by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given November 3, 2002

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

We all know we’re going to die one day, but that doesn’t mean we will actually acknowledge that we’re going to die. Most of us, in fact, will go out of our way to avoid the subject all together. Woody Allen may have summed it up when he said, "I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens."

If we don’t talk about it, maybe we just won’t have to deal with it. We can just be in another world where we expect that we’ll live for a long, long, time, and maybe forever. I think of the woman who said to her husband: "If one of us should die first, I think I should go and live in Paris."

It is no wonder that we do this. Death puts us face to face with the unknown—and the unknown can be difficult. Bottom line is that we don’t know what is going to happen to us when we die and this causes its share of anxiety. For most of us, the known is a lot more comfortable than the unknown. We will do all we can to have some certainly about what is going to happen to us eventually. But we can’t always get the answer we want.

A Zen student once queried his master as to what happens when we die. The master smiled and said, "I do not know."

"How can that be? You are a Zen Master."

"Yes," he replied. "But I am not a dead Zen Master."

A couple of years ago, I knew a person about my age who died suddenly. This got me to thinking about the fact that I had not prepared a will, I had not left any instructions about my memorial service and, in general, had made no preparations for my death. The next thought I had was some of the choices that might be made that would not necessarily be my choices. As a person who generally likes to be in control, I didn’t really like what I was imagining. I decided that it was important to get my thoughts down, lest a hymn that I secretly hate be sung at my memorial service. or lest some of my estate go to something I really don’t want it to go to.

I started thinking about these issues, but I didn’t quite know where to go to find an attorney. Finally I got a referral for one, but I just couldn’t seem to get around to making the appointment. Months went by and I began to recognize a pattern in my behavior around this—a pattern called avoidance. I know from talking with others that this is not at all a-typical. It is something that is easy to put off.

Finally one day I did get going. I met a lawyer and he gave me a bunch of homework to do. Once I got started, I found that it was actually a very good experience.

I thought about who I would want to have handle my affairs.

I thought about where I would want most of my money to go when I am gone, where I would most want it used into the future. The choice was clear. I decided on the two institutions that are the most important to me: my seminary and this church.

Next came decisions about my stuff and this was a little harder. At first I made a long list of books, furniture, art, photos, clothes and mementos. The list was pretty exhaustive and I just stared at it not knowing where to begin. Truth was, there is a lot of my stuff that nobody would particularly care about. That was a sobering reality. It was my stuff, but it wouldn’t be all that important to someone else.

I tried a different method. Instead of the long list, I started to think about what some of the most important items were: my ministerial stoles, some pieces of art, some photographs, some kitchen utensils I have from my mother. It quickly became clear that they were not necessarily things of monetary value, but things that represented relationships in my life, important people, important memories. Suddenly, I saw the rest of my stuff in a whole new light. Just what would happen to this stuff one day was now a question.

The process did not take all that long, but it was a rather emotional experience. And in the end it was a very rewarding experience. I loved imagining where things would go. I loved imagining how my resources would continue to give into the future.

Too often we don’t take the time to let our wishes be known. We put it off and then at some point it is too late. There are a couple schools of thought about this. One is to not worry about it—when we’re gone someone else will have to deal with it. There’s a certain point to that, but it can also make it difficult for those we leave behind. If you are lesbian or gay, it is especially important to have your legal affairs in order because you are not protected in the same way that other people are. And there is potential for conflict when we don’t make our wishes known. I’ve heard of more than one family that has gotten into nasty fights because mom or dad didn’t specify what they wanted.

In my own family, when my mother died, I found that relatively minor tensions quickly came to the surface in the process of dividing up the family treasures. In my family you never say, "I want that." You say, "I wouldn’t mind having that if nobody else wants it." You break the rule when you say, "I want that." And when two people say they wouldn’t mind having it if nobody else wants it, then you’re in trouble. We did work it out, but it wasn’t always easy. And sometimes doing what someone has requested is not as easy as you might think it will be.

When my mother was alive, she only made one request about her funeral. She wanted the song "Edelweiss" from the Sound of Music sung at her service. Her family was Swiss and the movie and the song were always very important to her. Now the song is not from Switzerland or Austria, it is the creation of the American musical theater. Nonetheless, it was her favorite.

Well, about ten years ago my mother died relatively suddenly. I was living in California at the time and did not make it back to Wisconsin before she died. When I got back, my siblings met me at the airport and told me the news that she had died. We headed back to our hometown and started to make the arrangements. That evening we met with the minister from the Lutheran church we all grew up in. We were sitting around mother’s kitchen table and discussing plans for her funeral a few days later. When I brought up mother’s request, the minister got a solemn look on his face. He said, nervously, that in fact the song could not be used because it was not a Christian song and therefore could not be in the service. He gave the example of how an alcoholic had once requested the song "I Did It My Way."

At the time of the conversation, I hadn’t slept in about 36 hours and the one thing I could remember my mother asking for was this song, so it was over my own dead body that this song was going to be kept out of the service. I should mention that I knew going in to this that my mother was not particularly fond of her minister. This did not help things either.

The minister had a twitch in his arm. The more stressed he was, the more pronounced the twitch became. As my voice grew slightly louder and ever more serious as I again asked that the song be sung, his arm twitched a little more. My siblings, I should say, were not speaking at this point. We were raised to not question what a minister says, and they didn’t quite know what to make of their little brother. To this day they talk about how they thought we were going to have to go out into the yard and fight it out.

