By Rabbi Ben Kamin
OCEANSIDE, California — When someone dies, it is not always time for ‘a celebration of life’
With the Academy Awards pending, I recall the touching memorial list they presented a few years ago, after the untimely death of Michael Jackson. The touching, if theatrical necrology included Michael Jackson but neglected Farrah Fawcett—both of whom died in 2009. At any rate, James Taylor sang a sweet song, his bald head shining with mortality, and the national audience was invoked to a graphics-driven “celebration of life.” That’s okay for a later, group perspective, such as the one at the Oscars, but not necessarily satisfactory at the actual time of death.
Maybe it’s because when I’ve lost people that I loved, I didn’t feel like celebrating. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen people up close, really up close, when the reality of the fresh absence of someone, the abyss in their life takes hold and their cries are guttural and they are inconsolable because no device, no diversion, no seminar, no psychological formula can substitute for their need to swim through the dark waters of human grief.
There is no visceral objection here to the phrase, “a celebration of life,” and, on one level, a gathering of survivors at the time of someone’s death is a commemoration, certainly a recalling, of that person’s life. The concern is that, over 35 years of observing the American way of death and dying up close, I see it seeping into the overall entertainment and denial culture that we are. Americans do so many things well; we really are, or have been, the paragons of manifest destiny, multiculturalism, pop music, space exploration, and urbanism. But when it comes to death and sex, we are conflicted, sophomoric, conflicted.
“A time to be born, and a time to die,” the brilliant, author of Ecclesiastes wrote. “A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to grieve and a time to dance.” This is when I love the Bible, incidentally—it is the ultimate library of human experience.
I know that when someone dies, we want to cling to life. That is the function of the soul, in which I believe wholeheartedly. In fact, I don’t believe in ghosts—I believe in souls. But when someone dies, we need to grieve, we need to weep, we need to tear, we need not to pretend.
Why then, rabbi, do you accede to these “celebrations of life?” One may indeed ask. In the first place, institutional religion has placed a heavy yoke of this diversionary concept on the minds of good people, in tandem with American breeziness and mine is to serve and not to judge. The temporal interlude of death and memorial is not the time to invoke religious law or to become sanctimonious. I would rather gently guide folks through their pain rather than their guilt.
When my close friend Eric died several years ago, the colorful brochure handed out at his service announced that he was born on such and such a date and was “Born into Eternal Life” on the day that he collapsed and died. We were told over and over again that Eric was not dead and we were to celebrate. Problem: Eric was dead and we were delusional.
I do honor, deeply, the theological sensibility at work here. Ironically, the one person (since I knew Eric fairly well) who could have made sense of that service, the only individual who would have been frank about the situation was Eric himself. “I’m gone. I’d like to be missed. You’re supposed to cry and be heartbroken. That’s how you will eventually heal. Then you can in time celebrate, and I will have peace.”
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com. Comments intended for publication in the space below must be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the U.S.)