Of death and other inconveniences in life

I’ve lost many friends.

When I became pastor of my first church, some of my members were a half-century older than me. Many became my friends. All of them have died.

In my first call, Les was 60 years older when he took me under his wing. We delivered Meals on Wheels together. I saw our village through his generous eyes. He was my life coach before life coaches existed.

Pastor-parishioner norms defined the boundaries of our relationship, but we also became pals. We lamented his wife’s dementia. He walked me through the rudiments of fatherhood when our Joseph was born. After his wife died, I helped him write his late-in-life wedding vows for his old friend and new bride. He died when I was barely 30. Though I was no longer his pastor, I was still his friend.

And his death stung.

Many of these friends I’ve had the privilege to have buried — over 300 of them. I’ve prayed over deathbeds. I’ve read sentences of scripture at gravesides, grounded by the smell of fresh-turned earth and flowers, the hum of bees, a breeze in nearby branches. I’ve preached sermons at the church in which I speak of God’s gift to us of them.

I’ve met relatives and lifelong friends at the reception and heard stories of the troubles with the law they had when they were caught driving a delivery truck in Chicago when they were 13, the brave and generous things they did for their community, and the special gifts they shared as a father, mother, brother, friend, neighbor.

In addition to gratitude, some guests confided malfeasance and shortcomings, and many mused about the strange finality they felt, life’s brevity, the strange weight of it all. I’ve wrestled with them over the punch bowl trying to find the right words. Bereavement? Sorrow? Loss?

In every case the dull joyful-sad ache of grief was accompanied by love, which is why we hurt so much.

Words like wonder and awe keep bumping into each other in such conversations.

Marking the milestone of death with some kind of gathering is precisely the place and time to have these conversations. Convening with the bruised and left-behind is a tender, beautiful communion.

Since Covid, fewer families bother to have a funeral. People are putting off or otherwise opting out of formal celebrations of life. “We’ll do it later” is another way of saying we never will.

Ed Plemmons, one of the owners of Heritage Funeral Services in Valdese, guesses that 30-percent of the deaths they will handle in 2026 will have no public ceremony marking the death.

No wake.

No funeral service.

No graveside.

In 1963, when he began his work in the funeral business, nearly every death was marked by some kind of public gathering.

Fewer people gather over open graves, in church pews, or around sausage balls in fellowship halls. Families used to wash and dress their dead. They hosted neighbors in their homes and places of worship. They dug the holes in family cemeteries, got dirt under their fingernails, broke a sweat.

We moderns experience the weight of loss differently. Nowadays, the nearest of kin signs a few papers and other people “take care of it.” We call in professional undertakers, rabbis, and transition doulas.

Asking for help is fine.

Passing on services is not.

With fewer actual funerals, we increasingly don’t pause to commemorate, to remember, to give thanks. There is no ritual to hold our grief. No toasts. No speeches, poems, or screeds. No prayers, no anthems, no benediction. No holding silence and telling stories. A community that doesn’t gather can’t help us shape our remembering into words.

Skipping the funeral is to our detriment.

Death is part of life, even if we moderns avoid it.

And with death comes grief.

A minister friend was burning out when he told me, “I’m tired of burying my friends.”

He said his grief was “cumulative.” I had never heard of cumulative grief.

The pain got heavier and heavier, he said, unnoticeably at first, one thin layer at a time. But it added up. He didn’t have sufficient time to recover before the next funeral.

And the next.

And the next.

Our grief becomes compounded. This often happens when losses pile up in a short time. It gets to the point where we can’t deal with all of it, so we don’t deal with any of it.

Many of our veterans can speak to this heaped-up, unmanageable grief.

People who work in helping fields also know what I’m talking about.

Marking the milestone of death with some form of funeral is one way we untangle our loss. We gather with others around the proverbial punch bowl and shake our heads. We express the expressionlessness of heavy hearts.

Grief is healthy.

Grief is a byproduct of love.

But if we don’t express our grief, it becomes bottled up inside of us and will need to find some other way out eventually. The only thing worse than grief is getting stuck in grief. Unmanaged grief might darken into depression or stoke the hot fires of anxiety, neither of which is good for our bodies, our family, or our community.

I’m in favor of marking the milestone of our beloved’s death in some communal event.

Gather the community. Remember, worship, laugh and lament together. Have a wake. Sit shiva. Convene ceremonies — janazah, sraddha, and other celebrations of life. Do something.

When someone dies, our let’s-keep-it-moving culture allows no off ramps, not even a slow lane. We just keep driving — fueled by energy drinks and the soulless urgency of white line fever.

Where are we going?

What’s the hurry?

And who are we going to be when we arrive, if we haven’t stopped along the way to celebrate and grieve those with whom we have sweetly shared the journey?