How To Be Remembered...A Memorial Day Reflection

Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, May 30, 1999

Reading from The Town and the City,by Jack Kerouac

They buried George Martin in New Hampshire, on a long grassy slope off the foot of a hill, in the middle of the farming country around Lacoshua. It was a small cemetery over one hundred years old, with old stones leaning woefully among the waving grass, others fallen and half-buried in the loam, the husks of ancient wreaths mingling with pine cones, wild flowers, and a stonewall that had become a vine in the wild undergrowths of the earth...On this hill, in the distance, one saw the misty lands and farmfields and pine woods of the old New Hampshire earth from with the Martins of two centuries had risen secretly, hidden and unknown, enveloped and furious, to live and work and die in the brooding presence of themselves and the earth...

"New Hampshire, New Hampshire," sighed Marguerite Martin, looking around at the beautiful morning and the trees and the distant fields, "He wanted to come back here in the worst way. He hated it so much in New York!... This is where your father and I were born and raised, this is where we were married. When we came into the town there at Millis Street that was the little church where we were married..."

The procession got underway... They proceeded through the streets of little Lacoshua following the beflowered hearse, and the townspeople, who all knew the name of the dead man, paused in their Monday morning affairs to watch, the men removing their hats-- briefly--before walking on. Somewhere a churchbell was ringing, and everywhere Lacoshuans knew that George Martin had died........

On a highway one rainy night in the summer of that year, by glistening waters of a river in a place not far from the lights of a town a big red truck stopped at the one-light junction... Peter Martin in his black leather jacket, carrying the old canvass bag in which all his poor needments for a long journey were packed, got down from the truck. "Don't worry about me," he cried waving. "It's not raining hard at all. See? Just a drizzle. I'll be alright."

And Peter was alone in the rainy night. He was on the road again, traveling the continent westward, going off to further and further years, alone by the waters of life, alone, looking towards the lights of the river's cape, towards tapers burning warmly in the towns, looking down along the shore in remembrance of the dearness of his father and of all life.

He put up the collar of his jacket and bowed his head, and hurried along.

Sermon

There's a phone call I receive from time to time, and I know where its going after just the first few words. It comes from a funeral director--more often than not its my friend Norman Hall from up the street at Davis--and begins: "Steve, I have a family here whose mother/father/some other close relative, has passed away. They're really not strongly affiliated with any church, and the deceased did not consider him/her self to be an especially religious person, but they would like a minister to officiate for a memorial service and burial. Could you be available at such-and-such a time and place?" Except for the occasions when I've had a unavoidable time conflict I've never turned away such a request. Its usually for a family I don't know, and they are relying upon the wisdom of the funeral director to find a minister suitable for performing a funeral for a "not church affiliated and not an especially religious person."

It seems the local Unitarian Universalist minister is the one who, more often than not, gets the call when these situations arise. In fact, my UU ministerial colleagues and I have a name for such requests. We're the ones who get the call when a funeral director is asked to find the town's "LOM". LOM stands for "Least Offensive Minister" when it comes to funerals. Of course its never put to me quite that way--Norm Hall has considerably more class than that--but at this point in my life its not an expression I'd take offense to anyway. Frankly I doubt that few, if any, other ministers in town, representing any one of our local faith communities, would prove to be "offensive," under such circumstances. But, as I say, we UUs seem to be the one to get the call when such circumstances arise.

I relate this not to make light of the plight of a family who has experienced the loss of a loved one. It is a privilege, in fact, to be invited to help a family, or circle of friends, to memorialize one who close to them, and whose life had meaningfully touched their own. I feel like I've been granted access to a very special, if not sacred, part of their lives as I listen to them take the measure of someone to whom they are now having to say good-bye. Indeed, "sacred access" is precisely what I have been granted.

While I'm the one who has been asked to be of service to those dealing with a loss, I've also gotten something back which, over the years, has come to be a great value to me. Even when the death has taken place under the most painful of circumstances I still find myself touched by what is evoked in others when a life is recalled. Just a few days ago I was asked to help conduct a memorial service for someone who had taken his own life. He'd been a resident of one of the Harbor Homes facilities in our community; and some of the mental and emotional issues he'd been struggling with for much of his life apparently, and tragically, become too overwhelming for him. It was important to those who knew him that his struggle be honored--even though the outcome was the last thing anyone who'd known him wanted. His life had still made a positive difference in the lives of others in a way that was worthy of recalling. Such indeed is the case when it comes to memorializing most lives.

While each of the lives I've been asked to assist in memorializing is unique and special to the persons involved, I've also come to recognize some common themes when it comes to how they are each remembered. The personal value for me, from the many conversations I've had in preparation for a funeral or memorial service, is that its given me some insight into what is most enduring about the lives we live. While it may not surprise you a great deal to hear what some of them are, but part of what I'd like to share some of those insights with you on this Memorial Day Sunday.

