of a quote on impossibility and loss. We have a lot of years to be spiritually and emotionally supple!!! What path do we choose to set those years on?
Life is inevitably filled with necessary losses. No one gets out; we live at the edge. All of us eventually learn this truth.
But in those short sentences from Annie Dillard, what I hear is not the Necessary Losses that are a given condition of living but the unexpected gains. The amazing amount of choosing possible at all! Necessary Losses, yes! Unexpected Gains, indeed!
Life is a gift for which we are grateful. We gather in community to celebrate the glory and wonder of this great gift.
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