Eulogy or Elegy?

 

(photo by Marcia)

 

Funerals tend to be more elegy than eulogy, lamenting the dead rather than celebrating the person’s life as we send them off into the Ever Forever After with a toast and a hearty cheer. 

 

It’s probably a matter of timing. If a funeral happens right after someone has died, we are overwhelmed by feelings of loss, and we’re trying to corral enough positivity and joy to offset our pain. A memorial service held later in the year allows us to remember the person’s entire life. Three weeks after my wife’s unexpected death, I thought I could give Evelyn’s eulogy, but the shock of her unexpected death was still too fresh and raw, and my friend Daniel graciously read my words.

 

Writing Our Grief Out

            All sorrows can be borne if they’re put into a story, Isak Dinesen said. Writing about our grief unties its knots, and unhooks death’s claws from our flesh. 

 

            Start a writing routine. Every day, sit down at the same time, and write about your grief. Record all of your thoughts, feelings, memories, and questions. Write about everything that seems connected until you can’t think of anything else to say. If something else shows up later, make a note to explore it. Writing helps, as does walking in nature and having a community of support.

 

Being Creative with Grief

After being batted around by grief for a time, many of us want to take this raw energy, and our new clarity about reality, and be creative with it. We want to regain a measure of control over a force that has been tossing us around for months. I don’t play a musical instrument, paint, dance, weave, or create sculptures, but I do write, and I wrote down every memory, image, insight, and story of my life with Evelyn, and shaped some of them into essays and poems.

 

We take the remnants that grief leaves us, and sew them together in a patchwork quilt with the sinews of our heart. 

 

Grieving For Society

The Call to Be Creative

When I was swimming in grief's minestrone soup, one of the realities that helped me cope was the sameness of life outside my house. Every day I could mindlessly commute to work, do my job, come home, watch TV, sleep.

Then 9/11 happened, a few months after my wife died, and my grief was swept up into the larger grief of the world. I had no sanctuary from death. Because I didn’t have cable, even TV wasn't a refuge because of its unrelenting coverage of the terror and destruction.