We did not have to take it outside. In the end, the song made it into the service.

Looking back on the scene, I can appreciate that it was a good way for me to release some of the energy that I was carrying around. It may have been just the thing I needed, even if it probably didn’t quite make the day for my mother’s minister. Seeing the story from my present vantage point as a minister, I now appreciate that some of the requests that come in are not appropriate. But most of the time they are good and appropriate. They are often the things that most make the service meaningful.

I heard a story last summer on National Public Radio that reported on the rise of requests for secular songs at memorial services in England. Funeral directors particularly noted the rise in popularity of the song "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen and that hit from the disco era "YMCA" by the Village People. As you might expect, this trend was greeted with a degree of wariness. I can’t say that I have identified such a trend in this congregation, but it could happen. Let’s just hope it happens in good taste.

What I’ve come to appreciate over time is that more than the songs we choose, what makes a memorial service memorable is the extent to which we can know and celebrate the ways that a person was alive. That may happen in any number of ways, but most importantly it happens in the telling the story of a person’s life. It is probably not the things we have collected. I have yet to be at a memorial where someone was honored because of the size of their SUV or how many stocks they traded or how much they had in the bank at the end.

What is important is how they touched the people they knew in their lives, the ways that they set examples for others. The way that their story will be carried on in the people they knew. I love the way there is a certain buzz that moves through the assembled group when someone calls up some phrase or some image from a person’s life and how you can feel that sense of a-ha. When someone lived a good life, yes it is hard to say goodbye, but there is also something about it that is good and satisfying.

"We only die," Leon Trotsky said, "when we fail to take root in others."

What is most important in the preparation isn’t how many details we tend to. What is most important is the way we see our lives and the way we come to not only know and accept the fact that we are going to die, but the way that that knowing informs the way that we live.

Many of us have known people who have found themselves living with an illness, maybe even one that will take their life. And as they live with the illness and as they live with the fact that they may not be alive for a lot longer, something happens to them. Suddenly their priorities become a lot more clear. Suddenly their outlook on life can be a whole lot different. Suddenly something that they spent a whole lot of time doing doesn’t seem very important at all. Suddenly they have a whole new perspective on what it means to live.

In the book Tuesdays with Morrie, the professor Morrie Schwartz, who is dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease, is interviewed by his former student, Mitch Albom. This is a conversation between them.

These are Morrie’s words: "Everybody knows they’re going to die, but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently."

"So we kid ourselves about death," Mitch says.

"Yes. But there’s a better approach. To know you’re going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time. That’s better. That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you’re living."

"How can you ever be prepared to die?"

"Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, ‘Is today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all that I need to do? Am I being the person I want to be?’"

He turned his head to his shoulder as if the bird were there now. "Is today the day I die?"

"The truth is, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live. Most of us all walk around as if we’re sleepwalking. We really don’t experience the world fully, because we’re half asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do. (When you face the fact that you’re going to die) you strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials. When you realize you are going to die, you see everything much differently."

Some questions you might ask: What would you do if you got the news that you were going to be alive for just a few months? Would you make major changes in your life? Or would you be pleased with where you are? What are those things that pull you out of yourself—those things that help you know who you are?

Is today the day? And if it were, how would that be?

What has your life meant? What have you accomplished? What are those places where you seem to be stuck and can’t quite find a way to get unstuck?

As a person who does quite a few memorial services, I can tell you the most painful parts are hearing the stories where people die with unfinished business. Those stories where children and parents are estranged at the time of death, when siblings are no longer speaking. Those stories of words that have hurt and words that have never been taken back. What this leaves is a legacy of hurt that is much harder to work through when the other person is no longer alive. It can make for a very difficult journey before coming to a better place.

If we can to do that work, it not only helps us, but it helps those we leave behind to make sense of what our lives have been and also to move forward. If we can live in such a way, we can also die in such a way. We can be teachers—we have the opportunity to impart a gift to those we leave behind.

As Roshi Taji, a contemporary Zen master, approached death, his senior disciples assembled at his bedside. One of them, remembering the roshi was fond of a certain kind of cake, had spent half a day searching the pastry shops of Tokyo for this confection, which he now presented to Roshi Taji. With a wan smile the dying roshi accepted a piece of the cake and slowly began eating it. As the roshi grew weaker, his disciples leaned close and inquired whether he had any final words for them.

"Yes," the roshi replied.

The disciples leaned forward eagerly. "Please tell us!"

"My, this cake is delicious!" And with that he died.

Words of Kabir:

Friend, hope for the truth while you are alive!

Jump into experience while you are alive!

Think… and think… while you are alive!

What you call "salvation" belongs to the time before death.

If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,

do you think

ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic

just because the body is rotten—

that is all fantasy.

What is found now is found then.

If you find nothing now,

you will simply end up with an apartment in the city of Death.

If you make love with the divine now, in the next life

you will have the face of satisfied desire.

In the end, more than the songs sung at the memorial, more than the number of years put in at the office, more than all the places where we have traveled, what matters most is knowing that we lived, and in that living we were ready, when time came, to die. Amen.

PRAYER

Great spirit, we give thanks for this day. We give thanks for this precious life we have been given. Help us to be alive in all of our days. Help us to be free of fear. Help us to know that we are connected, though it all. Roots hold us close. Wings set us free. We ask this in the name of all that is good, and in the name of all that is holy. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Live in the spirit, good people. Be alive and bring all of yourself into the world. Go in love. Go in peace. Amen.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2002, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.