Creative ways to honour the dead
Looking back on our lives, we find a landscape of death. How and when it happens is different for each of us, that it does happen is something we all share.
Dear friends,
This is one of my most treasured photos. Me and my brother playing with our dog Kelly on the beach while my dad sleeps in the sand dunes. But as I look at it this morning, I see my mum. It’s her presence that’s most strong in this image. She’s behind the camera, observing the scene and wanting to capture it. She took that shot, in that moment and here I am, 43 years later looking into the picture. Seeing what she saw, and seeing her.
Death anniversaries
We’re coming up to my personal ‘season of death’. My mum’s death anniversary is on the 14th of December and she, along with my dad and grandparents, started appearing in my dreams a couple of weeks ago. My dad’s death anniversary is the day after boxing day, but I’ll extend my death retreat until 12th night, around the 5th of January.
I've set aside this period of around 3 weeks to lie low. Of course, Christmas is in the middle and not the quietest time of the year, but exactly the time for bringing out all the family traditions. After the feasting I’ll be on retreat, quietly at home for 10 days. Then, and only then, will I be ready for 2024.
Our own personal death landscape
Looking back on our lives, we find a landscape of death. How and when it happens is different for each of us, that it does happen is something we all share.
I was in my 30s when the first of my grandparents died. Then, within 6 years, they’d all died, followed by my dad. The landscape changed drastically. Standing behind me had been my mum and my dad, and behind them, my maternal grandparents and my paternal grandparents. Suddenly, there was just my mum. I’m only realising now how shocking that must have been for her, too.
Chatting with someone the other day, they dropped into the conversation that their mum had died when they were 17. That’s a landscape I can’t imagine growing up with. Other friends are taking care of their elderly parents, even though they themselves are well into their 60s. I appreciate the freedom of not having parents to take care of, and at the same time, what I wouldn’t give for just one more conversation with them.
It’s hard to imagine that an alternative reality could have been mine.
Only 47% of people in the UK want a funeral when they are gone, says a new report just out
Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a foreword to the report.
He said: “People around us are increasingly sheltered from the physical reality of death, they know less and less about how they will die and how to cope with loss.
“It is shocking to discover that death may be seen as expensive, time-consuming and irrelevant.”
From an article in The Times
My dad loved a good funeral. I take after him in that way. Now that I’m settled here in Sweden again, I’m going to need a funeral travel budget. As long as people are still having funerals, I will want to go.
Playing our part in the funeral of someone close to us can be one of the hardest things we’re ever called on to do. But also one of the most important. I feel lucky to be part of a family that values funerals, and part of a Buddhist sangha that does them really well.
At the same time, I totally understand the desire to sweep those ashes under the carpet.
Cemeteries and shrines
I panicked the other day, wondering if I’d lost my mum’s ashes in the house move. She would have laughed. I found them in a box labelled ‘sentimental old tosh’. Before she died, she told us what was and wasn’t important to her. For example, she did not want a ‘picnic basket’ style coffin!
We had buried my dad, but she wanted to be cremated and for her ashes to go in dad’s grave with her name added to the gravestone. But, she added, don’t pay for an internment, just dig a little hole yourselves and put a few ashes in. We’re not a family that avoids death, so some months after she died we all headed off to the cemetery, with a trowel and the ashes. My youngest niece, who was around 7 and the least sentimental of all the kids, wanted the honour of digging the hole. “Don’t go down too deep, you’ll get to grandad!” joked my brother.
I’m too far away to visit the grave this year, and I’m sad about that. If we follow through with our plans to move to the countryside in a couple of years, then maybe I’ll create my own little cemetery. Plant some special trees and have a bench where I can sit and chat with the ancestors.
This year though, I think I’ll make a little shrine here in the apartment, then I can light a candle and make some offerings. What will go on the shrine?
My dad’s gardening cap would be there. They were big gardeners, his specialty being veg and her’s flowers.
She had a book on flower arranging that lived under a coffee table near the sofa, it was the book she rested her hands on when she did her nails. When she died I took the cover to frame it. It’s covered in tiny flecks of nail varnish. I call it ‘traces of mum’.
What objects would go on a shrine to your ancestors?
Dreaming of the dead
Before I consciously realised death season was looming, my parents and grandparents all started appearing in my dreams. It’s been lovely to spend time with them.
Outside of this death season, I have a recurring ancestor dream. You could call it a nightmare. In it, I’ve forgotten about them. I’ll suddenly realise that I haven’t visited my grandparents in years, or that I’ve not called my mum in weeks, that I’ve just forgotten them. The feeling is horrible.
What does it mean? That my ancestors want to be remembered? That I mustn’t neglect the people I love that are alive, easy to do in the busyness of life.
Being reunited with the dead
Being a ‘creative Buddhist’ means I’m happy importing beliefs from other faiths into my own. One of these beliefs is the idea of being reunited with my ancestors when I die. That they are somehow waiting for me. It’s such a consolation. Given that within Buddhism, both ‘time’ and ‘space’ are constructs of the mind, I don’t think this belief seriously contradicts my Buddhist views. Our views create our world and this is a view I’ve recently decided I’d like to live with.
When my dad died I put Odilon Redon’s ‘Bust of a man sleeping amid flowers’ (below) on my shrine.
“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”
Oscar Wilde
It’s not always an easy time of year, maybe that’s true for you too? If that’s the case I hope you feel some comfort in this letter. Do feel free to forward this email to anyone you know for whom this is also a season of death,
Love and warm wishes coming your way,
Vajradarshini
Yes why shouldn't we choose to be with them. Sometimes i choose to be with my parents right now. I can still imagine their physical reality and close my eyes and be with them for a little while, and this is much more possible - snd comforting - now, than it was immediately after their deaths when all was loss. Lovely post - all resonates. And the pink cardigan and wearing the clothes of the dead
Thank you for sharing this letter. A close friend of my family died in the summer and I was asked to shoulder the coffin (which I had not done before). It was a strong experience being part of someone’s “death honour guard” and I’m still working through the threads that have appeared since then.