Month: November 2009

Our wonderful eldest son Nate and Laura Hope Dunbar have announced their engagement. Just when you think you couldn’t be more proud, more joyous, they find a way to kick it up a few notches.
 
Margaret and I long to have been together last night when we heard — so we could hug and cry and reminisce about our little Halloween bumble bee growing into the man, the friend, the scholar and teacher, the fiancé who gives us such delight. We’ve been so tremendously blessed by our children and the wonderful loved ones they’ve brought into our lives — thanks, and cheers, and congratulations to Nate and Laura!

At church this morning, we sang the praise of all the saints, and tomorrow we will praise and pray for all the faithful departed. I’m still feeling my father’s death a year and a half ago, and just a few weeks ago my aunt Isabelle died. It’s been a hard while of dying, and (of course) popular culture witnessed a funereal procession of hearses this year, headlined by Michael Jackson.
 
Tom Long has been studying America’s theology of death and mourning for years now, and his perspective in today’s op-ed in the NYTimes shows some of what he’s observed. He doesn’t mention the surge of fascination in zombies and vampires (whose fictive grim existence serves, perhaps, to offer an ironically self-aware empty promise of deathlessness), but the whole picture illustrates a sad cultural aphasia in the face of death. One of the jobs remaining to me will be to work on articulating what we ought to remember about dying, how we may learn to grow up into death.
 
Still, when our own words fail us, our forebears willingly lend us theirs. Dad, Isabelle; Michael, Ted, Eunice, Walter, Farrah, John, Mary, all: May rest eternal be yours, and light perpetual shine upon you. May your souls, and the souls of all the righteous, rest in peace.