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; well not on his own, his wife and children knew but he didn’t want my mom and aunt, his older and younger sister, respectively to know. It broke my mom’s heart to find out, especially because she had been angry with him for not keeping in touch over the last few years. Now we understand why. By Monday, they’d already gathered. My mom and her sister Lisa were there when he passed away, surrounded by his family. A blessing, maybe. It was only their second or third trip together since he was put on hospice – my mom lives in New York and my aunt Lisa in the Netherlands.

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 strangely absent. There’s something disorienting about watching it all unfold from a screen, too far away to touch the space but close enough to feel it all. It felt kind of invasive to watch it online. It felt kind of unfair. I could experience it without regard for funeral etiquette, cry when I wanted and not feel like I had to look or respond a particular way. My grief was only for me, but their grief was displayed for everyone, 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. It felt, even from afar like a 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.

After saying the things priest say, and the each having told their stories of him, the priest stepped forward again, and in a calm steady voice – the kind of tone you’d expect, the kind that holds people together when they don’t know how to be – He announced that he would now sing Amazing Grace, but to the tune of House of the Rising Sun, one of Dave’s favorite songs to perform with his band. There was a moment of silence just long enough for what he was saying to land. Then, a few supportive 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. Unusual, but for a man who appreciated the absurdity of things it was exactly right. So we sang. Amazing Grace to a bluesy, broken tune, about a brothel in New Orleans, and with that the feeling of the room slowly 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 feeling together, where sadness and absurdity collided and created space for something else.

Now, looking back, I can see how that moment acted as a kind of divergence. One second, we were drowning in this collective sadness, wrapped up in the heaviness of loss and what that loss means for life moving forward, and the next, we are being serenaded by the priest (who had a surprisingly good range). This contrast, this tension, seemed to somehow have shake us free of the repetition of grief. Where before my memory was too entangled in what I didn’t get to do with him, and what I would never get to say to him. This surprise unfolding had woken me to the moment at hand, and in that moment we were all together, for him. The priest singing had somehow given us permission to laugh, to feel joy, even in the middle of it all. Maybe it had to be him, his authority 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 opened up 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 a bit. It allowed grief to be felt differently, pulling us into a novel kind thing 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, strange, 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. Helps us find now while lost in the welter of feeling.