Black Friday

My town is rich with gravestones, aflame with late November leaves.  Yellow covers us in sunlight over stones, as we relish what I hope will become a new Black Friday ritual.  I walk the Beacon streets with my 6 year old daughter, a child overflowing with life and freedom, the perfect contrast to the melancholy somberness of the day's activities.   The day after Thanksgiving does seem the perfect day to visit cemeteries, and Beacon is blessed with an abundance of historic ones.  We live with the dead on many corners, filling old churchyards where children play and people walk their dogs.

It is one of the things I love most about my town.  The seamlessness I experience between past and present is what first enchanted me to this place.  I love the ruins of old buildings and the cornerstones that mark the dates of lives lived long before mine. Old factories are not demolished, but transformed into conference centers and art museums.  We vision the future as we walk on. Overlooking the creek, we imagine old train tracks converted to bicycle paths.  Everything is ripe with the possible, radiant with resurrection. 

Recently I met a woman who moved from the Silicon Valley to New England. The reason she gave:  there are no cemeteries in LA.  In sunny southern California, the dead are hidden and tucked away.  Age is disguised, despised, defied-- the eternal sunshine of youth lifted up as some Hollywood sign.  But these are people of a lie, covering death with botox masks and costumed lives. 

True aliveness requires an encounter with death, woven into the fabric of our existence. Here on these Hudson River shores, life is real and I walk this journey in many footsteps that have walked these paths  before. Today we read of tragedies etched in stone, lives cut too short. These people of another century lived daily with the scourge of loss and grief; too many children did not make it to adulthood, and too many young sons and brothers died at war.  But then again, so do we... don't we?  Just this week, I met with a couple who had lost a young daughter earlier in their lives; a friend's teenage daughter lost a classmate in a horrific car accident; and my neighbor's elderly father suffered a fatal brain injury from a random bathroom fall.  Meanwhile, war rages on in distant corners of the world- though we may have forgotten all too easily these young lives.

This is the reality we swim in: Death around us, before us, inside us.  Like it or not, try to defy- we are all going to die.  

It does not matter- on this Black Friday- how fast we shop or fill our carts, how crazy we enter the madness of indulgent rush, the consumerism of forgetting. It does not matter how much we accumulate here on earth- we are all still going to die. What matters is the fullness of this life we leave behind- these leaves bursting with color, this child skipping and singing down the block, this day we open our hearts to dance beneath the mountain's light.  

And so I mark this day- for the second year in a row- by walking through cemeteries and remembering so many lives. Facing the end of breath, I grow less afraid. I say this now, although my heart still breaks for the stories I have heard this week, and I fear the loss of my own loved ones.  But courage is standing in that place, and staying put.  This is the deep truth I encounter here-- that as long as there are ones who age and grieve and drift away, there must also be those who stand beside, who stay at the bedside, who accompany at the grave, who show up with casseroles and love and remembering.  For isolation and loneliness are far far worse than physical death-- those are the crimes against humanity which I rage against.  Those are the crimes that mark too often the numbing blindness of these times.  

Yes, may we make a place for the dying and the dead, the lonely and the lost, here in our beautiful, beloved communities.  May we love beyond measure, including all those who grieve in our embrace.  And may we encounter our lives, each and every one of our sacred breaths- until that final one becomes not a rage against the dying of the light, but a crescendo into oneness with all and everything that is.