Memorial Day originally became part of our national calendar in the years after the Civil War as a day to honor the war dead. While it still retains that purpose it has also taken on a wider dimension. It has become a time to recall all those lives that have meaningfully touched and blessed out own. I going touch on three areas this morning as I look at this subject. First, I want to briefly share some of the common themes I've come to hear from families and friends who are taking the measure of one close to them. Second, I want to say how those persons who are described as "not very religious" often sound very religious to me, given my understanding of what "religious" means. Then, finally, I'll be taking a little Kerouac excursion today using the passages I read from the concluding chapter of his first published novel, The Town and the City. Kerouac is memorializing his father in this piece of writing, but he is also seeing in his father's death a time of assessment and a point of departure for his own life. This dynamic is also often at work when it come to dealing with the loss of a loved one.

Back to the first one: What is it I most often hear when remembrances of a person's life are offered? The thing most striking to me, actually, is how little I hear about how the person made his/her living. Striking because "making a living" is what we, of necessity, devote a substantial chunk of our life to. The family may want an occupation mentioned, or the company for whom the deceased worked cited. If it goes beyond that, what is generally asked to be remembered is what the person meant to his/her co-workers. In a "people profession" like that of teacher, nurse, doctor, counselor, and the like, the emphasis is upon what the person meant to the individuals to whom he related, or to whom she extended herself as a member of that occupation or profession, rather than upon how well he or she fulfilled the requirements of the job itself.

Practically every conversation I've had in preparing for a memorial service has borne out the truth of a statement made by Winston Churchill: "We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give." I hear very little about what a person got, or acquired, over the course of a lifetime; nearly everything I hear is about what they gave. The children want to talk about what kind of parent, or grandparent, the person was. They want it pointed out what the person gave to his/her community. I recently did a service for someone who had been instrumental in starting and promoting softball league programs and tennis programs for boys and girls in Nashua during the 1950s and 60s; and the tournaments he'd gotten the city to host and the teams he'd taken to out of town tournaments. His job was barely mentioned by his sons and daughters (and I couldn't tell you what it was now myself) but his passions were softball and tennis. Whatever it is you feel the most passionate about--whether or not it has anything to do with your job--is going to show through, and that is what you'll be most remembered for.

Along with the ways in which you gave of yourself, and what your personal passions were, you will also--believe it or not--be well remembered for how well you made people laugh. I don't necessarily mean how good your jokes were (although sometimes that could be the case) but the things you did to lighten people's spirits. More often than not in my conversations the family and friends they will want some funny incident or amusing trait recalled about the person who has passed on. Some of that, to be sure, is for the purpose of bringing in some levity, as a way of off-setting the grief being felt; but it runs deeper than that, I feel. We're remembered for the joy we brought into people's lives, for how we lifted their spirits, for how we enabled them to laugh at life as well as take it seriously. It is an extremely rare conversation I have about the deceased where at some point some laughter does not come forth.

Still another common theme that comes my way has to do with how "at home" a person was with him/her self; and how well they conveyed the sense of knowing who they were, where they stood; and how much self-respect and self-acceptance they had. Some phrases I've often heard spoken, and in a very approving and admiring way are: "She let you know where you stood with her... He was pretty clear with himself about who he was and what he wanted ... She could easily listen to others because she was so well grounded herself ... He didn't often feel like he had to prove himself because he had an inner confidence..." If you are well grounded in the life you are living, whatever it may be that provides such grounding for you, it will be noticed and well remembered.

This observation gets me to my second point, which is that we are also remembered for how "religious" we are. I find a certain irony in being the one who gets called on to lead the service when the deceased was, as it often gets put to me, "not a very religious person." In these kinds of cases the person was usually not a member of a particular religious community, and usually did not adhere to a particular set of religious beliefs and practices. At that level I can understand and accept the phrase "not very religious." But then I'll be told about the person loved and revered life, savored living, respected the earth and its creatures, or cultivated a sense of awe and mystery and wonder at the Larger Life that surrounds us all; and I'll end up thinking "s/he sounds pretty religious to me."

My friend and fellow UU ministerial colleague, the Rev. Forrest Church, defines religion as "our human response to the dual reality of being alive and knowing that we shall die." That's not the only viable understanding of religion that there is, but its a pretty good one nonetheless. It is the one that comes to my mind when I hear about the various religious traits that a supposedly "non-religious" person had. Religion is our response to life; it is the ways in which we seek connection with Life; it is the ways in which we discover and extract meaning from Life; it is the ways in which we say "yes" to Life in the face of the reality that it is not ours to have and to live forever. More times than I can ever recount now I've heard the statement, "Well, mom/dad was what you'd call a very religious person, but...." and then everything that comes on the other side of that "but" more often than not tells me just what a religious person he or she actually was.

To recall the ways in which a person gave of himself, to affirm the things she felt most passionately about and committed to, to remember how she and he lifted the spirits of others and brought joy into the lives of others; and to speak of how they responded to the life they had for the time in which they had to live it, is to do a religious reflection upon that person's life whether traditional religious language is used or not.

Moving to my third point, and going in a somewhat different direction now, recalling and honoring the memory of one close to us can also be a time a personal assessment. It can be a time of bringing to awareness how our own life has moved, or is moving, in directions other than the life being remembered. Memorial services can be tricky things at times; they can be precarious, thin-ice occasions as well as time of remembrance and affirmation. Memorializing one who has died also presents a challenge to the living--the challenge to confront oneself and take stock of where one goes from here.

