Fred Sneesby - Observations on Culture, Faith and Politics

Death Brushes

February 22, 2007

One of the most chilling scenes about death is in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Ebenezer Scrooge, transported into the future, is privy to a conversation between a dealer in stolen goods and a woman who has come to sell some curtains, bedclothes, and a pocket watch. Scrooge is horrified to discover that they are his possessions taken by this woman before he is even cold from death. No grief. No mourning. No fond recollections of the deceased. Just unadorned rapaciousness.

I wrote about a death last week – the passing of Vickie Lynn Morgan (Anna Nicole Smith) – and since that time, we, like Ebenezer, have witnessed the looting of the dead that has become part of the American way of death. The dead, along with their possessions, character, lifestyle, successes and failures (especially the failures) are quickly turned into commodities that are carried away for consumption. Whole cable channels are supported by the dead; just think of that poor girl who was murdered in Jamaica and the hours of coverage devoted to her!

The celebrity death of Anna Nicole was sandwiched between the deaths of two ordinary people I knew, so death has been on my mind. I went to their wakes and funerals and spent some time thinking about and praying for them and their families. As opposed to the unseemliness of our culture’s treatment of celebrity death, the experience of these two “ordinary” deaths has been uplifting and has revealed character traits about our culture that are good.

Both women died of cancer and both had suffered losses in their lives. While no one would recommend suffering, their mourners recognized that how a person suffered and how a person responded to adversity mattered. That suffering and sacrifice can have a redemptive value is not something that is widely celebrated in our culture, but many people know it to be true from what I saw and heard these past few weeks.

One of these women who died was very active politically, not just for one election or for a few years, but over decades. Long-term involvement in a political party or cause is also a value that is not currently promoted. In fact, our political parties are shrinking at a time when they are very much needed. Political parties are the first places where different interests and groups begin to find common ground; that function of creating political communities is essential to our well-being.

The other woman was a true “people person,” a talker and a listener who had a daily and genuine interest in her friends and neighbors, co-workers and all others with whom she shared a connection through social, church, or other ties. This gift of sociability that she had was an ingredient in the larger social cement that binds us together, that enables all of us to find ourselves in communities that know us and care about us, groups that have a history and a future, a purpose and identity that gives life and meaning to all who belong.

At these women’s funerals, the priests gave excellent homilies, each one grappling with the reality of death and its meaning in relation to Jesus (both women were Catholic). One priest meditated on remembrance and invited his listeners to do just that, to interact with the person who had died through memory. He noted how our remembering the person in the days immediately after the death was always vivid and strong. I thought to myself how the vibrancy of memory in the early days of mourning must be part of the “sending of the Spirit” that the person participates in as she shares in the Resurrection of Jesus. Just as Jesus sent his Spirit to his believers after his Resurrection to remind them of him and his words and deeds, the recollection of those who have died is part of our experience of the Resurrection.

This remembrance or grieving is, of course, an act of love, and that is where the everyday grief of ordinary people differs from the way our media culture handles death. In the death experience of ordinary people (i.e., non-celebrities), the person who has died never becomes an object or a commodity; she remains a subject with whom we continue to interact and whom we continue to love. The tricky part is to stick with it, to be willing to have an unhurried grief.

Whatever our brushes with death may be, whether it is the passing of some public figure or the loss of someone very dear, the awful experience of sadness and grief holds within it opportunities for growth and grace that can be found no where else.