Beautiful Box
The year before Covid entered our collective lives, my friend Birgitta, who works as an end of life guide, and I are giving a presentation at our local farmer’s market. We offer information and educational materials about green burial practices and end of life planning that are coming online. On picture boards we have graphs illustrating the yearly waste of resources by the funeral industry, the toxicity of embalming, the global warming effects of cremation, which also spreads pollutants like mercury into the air. Other boards illustrate new practices and possibilities for home funerals, and for disposing of bodily remains in more earth-friendly ways.
For our display we have also borrowed a cardboard coffin, painted white, from our friend Olivia, who is a funeral director. We are inviting people to write messages to their beloved departed on the box, offering them colorful markers to express in words or images anything they want to say to a person who died.
Many people take one look and pass right on by. But some stop to ask questions, mostly older folks wanting information to assist them in their own end of life planning but also young people who are inspired to know more about the “mushroom suit,” a cool looking invention that shrouds a dead body in mycelium to detoxify it and haste decomposition, so that it can become life-giving compost. We also have a sample of the compost created by another such process, designed by Katrina Spade in Seattle, called Recompose. It looks and smells like earth, ready for planting a tree or a rosebush, whatever feels right.
Of those that stop, some pick up the colored markers and write simple messages on the box: Happy Trails, Brother. Virginia: I miss you more than words can say; Buddy: You live in my heart forever. Tell Mom hello from me. Some decorate their words with curlicues, flowers and leaves, hearts, suns, moons and stars. Not all are serious. One woman writes: At least you no longer have to pay taxes. A few parents encourage their children to draw pictures on the box, probably as a way to keep them occupied. One six year old girl writes in careful block letters: I miss you, Grandpa.
A couple of policemen are curious and want to know more about at sea burial. One older woman hovers, listening in on conversations but hesitant. We invite her questions and she tells us she knows this is important, but her husband refuses to talk about ‘these things’. When he comes to stand beside her, she grabs a few of our brochures and pulls him away.
A middle aged white gentleman stops, and speaks in a huff: “I don’t appreciate having to see something like this at the farmer’s market.” I laugh, thinking, okay, no death for you, Mister, but my partner tries to engage him. “So why do you buy organic? You want to eat non-toxic food, so you must care about your body. How about the earth?” He turns on his heels. “Don’t you care what happens after you die? To the earth and who comes after?” He makes a swatting gesture with his hand.
A young Latinx woman stands looking at the box with what seems like intense emotion in her dark eyes. I offer the container with magic markers, explaining the purpose of the display. She tells me that her father had died of a heart attack over a year ago at the age of 52. There had been no occasion to see him, or touch him, or to participate in the funeral except as a bystander, as his new family didn’t want her involved. I ask her what she loved about her father, what special things they shared. When she describes how much he enjoyed music and how he played guitar and when she was little, he wrote her special songs to sing together, her voice gets wobbly. I ask for more detail, and she starts sobbing. I hold her.
She takes a green marker and writes on the side of the box, pouring out first her anger at him for dying and leaving her, her grief, and the love underneath the pain. The words are not pretty but honest, and I can see the relief in her face. I suggest she make an altar with his picture, and once a week light a candle, as a way to honor both him, her own feelings of loss and their on-going connection.
As we reach over six hundred and twelve thousand COVID deaths in the USA and counting, I keep coming back to that encounter at the Farmer’s Market. The young woman’s suffering was in part caused by a similar sense of isolation and lack of witness to her loss, and delayed mourning. I think of all these families who are coping with the pain and grief of the empty place in the bed, at the table, or on the other end of the phone. My brother-in-law’s best friend and business partner’s death left him not just bereft but without a goodbye, the funeral put off until later, no place to engage mourning with others who cared, a disorienting emptiness. The things that normally help us cope with such losses — hugs and touch, being present and listening, funeral rites, services, wakes and gatherings over food and drink — are exactly those that COVID restrictions have made difficult or impossible.