The passage I read from The Town and the City is, on the surface, a very rhapsodic and pastoral rendition of the funeral and burial of a fictitious character named George Martin. But below the surface its about the struggle taking place in the life of the young man who is telling the story. The young man, Jack Kerouac, is struggling with the life he feels drawn to, knowing it will run counter to the desires and expectations his father had had of him.

Jack Kerouac began writing this book--his first published novel--shortly after the death of his father, Leo, in 1946 at age 57. Jack was living in New York at the time. His parents had also moved there from Lowell some years earlier shortly after he, Jack, had entered Columbia University on a football scholarship. Jack Kerouac had deeply disappointed and angered his father by dropping out of Columbia to pursue a career in writing, and to cultivate his relationships with the friends of his who would later be called the "beat generation" writers. When Leo died he was brought from where he and his wife were living in Queens, New York, here to Nashua, the town in which he'd grown up. He was buried in the St. Louis de Gonzague Cemetery. Jack calls Nashua "Lacoshua" in his novel.

Kerouac wrote this book as a way of recalling, in a semi-fictionalized manner, his growing up days in Lowell-- which he calls Galloway--and his formative young adult days in New York; hence the title, The Town and the City. He also wrote it as an attempt to come to terms with the life and death of his father, whom he names George Martin. He wrote it in a straight, prosaic style--completely unlike the "spontaneous prose" that would characterize Kerouac's later novels like On the Road.

In The Town and the City Kerouac's own small family of his mother, father, and older sister becomes the very large Martin family of Galloway/Lowell. Unlike Kerouac's own family who were first generation French-Canadian immigrants, the Martins are Yankees who arose from the "old New Hampshire earth" over the course of two centuries. One of the sons in this family, Peter Martin, is the character after whom Kerouac patterns himself. Peter Martin, like Kerouac, is both a gifted athlete and a voracious consumer of all kinds of literature, and aspires to be a writer. He also has a decidedly vagabond spirit about him.

The last chapter of the novel opens on this note: "They buried George Martin in New Hampshire ... in the middle of the farming country around Lacoshua ... in the distance one saw the misty lands and pine woods of old New Hampshire earth..." (The St. Louis de Gonzague Cemetery may have looked like that in 1946 but about all you can see from it now--as you well know--are the exit and entrance ramps of an expressway.) The chapter goes on like this for close to 20 pages, which is partly a Nashua rhapsody and partly a tribute to George Martin and the venerable Martin family. It gets a little thick in places, but all in all its a beautiful piece of writing on the part of a 24 year old guy.

But what leads up to this chapter--as well as what led up to the death of Leo Kerouac--is a tremendously tempestuous relationship between father and son about expectations. Leo Kerouac grew up in the working-class French-Canadian neighborhoods of Nashua and Lowell. When his son, Jack, got the scholarship to Columbia, Leo saw it as the ticket to upward mobility for the whole family. He and his wife--Jack's mother--even moved to New York so they could bask in their son's glory. But Jack went his own way. He could not stay on the path his parents so dearly wanted for him. He shunned what he saw as the confinements of academic life. He was rejected when he attempted to join the Navy, but did make a couple of runs with the Merchant Marine. He made friends with people his parents feared and even loathed. Then his father died of cancer.

Kerouac wrote this book following the death of his father, whom he'd hurt and angered because of his dreams of becoming a writer. But he still gives George Martin/Leo Kerouac a tribute of love and respect in the concluding chapter. Kerouac, however, isn't quite finished with the book once he's completed his eulogizing of George Martin. Instead, he gives his character, Peter Martin, the last words: "On a highway one rainy night in the summer of that year Peter Martin, carrying his old canvass bag got down from the truck... He was on the road again, going off to further and further years ... looking down along the shore in remembrance of the dearness of his father and of all life... He put up the collar of his jacket, and bowed his head, and hurried along."

Jack, as Peter Martin, gives his father the tribute and the respect that are due him, and then takes up his own life--going wherever it leads him. I find it of interest that in much of his writing after this book, Kerouac does not downplay his French-Canadian background in the manner that he does in The Town and the City. In fact he comes to proudly embrace it. Once he has declared his independence from his past, and his heritage, he can then turn around and embrace it on his own terms; as he did in many of his later works. I take this literary excursion to illustrate my third point on "How To Be Remembered." Even those lives which we touch most closely, are not lives that we will ultimately control or direct.

How to be remembered? Be remembered for what you give to others, for the things you feel passionately about, for the joy you bring to the lives of others, for the ways in which you respect and affirm life, and for the ways you embrace and love life. But remember also that those who will be remembering you will also choose lives of their own. You may influence those lives, but their eventual outcome is out of your hands.

So let this holiday be a time of remembering and a time of choosing. Give thanks for the lives that have touched and blessed your own; and keep on a course that will bring you fulfillment and touch and bless the lives of others

Copyright © 1999 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.