"A Sermon for the Day of the Dead"

When death came to my family as I was growing up, it came discreetly, with lowered voices and muted grief. My parents shielded us from the emotions and the rituals of mourning. We children did not attend funerals until we were in high school.

My grandfather’s death was the only exception. He summoned his children and grandchildren to his bedside, where he took each one of us in his arms and whispered goodbye. His outpouring of affection and grief made a lasting impression on me. I remember feeling overwhelmed and a little frightened. But I also remember receiving his love.

Looking back on it now, I see how valuable an experience it was. Death is overwhelming and frightening, but when we face it with openness and feeling, we are somehow able to cope with the mystery and the loss. My grandfather, having made his farewell, slipped quickly into death. He addressed his last words to his brother, who had died years earlier. “Abe, I am coming,” he said, in Yiddish, a language we never heard him use.

Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross published her book, "On Death and Dying," in 1969. Kubler-Ross interviewed terminally ill patients and then wrote about what she learned from them. Rather than view dying as a fearful mystery that cannot be probed or understood, she saw it as a process that follows a developmental course. Her famous observation that dying people move through five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, eventually became popularized as the pathway to a good death.

Kubler-Ross’s work helped the world see that dying is a life experience offering opportunities for growth and reconciliation. It also led to greatly improved care for the terminally ill. Her work contributed to the growth of the hospice movement and the use of advance directives. It provided counterbalance to the increasingly technical quality of medical care, giving everyone - those who are dying, those who are grieving, as well as those who are providing care - a place to be human.

The urge to humanize death - to bring it out into the open and make it part of life - can take many forms. Celebrating the Day of the Dead is one way to do it. The Mexican custom of visiting the dead at their graves, bringing them their favorite foods and having a picnic together, keeps alive not just the memory, but the relationship with those who are gone.

Our own version of the altar - the pictures and mementoes, the flowers given by a grieving family - honor those we have lost. The altar also validates our experience of loss as something tangible and real. If you come up to look at it after the service, you will see how we use things to express our loss. It is very poignant. There is also humor in the Day of the Dead. The ghoulish, dancing figures and the cheerful activity of picnicking in the cemetery make death less fearful and more friendly. Local observances of Halloween on neighborhood lawns have the same playful aspect, with decorations as an expression of individual creativity.

This is also the spirit behind the work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. She observed that dying and grieving alike were creative processes, to be explored and validated. The idea that they followed a developmental curve added a reassuring normality - even predictability - that comforted many.

Critics of Kubler-Ross say that her work took on a cultish aspect, applying a cookie-cutter shape to what is a profoundly individual and solitary experience. After Kubler-Ross, we read the famous poem by Dylan Thomas with an altered perspective. “Do not go gentle into that good night,” he wrote, “Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Now we might think he was stuck at stage two. Or as one critic, Ron Rosenbaum, puts it, “You better go gentle, buster … or you’ll never appreciate how beautiful death can be.” What began as caring “became codifying as well,” Rosenbaum writes. The five stages became a roadmap, “a deeply embedded unexamined ideology of death, something that doesn’t merely describe the dying process that people go through but shapes - virtually prescribes - the process. It sets up the Five Stages as a kind of Moral Progress, and brands you as inauthentic if you don’t grimly trudge through each,” he sums up.

There is a dogmatic quality to the five stages, and a moral judgment we often sense when people speak about a good death. This is off-putting enough. But it also does not reflect reality. While there is much that we can do to help people die with less pain and anxiety, no one can orchestrate the end of life. Dying is the most individual activity there is. Some people have what we would call a good death. Others do not go gentle into that good night. Death is not a performance that anyone can rate or judge. It is simply the mystery that it is.

When Elisabeth Kubler-Ross died this summer, I realized that I had lost track of her over the years. I knew all about her early work and the five stages of dying, which I studied in divinity school. I didn’t know that she had taken an occult turn. Her later books are concerned with life after death, communing with the dead, and advancing the idea that death itself is not real, but rather a portal to a higher level of existence. These are notions that I have trouble taking seriously, though oddly enough, they fit in well with the Day of the Dead.

The most appealing part of Day of the Dead is its light-heartedness and humor. It’s a celebration, with joyful music, special food, imaginative visuals, and jaunty bravado. Its rituals say, death is a part of life. Let’s do something creative with it.

The great contribution that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross gave our world is her insight that dying is also part of living. “When you’re dying,” she wrote in 1975, you get your final chance to grow, to become more truly who you really are, to become more fully human.” Whether that growth follows the famous five stages - or not, is less important than the truth that life is growth, and every experience, even one we fear, may have value for us.

When I look back at my grandfather’s last days, I ask myself if he grew in some way, becoming more truly himself. I was just a child at the time, overwhelmed and frightened, not fully able to appreciate the power of that interaction. Thinking about him now, I see the strength and will he exerted to have those last few moments with his family the way he wanted them. He made sure we knew how much he loved us. He may have been dying, but weakness did not hold him back.

I have spent all the rest of my life seeing my grandfather illuminated by his final days. The elderly man I loved in my own self-centered, childish way - because he doted on me and gave me silver dollars and took me to Radio City Music Hall - now made me aware of who he really was. His death helped me grow up. I understood for the first time what it means to know someone, to be in the presence of another’s pain and grief, and to be held closely by someone who loves you and must let you go.

I have no idea whether my grandfather traveled through the five stages. I do know, however, that he met his death with openness and feeling, which kept his love alive and real. His spirit lives on in me. That has to be good.

The spirit of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross lives on too, who knows? perhaps more than we realize, but certainly in the understandings we now share about death and life. There is nothing dogmatic about the idea that dying is still living, and with living comes growth, resolution, and even healing. To sense that dying is a process that has its own internal meaning, allows us to accept it as a natural, though terribly vulnerable state to be met with respect and compassion. We see how distinctly individual a path it is, not easily regimented or imposed on anyone.

And whether we rage against the dying of the light or bow mightily to the mystery, we still have something to give each other right up until the end. What is true then is also true here and now. There is still time to grow and to become more truly ourselves, to love openly and to live fully, and to leave our mark on those we will someday leave behind. .

This sermon refers to two books by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross," On Death and Dying" (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.), 1969, and "Death: The Final Stage of Growth" (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.) 1975. I also refer to Ron Rosenbaum’s article, “Dead Like Her,” posted Thursday, September 23, 2004 in Slate magazine.