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Monday, 31 October 2011 |
As a child, I was
fascinated by mummies. When Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian hosted a
traveling Egyptian exhibit, my mother and I took a train from Connecticut to Washington,
DC. I stood for hours peering into the glass cases. I was awestruck.
Kate Braestrup, a
Unitarian Universalist minister to the game wardens of Maine, wrote a memoir
titled, “Here if You Need Me.” The work traces her husband’s early death and the
years just before and after the loss. In one chapter, she gives a detailed
account of the way she dressed her husband’s body for burial. Rev. Braestrup,
well acquainted with death through her profession, did not want a stranger to
tend her husband’s body; she wanted to serve every inch of his frame with her
own attention and love.
Today, mummies scare children in a series of (pardon my judgement) despicable horror movies. Gore threatens to replace, for today’s children—and maybe adults—the awe we might otherwise feel at the sights of an Egyptian exhibit or the retelling from Braestrup’s memoir. When I stared into the glass cases as a child, I wondered what it had felt like to dress a body—what it had meant to the caretakers to tend to a frame with every imaginable luxury: the oils, the perfumes, the time and attention.
Too often today, we fall prey to a dark fascination or fear of death. It is the stuff of horror and terror, from movies to the late night news. As we go forward into this month, with its liturgical theme of death, my hope is to take death out into the light, as Rev. Braestrup did with her husband’s body, and tend to it with our deepest attention and awe. Death is, after all, one certainty of life, and it can be that which reminds us of life’s ultimate meaning.
As always, I am available for pastoral care, should you hope for the time to wrestle personally with this difficult topic.
Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 29 January 2012 )
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