One of the few cultural practices that is likely to be a human universal is the ritual coping with death. When I was an undergraduate in Anthropology at UCLA, I was struck by Renato Rosaldo's description of grief and ritual headhunting among the Ilongot, a tribe in the Philippines. Headhunting offered a ritualized and, up until the 1970s, socially permissible means of coping with grief over the death of a loved one. Rosaldo spoke at length in his writings of his struggles to get a truly "emic"perspective on headhunting and the particular emotion that the ritual was intended to cope with. He noted that it was not until his wife, Michelle, died in the field that he truly understood, experienced, this emotion. Other anthropologists write of rituals and emotional norms relating to death, from rites that celebrate the life to those that help the lost person carry on in the bodies and spirits of those who survive, to cultural rules for mourning. While there is vast diversity in the ways humans employ culture to cope with death, we all seem to turn to ritual.
Yesterday was one of the saddest days I have faced in a very long time. It was the first time that, as an adult, I said a permanent goodbye to someone I knew and it was the first time in my life I said this permanent goodbye to someone young, healthy, and happy. Paul was probably one of the kindest people I've ever met. I didn't know him well, but his energy was contagious. The first time I met him, at my partner's first station out of the fire academy, I remember him talking about his wife. And when he talked about his wife, he lit up the room, even though it was something simple, something probably even mundane. He was just one of those people who inspired the people around him to make the most of life and to appreciate every moment. Because that is how he lived his life. Thus, even though I didn't know him well, I find myself more affected by his death than I have been by the loss of any person in my past. This is the first time I was able to experience my own culture's death rites - the funeral, the burial - from a truly emic perspective, and I must admit that I was grateful for the rhythms and structure of ritual.
Although I'm an anthropologist and I love thinking about and analyzing ritual, I often whine about it when I encounter it in my own life. I don't usually like the relative anonymity of it, the fact that ritual often depersonalizes an entire experience. This is probably why the weddings I find the most moving are those in which people add pieces of themselves. But, in this case, the personal quickly became too much. The hymns, the incense, the readings, those were the things that helped me cope while still providing a way to say goodbye. Yes, these things depersonalized much of the ceremony, but they also made it possible to get through. They allowed us to catch our breath, to mourn together, and to acknowledge the permanence of this passing without collapsing into the grief of the individual and the family he left behind. The eulogies were beautiful, each of them from the heart, each of them honoring the wonderful man while expressing their sadness. But the eulogies were also exhausting, emotional enough that had they been the bulk of the ceremony, it would have overwhelmed.
I have never appreciated ritual quite like I did yesterday. I have always turned to my intellectualization of it, picked it apart, fussed over the idea that we so often participate in it without knowing or caring why, letting it take away that cherished notion of the individual that my American heart holds in such high regard. But it is perhaps the very anonymity of ritual allows us to cope with loss in a shared way, as a community. Mind you, it doesn't take the place of private, emotion-filled mourning and it doesn't completely remove the heartache from the ceremony. Rather, it helps keep things manageable while people come together to say goodbye. I can only hope it made room for us to move forward, taking inspiration from his life, standing by his family, celebrating who he was, without getting entirely lost in the void he left behind.
RIP Paul, you will be missed and you will always be loved.
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