Another death

There's been another death this year, a woman I've known for a dozen years though not deeply. But for most of those years, I saw her regularly, once a week. I'll call her Janet, which wasn't her name in real life.

Janet and Debbie co-founded the UU Sangha that I attend regularly. During all the years up through when we suspended meeting because of COVID-19 in 2020, Janet facilitated every meeting, every week, except for the handful of times that she traveled to visit family. By the time we resumed meeting—first remotely, and then in a hybrid manner—her treatments for ovarian cancer had started taking a toll. So she was rarely there, and no longer led. Still, she was in everyone's hearts. This year Debbie traveled here (to Beautiful City, where I live) several times to visit with Janet and her family; and finally, five weeks ago, Janet died.

This is just some random UU congregation on the Internet, and not the one
Janet belonged to. But her Celebration of Life was easily this crowded.

The Sangha did an adapted Buddhist ceremony for the dead at our next meeting, and we are doing an abbreviated ceremony by Zoom once a week for the seven weeks thereafter. (Tonight is number five.) Last weekend the UU Church that hosts us (of which Janet was also an active member) held a Celebration of Life for her. In fact, Janet herself designed the Celebration of Life ceremony. There was a little Buddhist input, when the Sangha came up to the front to chant "The Three Refuges." And there was a walk through her life, with lots of photos. Several people stood up to talk about what she had meant in their lives. And there was lots of food. It was a lovely service.

Already some of the other members of the Sangha have started to think about their own deaths. (None of us is exactly young.) One woman has said she wants her service to look just like Janet's, and so she has started writing her life because nobody here knows anything about it.

Where does this leave me?

Traditionally I have said that funerals—I mean, "Celebrations of Life"—are for the living, so whoever survives me should decide what they want. But of course part of my diffidence about expressing my opinions is that I fear throwing a party to which nobody shows up! And who would have anything to say about me? I'm no longer working, so I can't claim the automatic community of the workplace. I communicate with a few close friends—Debbie, who is older than I am; Marie, who is about the same age but in worse health; Schmidt, who is solitary and hardly the life of any party. There's my Mother, but in the normal course of things you'd expect her to go first. There are Brother and SIL, but I'm not at all close to them. There are Wife, Son 1, and Son 2—plus Beryl and Son 1's girlfriend, I guess. But it feels like a dirty trick to ask any of them to say anything nice about me.

So maybe there will be a handful of people who still remember me who can get together. Hardly enough for a big event. It was always like that when I worked somewhere that was ramping down through successive layoffs. The big parties were at the beginning, when the superstars got jobs somewhere else. But I was always laid off at the very end—after all, someone had to do the support tasks that I did right up until the end, and as the overall volume of work dropped I could take on the responsibilities of one after another of my colleagues. Besides, I was chronically underpaid, so keeping me on didn't do much damage even to an endangered bottom line. So by the time they finally closed the doors, the only employees left were a handful of eccentric but essential misfits: too few for a big party, and not really friends with each other because all our friends had been let go months before.

That exact scenario happened to me at least twice—arguably three times—in my career. I figure my experience with funerals will be much the same. 

Do I want them to know the story of my life? Which story? The most extensively documented story of my life is this one here, the story of Hosea Tanatu in this very blog! But they can hardly use that! It's anonymous for a reason: everything I say about other people—to say nothing of myself!—is mean and nasty. Besides that, the most important bits are all interior—the Aha! moments where the pieces fall into place and I recognize some truth that had escaped me before. It's hard to make a compelling story out of that.

Maybe you could make a story of the people around me—my birth family, Wife, the boys. From time to time you could punctuate events by using me as a clock, or a metronome. "This year, Hosea changed jobs. That year, we moved to Beautiful City." It sounds better than, "That year, during his spare time while unemployed, Hosea tried to reframe Christian theology from a totally new perspective. After he wrote it up, he showed it to half-a-dozen people. None of them got the point he was driving at." (That really happened. It was before I started this blog.) Of course the latter approach would constitute an account of my real life, but it wouldn't mean much to anyone else.

I don't really know what I want on this front.