I appreciated President Biden’s immediate gesture to memorialize those who died of COVID, the night before his inauguration. He clearly knows grief and the importance of marking loss. The ceremony with the lights was lovely, a symbolic performance to watch on TV, but how do you make real a number such as 600 thousand deaths? Or a hundred for that matter? How indeed in a culture that has a taboo against seeing and feeling death itself, hiding away aging and dying bodies in nursing homes and hospitals, a culture serviced by an industry devoted to helping us not having to deal personally with the reality of our physical remains, using toxic chemicals and make up to make the deceased look as if they are still alive.
The deaths of my parents, sisters, other family members and numbers of close friends have taught me to know loss, and grief, and shown me ways to befriend what is inevitable yet much denied in our culture at large.
Washing my father’s cold feet and pulling on his dark blue socks and black shoes for the last time gifted me with a physical way to say goodbye, and a new appreciation of our place in the life cycle. I watched over my younger sister’s body as she lay on dry ice for three days in her bedroom fragrant with flowers and full of family members and friends come to pay their final respects, reaching out to touch her one last time. Her face, the muscles and skin waxy but relaxed, gave death its due but also gave the relief of knowing her drawn out agony to be over. A friend’s still birth I attended in the hospital, where we got to hold the lifeless infant, examined his face, appreciated how he looked like his older sister, but with darker hair and bigger hands and feet, and baptized him with our tears.
Not one death but many have worn away my own denial, taught me that our losses need to be marked, held in family and community ritual to be endured and integrated. Taught me that death and its frequent but not always attendant, grief, does not do well being ignored. So more and more I find myself at odds in a culture that eschews the reality that our physical beings are terminal in favor of fantasies of control and longevity. That guy at the farmer’s market speaks for many: don’t confront me with my mortality.
After Birgitta and I arrived home from the farmer’s market with the box, I repainted it white, covering up all the messages, and returned it to the funeral director’s garage. Less than a week later, she received a call from a family whose 17 year old daughter was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting right in front of their home. Visiting with the girl’s family and friends to arrange the funeral, she saw they were all in a state of shock and wordless suspension as they waited for the body to be released by the police, for burial. Olivia realized they needed some way to ground their feelings, settle their bodies from the shock, numbness, unreality and horror. She brought our cardboard coffin to their home.
Over the next 48 hours her school friends and family put their all into decorating the box. They left not one inch of the cardboard uncovered, inside and out. Photos, paintings, messages, flowers, materials, pieces of clothing, parts of a baby quilt, letters, all honoring what she meant to them, representing the unique details of her presence in life. This object offered them a way to make what happened real, and a focus, an opportunity to engage in memory and creativity together, to begin to the process of integrating what had happened. By the time they readied the box to take to the funeral home, the shock had started to wear off and instead they had become more fully present to their feelings, able to express their grief and rage and love, holding each other, literally, in shared sorrow.
We have huge numbers of bereft people. Not just family members of those who died of COVID, but those who died from despair, suicide, loss of income and loss of health care. And in the wider circle, those who have died in our gun violence epidemic, a slow motion war we don’t even acknowledge; and the continuing stream of people of color killed by the police. Accepting the death of a loved one is hard enough without the added horror of violence, a fate suffered by too many.
We inhabit a space of shared loss that needs acknowledgement within a mainstream culture that is death phobic yet enjoys fantasy death through fantasy violence. In testosterone laced story telling individual heroes survive against all odds, doing an inordinate amount of killing in choreographed sprays of blood while we rarely see the actual consequences, the painful physical destruction of enemies and allies. I wonder if witnessing George Floyd’s nine minute murder impacted so many white folks who might normally discount that experience, because for once we did not turn away, but witnessed his real death in real time.
What if every time someone is shot on TV, we would watch the actual demise of the physical body even just for 30 seconds? What if on the news our screens showed us one of the 150 or so species going extinct every day? If we could see the last tiger colony slowly dying of malnutrition and habitat loss, most of us would likely turn the channel. No wonder we can’t face into global warming when we have trouble acknowledging the losses that are happening every day.
Witnessing a dead body helps cut through our denial. But when a body is not available, an object like a coffin can help us honor our losses and move us beyond our own private pain into something larger, family, community, our common humanity.
