The Horizon Stops Here 5 comments

By Lindsey Crittenden

With this post we welcome a new member of the Good Letters blogging team. For Lindsey’s bio, go to our Contributors page.

My uncle died early this month. He and I were not close, and yet he was the last of his generation in my branch of the family. The burial was a brief affair. Four of us sat on folding chairs that had been covered in something resembling green fur, under a tent in 95-degree heat, on the crest of the Hill of Meditation in a suburban memorial park. The priest said his words, the mortuary employee took five tries at folding the flag, we hugged, we placed flowers on the coffin, and we drove off, AC blasting. No one stayed to watch the coffin lowered on ropes and pulleys. No one stayed to toss a clod of dirt, if a clod of dirt had been available.

My nephew, at 18, is a serious kid. He wears suits and ties by choice, prefers the Tridentine mass, and pronounces Latin Vs as Ws. He’s pedantic as only a teenager majoring in philosophy can be. When I told him that the memorial service would be Thursday at 2, he replied, “It’s not going to be one of those celebrations of life, is it?”

It was. The liturgy of Christian burial, according to the program handed out at the church, is an Easter liturgy. It finds all its meaning in the resurrection. So we prayed for my uncle, that he would be given eternal life and brought to the joys of heaven and granted a place at the table in [the] heavenly kingdom.

This brings comfort, of course, as well as theological consistency. My uncle lived to age 89. He had a 55 years of marriage to my mother’s sister, a successful career, lots of travel on cruise ships, and a second marriage at age 85. He had a good life, everyone agreed over tiny ham sandwiches and white wine. There was no rending of clothing or tearing of hair. And, as grateful as I feel for his long life, I couldn’t help feel that something was missing.

I found it later, in the Book of Common Prayer: “[w]e are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we return.” Earth was not cast upon the coffin at my uncle’s burial, at least not while we were there, so the priest did not mention earth or ashes or dust. It wasn’t my call, of course, but I would’ve welcomed those words. Along with seeing the coffin go down into the hole in the ground, they carry concrete precision and a strangely reassuring refusal of comfort in abstraction.

Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon. And a horizon is nothing but the limit of our sight. A decade before she died, my aunt introduced me to those words, attributed to Raymond Worthington Rossiter (and recorded much later in a Carly Simon song).

We can’t stop trying to peek past that horizon, reaching for comfort and reassurance, what some might call pabulum and others deem necessary. And yet, I can’t keep thinking of a photo taken of Princess Caroline at her mother’s funeral. She’s shrouded in black lace, her face bloated and wet. That image has always seemed to me the face of grief. I saw it again last week, in a newspaper photo of a pregnant Georgian woman reaching into a coffin to touch her dead husband. The concrete. The tactile. The physicality of death. That’s what we can touch. That’s the horizon we see.

I recently saw Tell No One, a French movie with a plot so labyrinthine and acting so impeccable that I gave up trying to figure out the story and let myself be carried. The plot has at its core an assumption: If we’re morose enough to still be grieving after eight years, if we’re prone to drink ourselves into a stupor and commemorate each anniversary, if we’re unwilling to Move On With Life—our persistence will pay off. The beloved will come back—in this case, first through e-mail messages that appear in the bereaved hero’s in-box. And, as much as our friends and the authorities think we’ve lost it, we’ll get our validation in a rhododendron-glutted happy-after-after return to Eden.

I don’t think so.

My morose grief never brought back my loved ones. Nor will it for the pregnant Georgian widow. I’m going to stick to my preference—my prejudice—for grief that resists consolation. For Auden’s “Funeral Blues” (Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, / … / He was my North, my South, my East and West, / … / I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong), for Princess Caroline’s bloated face, for Dido on the pyre, for hair-pulling and covering mirrors and ash and dirt.

We won’t see them again. The horizon stops here. Isn’t that for now the point?