Playing the Ghost

There are plenty of ways to practice dying while still alive. Many of these come from established religious traditions, and have important physical, psychological, and spiritual demands, such as being dunked in a river, being covered with paste made from the remains of a fresh cremation, non-orgasmic sex, sitting still and breathing for half an hour, or, sometimes, just simply muttering "death death death" to yourself. I have not (yet) tried all of them. But it occurred to me that, rather than going and burying myself alive at sunset and bursting out of the ground at sunrise, I might want to try to invent my own ritual for dying while alive. But how? The individual cultures and traditions that spawned the techniques I've listed above are thousands of years old. It would be hard for me to hold a candle to their meaning-making abilities. However, it would probably be less expensive than getting drugged and sent through an underground labyrinth filled with puppets meant to represent the people I meet in the Underworld.

(And I suppose this might be more of the heart of my "we don't get Death in America" rant. I don't feel like we generally prepare ourselves for Death in such meaningful ways. Death is sort of the unfortunate consequence to a life that, otherwise, fully intended to live in its apartment.)

My first thought was how to cope with letting go, whether you wanted to or not. Even if the experience of dying isn't entirely available to me, the contrition involved in the passage of time might be a step into that experience. Maybe if I go somewhere that I am no longer welcome, it will show me how life has continued without me, and will go on continuing without me, regardless of how much I would like to have buildings named after me. And the best place for that is a place that I've found myself incredibly attached to, one that is a deep anchor for my own identity, and one that persists without me to this day: my undergraduate college. In less than a year, everyone I know will have graduated. I've also never been back since I graduated. 

So perhaps a pilgrimage to a place that no longer remembers me will give me some insight into how to learn about dying while still alive. Perhaps I will play the ghost, and linger on a bench all day without speaking to anyone, and see what happens.

Or, perhaps something else entirely!

Saints and Poets, Maybe

After my grandmother died, we were cleaning her house out and I came across several old, empty, cleaned out cookie-tins. As I was piling them up to be packed into the car, I noticed a discarded sock on the floor. It was one of my grandmother's. It was clean, and had probably been in line to be worn before she passed.

Without thinking, I picked up this sock, put it in a cookie tin, and made sure that tin ended up in my room, where I stashed it in a closet. I still don't think I've opened it. Looking back, I suppose there was something compelling about a thing that had made direct contact with my grandmother in her final weeks, but I could've just as easily snatched a pen, a cup, or a book. But none of those really surprised my sense of grief - I can easily picture my grandmother interacting with all of those objects. In fact, I really like imagining her writing in her journal, drinking a cup of tea, watching the birds. But it takes effort, and a kind of anchorage, to remind myself that she also wore socks.

That, I think, is the value of mementos.

Postsecret recently put up a number of sound bytes, mostly taken of answering machines and the like, of people who had died, which had been held on to by their loved ones. None of them is spectacular - even the tape-recorded note of a mother encouraging her daughter is hard to listen to because the recording is so rough. But simply hearing a person speak, using their own cadence and not your memory of their cadence, is enough to shake up your memory of them, to surprise you, to remind you. There is something uplifting in the idea of hearing my grandmother speak again, or one friend play a guitar, or another laugh - but even those are rose-colored. Would I feel the same way about a bill my grandmother paid?

I suppose the thing about having your mental picture of someone you've lost challenged and shaken is that it's very hard to do from the inside out.

The word "Remembrance," often used in liturgy like the Episcopal Communion, comes from the Greek word "anamnesis." If I were to attempt to translate it using this handy sledgehammer, it might mean something like "the up-remembering." It carries with it a sense of there being a kind of "bubbling up" in this specific kind of memory. After all, you realize things you forgot you knew. The physical experience seems to be that these memories come from somewhere else in you and "surface." This becomes particularly interesting when you think about "selective memory," when information you wished to forget suddenly bursts out of the pipes you've made for it.

Effective mementos cause anamnesis. Effective mementos are bad plumbing. Because I know, deep down, that how I imagine the dead is just a filling-in of blanks they've left for me. The substance used is thought, which is crafted and shaped by my own mind. After a while, it becomes sugary. It is not a wholesome experience. But effective mementos will cause an overflow from within of things I never expected to remember about someone. Perhaps this overflow will even bring up new and un-fillable blanks. It won't bring the person back, and it may not stay long, but for a moment, at least, I might be reminded that the person I miss is bigger than my understanding of her, and that her absence was not the only part of her that was too large to comprehend - her presence was, similarly, a mystery.

Emily discovers this at the end of Our Town. Having died giving birth, she sits among the dead in her town's graveyard, as her funeral procession leaves. Against the admonitions of her friends and neighbors, she decides to try to relive her life. She begins with what she thinks will be the happiest memory she can remember - her birthday. The Stage Manager takes her there, and within moments, before her young self even steps into the kitchen where her father is waiting with a birthday present, Emily collapses from grief. The smell of her mother cooking bacon, her father's frame, all the things she'd stopped noticing because they were regular are simply too much for her to take. The Stage Manager stops the memory, and Emily asks if everyone sees the absolute value of each moment in life, the way she just has. The Stage Manager replies, "Saints and poets, maybe - they do some."

For the rest of us, we've got mementos. And also, possibly, the thought that any one thing we do or participate in may be taken by someone who survives us as a lighthouse for who we were, even if it's something as simple as wrapping paper, an answering machine message, or a sock.

***

Also, because I love lists, here's a list of mementos I have:
-A tuft of white fur sealed in an old glass garlic spice bottle (from my first cat)
-A whip, made out of a piece of window framing, a string, and a ball of duct tape
-A four-panel comic strip made on a company notepad, featuring one mouse shaking a can of soda and tricking another mouse to open it (the lesson, as clearly stated by the mouse, is: opportunities are everywhere, you just have to know where to look for them.)
-A zodiac clock that doesn't work (and apparently, now, is incorrect)
-A plaster mask of my own face after I found out someone had died
-A case of tea
-A sock, in a cookie-tin