Nothing is Lost
I say words at my share of funerals, memorial services and gravesides. Sometimes they’re over folks I know and other times they’re for total strangers. It’s part of the work I do as a pastor. I am both minister, priest and friend in those moments. I’ve adopted the attitude of Thomas Lynch, Milford Michigan’s poet-undertaker whose newest book is titled, Apparitions and Late Fictions: A Novella &Â Stories (2010). In an interview, he once said:
“In The Undertaking, I followed that up by saying something like, ‘A dentist is a dentist, but he has no particular fondness for root canals or bad gums.’ That is sort of his office in brief, to take care of that, but what I wanted to point out is that it is not death-death as a subject is dull, mum, it says nothing-but all the meanings attached to the dead that are the basic stuff of human beings.”
Despite what you think about death and the whole experience of grief and strange, mixed feelings at a funeral, I typically don’t mind the role I play by helping put words to what some are feeling and others are thinking. In most accounts, I see myself putting a big frame around what’s happened so that the experience itself is sharpen in focus. I think “last words” are important to the grieving because they are ways spoken to describe what large looming event has happened that they can’t quite name themselves.
A while back I ran across a poem by Nöel Coward that seems to capture or perhaps re-captures the feeling that one has lost something significant …
Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.
“Nothing Is Lost” by Nöel Coward, from Nöel Coward Collected Verse © Methuen Publishing, Ltd., 2000. Reprinted with permission