Driving on Interstate 80 from my Illinois town located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Rock Rivers toward Iowa City, Iowa. Sixty miles dodging semi-trucks weaving across traffic lanes from prairie’s gusts or drivers’ fatigue, wind turbine blades hanging over flatbeds, newly built mobile homes with large “wide load” signs taped to them, and an assortment of campers. Traveling to see two congregants at the University of Iowa Hospitals (one dying, the other hoping to live). Thinking as I drive how convenient it is that the best hospital exit takes me by the entrance where I will one day be buried. Not alone but alongside my first husband, Tony, who has already been there for over eight years.
Decide to make a cemetery stop. Check on the daffodils I planted around his (our) stone. Have a quiet moment of my own. Once off the interstate, I turn left down a brick, narrow street. Enter the cemetery’s single lane road. Wind past stones I’ve grown to accept and even find solace in including the memorial to those humans brave enough to donate their bodies to the advancement of science and medicine for all people, known and unknown.
It’s Holy Week or close to it. Close enough for me to feel its intensity in my body. Enough to wonder why a pastor of fifty plus years decided right now to transition from this life into the next one (Shouldn’t he know better? As in every pastor is nearing exhaustion including me?). I approach the right turn into our section. An area I am proud to say boasts a restored prairie, woods with hiking trails, and a columbarium. But today instead of the usual hikers, and dog walkers, I find a line of cars park in the middle of the narrow road. Empty cars with no burial tent in sight. And there are people everywhere riding bicycles grinning like their ten-year-old selves.
I suspect I witness a celebration of a recently deceased cyclist. Yet to my seasoned pastoral eye, this seems to be an event organized by friends and family. People not in the business of death. Nothing wrong per se with those who do not include the dying and dead in their profession. Yet, I’ve already learned in three short years of ministry that people can be, well to be frank, clueless as to the nuances of impending death, death itself, and post death realities and its rituals. The last in my list is where a good funeral director is more than helpful. Even if there is no ceremony, worship service, memorial service, celebration of life, or funeral. These people know the landscape and language of this time. Because a good funeral director would have had those cars parked along the sides of the road making way for other people visiting their loved ones’ graves. A good funeral director would know what else was happening in the cemetery that day such as burials or mowing or road maintenance. A good funeral director would direct the cycle traffic reminding everyone that there will be walkers and cars in the cemetery and everyone must share the road. A good funeral director would have thought of me and people like me who come to the cemetery to feel what the living of life often masks–our sadness. But instead, I encounter a gleeful, happy crowd of cyclists who are fully absorbed in their mourning ritual taking over a place of which I now have partial ownership of.
When I finally figure out how to park, I become a point of curiosity. For one thing I am not one of them. I have not been invited to this party. Also having emerged from my car, my clerical collar proceeds me. My collar, an outward sign to some of their childhoods, church hurts, and feelings about gods and God. To others a symbol of what I will do in an hour or so. Commend a dying one to God. Yet what I am not here to do right now is to remind this group of anything, life or death or even their spiritual selves. In this moment I am here only as a widow.
During another visit here I was walking along the road, lost in solemn, sad, and introspective thoughts. As I rounded the road’s curve toward the trailhead two couples a generation older than myself were laughing and parading around a newly installed gravestone. I looked up because people are not typically joyful in the cemetery. That’s what I’m thinking and in truth in a judgmental way when one of the women looks at me and says, “Oh! Do you have your grave here too?”
How am I to reply? I want to scream, “I SHOULD NOT BE HERE YET!” Instead, I say and I admit in clipped tones, “My husband is buried here.” Then I walk on not waiting for a response.
I am around death a lot. It’s not gleeful. Peaceful, it can be. Yet peace and joy are gifts at death. Not all of us receive them when a loved one dies. When death is not peaceful, like Tony’s death day, those remaining spend a lifetime gathering particles of peace, enough to keep living.
The cycles everyone is riding today are expensive. I recognize the brand names now married to an avid cyclist. Our garage and basement filled with cycles, tools, and parts. I think, “If you can afford these cycles, you can afford a F***’in funeral director! Those are my thoughts, not empathetic. Certainly not compassionate. But in grief, others’ experiences and needs are not primary. Not even close.
Daffodils poke out of spring’s ground around Tony’s grave. I clean up dead leaves, count the rocks on the top of the stone, take a deep breath acknowledging the truth of this place in my sons’ and my continued life. Then it’s time for me to go from death’s markers to the hospital room of a dying one.
I spend ten minutes maneuvering my car out of its parking place with the help of one very happy cyclist.
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