to be remembered…

Last August, writer and theater critic Terry Teachout wrote a beautiful blog post about life, loss, and literature.  It is a lovely, meandering exploration of remembrance that connects Willa Cather (one of my favorite authors) and Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, via the New Hampshire cemetery where Cather is buried.   I especially appreciated Teachout’s closing sentence: 

For those of us still on earth, straining to make something of ourselves, it seems there is no weaning away from the people we love and lose: they are always there, dissolved into the completeness of eternity, waiting patiently–and, I suspect, indifferently–for the little resurrection that is memory.

Lately I have thought a lot about how to honor the memory of people and places we’ve lost (from family members, to interesting strangers, to arts organizations).  And I have taken to reading Obit Magazine, which isn’t as macabre as most folks would suspect.  It may be the historian in me, or my interest in how we remember and if we remember, but either way I am fascinated by how cultures celebrate life and death.  From Obit’s website: 

Death gives life its immediacy. Because we know it will end, we savor and value life all the more. Whether it’s the loss of a person, a place, an object or an idea, life’s constant change presents an opportunity for examination, discussion and even celebration.  By examining the transformations we face, we can understand how the past influences our time and our future.

And so, I write tonight in memory of two first cousins who’ve passed away in the past eight months.  Josh Aiken was 34, and was so kind, gentle, and brave.  Rob Kimpel was 44, and had an infectious laugh and generous spirit; I cannot imagine how much his wife and children must miss him. 

Peace to you both…our families will never be the same…and I will always remember you.

 

 

 

want and need

Upon re-reading my post from Christmas day, I considered deleting or editing parts of it, but decided to keep it intact.  The reason:  I am entertained by how my writing was affected by reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road the weekend before Christmas.  (I highly recommend the book, but wouldn’t suggest it to many people as a “holiday read” by any means!)

For those who haven’t read the book, it is the story of a man and his young son struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world; there is no reliable source of food, permanent shelter, or much comfort to be found.  The only things that sustain them are their survival skills, their love for one another, and an intrinsic belief that there are kernels of good remaining in a world of evil.  The story is simple but profound, and is told through a narrative that consists of stream-of-consciousness and spare and poetic description, often utilizing sentence fragments.  As a result, the book seems more like a prose-poem than a novel, and its haunting, stark beauty stems from that structure.  One of my favorite passages is this one, as the father cradles his son as they sleep, as he does every night in the cold and darkness:

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.

Upon viewing Christmas through the filter of The Road, my already heightened awareness of modern over-consumption (food, material goods) was definitely enhanced.  I struggled (successfully) against my impulse to buy my niece more “things to open” when I knew she already had more than enough.  And I definitely looked at gift giving with harsher judgment than usual as “wants” versus “needs.”

I am not rejecting beauty and plenty:  I think that that is too extreme.  However, I was reminded to embrace more gratitude for the love of my family and my friends, for joy where I find it, for a belief in goodness, and for all my needs being met in abundance.

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Related gleanings:  I can’t overlook the obvious tie-in of these thoughts to themes in Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol.  As a theater person, I’ve worked on that show so many times that I had become oblivious to it.  At the urging of a friend, I re-read the original story last year; it was a gift to re-discover the beauty and intention of the original text.  In a non-holiday-related book, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller (also a post-apocalyptic vision of the future), I could see The Road as a precurser to the dark but more humorous future world created by Miller.