The Death of My Aunt, The Death of God, and The Excellence of Mortals
A "thank you" to two men who stepped up
“This house is ‘worlding,’” I said, retrieving Being and Time from my tote. Since I’d studied it for a class we returned to it often. Its message of fully “being” fueled our decision to move to the country.
“Yes,” you agreed. “And the things in this room are ‘thinging.’”
The world is not to be described in the soulless language of science, Heidegger thought, as interactions between disconnected objects. The world is to be understood through poetry. The world is a place to dwell, and to dwell is to belong. Therein lies “worlding.” Nor are things discrete bits of matter. A carafe is not merely a cylinder some cubic inches in volume, some case study in physics. It’s a vessel for sharing wine with friends in celebration. Therein lies “thinging.”
We appreciated Heidegger’s respect for divinity. And Nietzsche’s, too: his famous cry that “God is dead” lamented the world’s loss of wonder. We were atheists, then as now. But neither philosopher was concerned with literal deities. Each spoke of the void left in human hearts when belief in the enchanted is lost and only cold materialism remains. They, and others, warned that the conditions of modern life—urban living, individualism, technology, our war against nature—rob people of happiness and purpose. But we know too much to find comfort in premodern mysticism, so we struggle to create meaning in our lives. That’s the crisis of modernity.
- From 18 Months
The crisis of modernity is an enduring interest of mine. It's too big a topic to wrangle neatly into words—big enough that the philosophy professor leading my independent study gave me the entire semester to elucidate its definition. In short, it's the idea that unbridled progress, with its accompanying loss of what once seemed “divine,” may not represent an unmitigated good.
My paternal aunt died last weekend; I'll call her Constance. Living in a care facility far from her birthplace, she'd succumbed to a month-long illness no one in the family knew she had. Though I hadn't spoken to her in years, I loved her in my youth and still have fond feelings for her. In the tradition of living out a tired cliché, I'd recently meant to call her, and got busy, and didn't.
Constance retired from a blue collar management job and remained single for the entirety of her life. Her friends were baffled by the story of her short courtship with Frank, a kind man of respectable wealth who wanted nothing more than to marry her. Constance told me about Frank, admitting he was quite the catch. “I don't know why I didn't marry him,” she said with a shrug.
I know why. After Frank, Constance bought a house with her best friend—a sturdy, assertive woman who also never married. The two lived together for decades and were still friends when the latter passed away. But Constance and her friend were devout, fire-and-brimstone Baptists, who openly condemned divorce, the teaching of evolution, and homosexuality. I'm not sure how they reconciled their faith with the inconvenient reality I suspect they faced. It probably involved denial, transgression, guilt and repentance. Rinse and repeat.
The next of kin was her (and my dad's) brother. It seems he couldn't locate a life insurance policy, and as a man of meager means from the famously unsentimental side of my family, he declined to purchase a funeral, headstone, or anything else superfluous to getting her body into the ground. He couldn't even be bothered to provide the undertaker with photos, or clothes to bury her in.
A mere eight of us appeared at the graveside service; two family members besides myself, one ex in-law, and our partners. The casket was plain. No obituary had been written. The flower arrangement I sent was placed near the only other one present. The cemetery was in the area of my aunt’s birth, but since she’d moved long ago, neither the undertaker nor the pastor knew her. The paltry gathering triggered my own fears of dying alone without fanfare, in my case as a childless unbeliever with a string of disgruntled ex-lovers and estranged friends in her wake.
“I don't suppose we could see her,” I asked the undertaker with trepidation. He opened the casket to an octogenarian wearing subdued makeup, braided hair and an inexpensive floral gown—someone who bore little resemblance to the spirited, short-haired woman who took me to the museum in plain button-ups and slacks. He apologized for how she looked, explaining he'd not seen a photo of her. But I was grateful he'd bothered to make her up at all, since no showing had been scheduled.
Religion meets a need, critics of modernity say, one not easily met by secular replacements. It celebrates life's sacred moments, like the birth of a child. It provides comfort and ceremony in times of difficulty, like the death of a loved one. I've inclined to agree with Sam Harris, who wants us to meet those needs without the violence of religion, its animal and human sacrifice, its abuse of women, its eternal torment. Not that I have no conception of what religion offers, that elusive thing our souls need. “I don’t buy into the religious or the paranormal,” I write in my memoir. “But I do believe in the sacred.”
The demeanor of the two men who performed my aunt's small service revealed anew the sanctity that a little tradition can bring. Their sincere interest in their work, in its appropriate fulfillment, a kind of professionalism, to use too sterile a word. Their compassion. Their humanity. Still, I credit these two men, not the God they worship, for elevating the experience. It was their own willing contribution that made the difference.
Though stymied by the family's minimal participation, the undertaker resolved to conduct a proper funeral. He'd printed a simple folded program on parchment, adorning it with a vintage illustration of a rose. On the inside, he’d included the paltry information he had on Constance: her date of birth, her date of death, details on the service. Opposite this, he’d transcribed the Lord’s Prayer. When we were seated he said a few words, more words than he needed to say under the circumstances, drawing upon nothing at all to create a nonetheless solemn and sacred moment. Abundance from scarcity. Breaking five loaves and two fish into a multitude.
The pastor, for his part, began with a prayer. A religious service was appropriate for a religious woman, but it also provided him with a framework for delivering a eulogy in the absence of information about the woman he eulogized. “I didn't know Constance,” he began, explaining his difficulty in pulling together the right words for the occasion. “But the Lord knew Constance.” It was an inspired way to proceed. Drawing upon the foundation of religion, he spoke for a while, making a kind of sense, his familiar Southern accent delivering a kind of comfort. He brought dignity to the uncharacteristically-dressed woman, elevating her place in the cosmos, turning a senseless loss and its pathetic response into a moment of importance situated within a grand narrative. He wove together the loose ends he’d salvaged, a life and a death, found family and blood kin, turning oblivion into eternity in glory. Constance, her dwelling in the world, her belonging, her gathering in the fourfold of mortals, divinities, earth and sky.
And after all, my aunt was not as alone as her modest service might suggest. She had a ton of friends back in the city, friends from the care center, work friends, church friends, friends she made with her partner. Perhaps those folks couldn't justify a long trip for a short service, with no showing before and no dinner afterward. Perhaps they didn’t even know about it. But they loved her as I did, and grieved in their own way, in their own homes, honoring her with other small ceremonies and tears.
There's something to be said for taking care of the little things that are within your sphere, day in and day out, of finding the gaps and filling them, thereby making the world an incrementally better place. Just doing your business consistently, correctly, for the sake of it, without seeking reward or applause, as these two men did. Competence. Mercy. Compassion. It's a yawning chasm away from the solipsistic ranting and ruminating that characterizes the Internet and much of the rest of my world. Theorizing is vanity. Doing is holy.
I am sorry for your loss. A whole generation is passing away, and with them their set of rules to live by, regardless of how useful they were. We are now inventing new rules to fill that void, but none seem to matter as much as doing our job with integrity. Thank you for this beautiful meditation.
"There's something to be said for taking care of the little things that are within your sphere, day in and day out, of finding the gaps and filling them, thereby making the world an incrementally better place. Just doing your business consistently, correctly, for the sake of it, without seeking reward or applause, as these two men did. Competence."
This is a very useful approach. I sometimes think of it as just do your job, do your job very well and ethically. If we all did that... who knows. The world's too complex for each of us to master much more than that.