Affective Shoves by Godly Representatives

September 16th, 2024

I sat cross-legged on the couch in my living room in Edinburgh, Scotland, underdressed and staring at my iPad, watching my Uncle Dave’s funeral unfold in Texas – the second online funeral I’ve attended while doing my PhD outside of the states. He passed away on Thursday; after a brief but tumultuous battle with Alzheimer’s, we had only known for one year, we still can’t fully grasp why he kept it a secret for so long. Fear, shame, protection? I hate thinking that he spent time with this burden on his own; it breaks my heart. By Monday, they’d already gathered. My mom and her sister Lisa were there when it happened. A blessing, maybe. Their second or third trip together since he was put on hospice – my mom lives in New York and my aunt Lisa in North Holland.

The service went on as these things do: quiet, heavy, full of that unspeakable thing that lingers in the air. His guitars – his favorites – displayed at each end of the open casket. My cousins stood and shared their stories of him and gave their final goodbyes. Even from across the ocean, the weight of it pressed down on me, thick, and slow. I watched them – feeling removed – but still feeling the sharpness of it all. There’s something strange about watching it all unfold from a screen, like you’re too far away to touch it but close enough to feel it all. Their grief played out in real time, a mess of perfect expressions of love, awkward silences, subtle glances, hesitant but authentic gestures of comfort, all of them searching each other for the right way to do this. Collective grief spread across the experience, touching each person differently but binding us together. They were all there for him, we were all there for him; this cool, funny guy who lived life with a kind of reckless joy most people do not even try for.

Then, the priest stepped forward, calm, and steady. His voice had that tone you expect, the kind that holds people together when they don’t know how to be. He stood there for a beat and then said something no one expected: We’ll sing Amazing Grace, but we’ll sing it to the tune of House of the Rising Sun, one of Dave’s favorite songs to perform. There was a moment of silence just long enough for it to land. Then, giggles. Little bursts of laughter rippling through the room. My uncle would’ve loved it. If it wasn’t him in the coffin, if this wasn’t his own funeral, he would’ve thought it was perfect in its absurdity. Hilarious, unusual, exactly right. So we sang. Amazing Grace to a bluesy, broken tune, about a brothel in New Orleans, and suddenly the room shifted. The grief was still there, but it softened. The sharp edges dulled, smoothed over by something lighter, something easier to hold. It was like we were all yanked into a different place altogether, where sadness and absurdity collided and created space for something else.

Now, looking back, I can see how much that moment changed everything. One second, we were drowning in collective sadness, wrapped up in the heaviness of loss and what it all means. The next, the priest – of all people – gave us permission to laugh, to feel joy, even in the middle of it all. He had this trust, this authority that made it okay to embrace the ridiculousness of the moment. If it had come from anyone else, it would’ve felt off, uncomfortable, or even wrong. But because it came from him, the door opened, and we all walked through. Time bent in that moment. The past – my uncle’s laugh, his music, and his wild spirit – met the present in this strange, beautiful clash of grief and joy, feeling in the present a future with his absence. The priest’s decision to sing Amazing Grace like that didn’t take away the sadness, but it transformed it. It pulled us into a novel kind of feeling, one where loss and joy could exist layered together, shifting back and forth in our attention, both sharp and soft at once. It let us say goodbye to my uncle in the only way that truly made sense: unexpected, ridiculous, and perfect. Sometimes that intensity of feeling – the kind that fills you up in all your spaces, reaches beyond you, and engulfs your entire now, then, and forever – needs to be met with an intensity of feeling that challenges it, one that startles you out of the stupor. One that is its opposite, as it is the contrast between the immediate past and the immediate present that births consciousness, reminds us that we are here, it brings us back to ourselves. Ourselves that were lost in the welter of feeling.