The
ritual of saying good-bye to someone we love, generally known as a funeral, has
once again caught our public attention as Senator Edward Moore Kennedy was
mourned and buried. I was in elementary
school when his brother John was assassinated, and I remember through the eyes
of a child the days of shock and grief sweeping across our country. The continuous news coverage filled all of
the channels on the television, and we watched the pomp and ceremony as a
nation bid farewell to her president.
Those
of us who remember JFK’s funeral procession as well as the subsequent deaths of
Martin Luther King Junior and Robert F. Kennedy couldn’t help but think of
those days as Teddy’s flag-draped casket peeked out of the rear window of the
hearse as it made its way through the neighborhoods of
I
told myself that I was watching the coverage of the funeral procession out of
respect to Senator Kennedy and his place in our nation’s history. Yet as the family began to gather at the
gravesite, I wondered if we should be willing to give these grieving people a
private moment to make their final good-bye to husband, father, and
patriarch.
While
the media plan was to cover the internment to the final playing of Taps, a
glitch of sorts occurred that gave an ironic twist to the night. The plan had been to arrive at
This
absence of light at the end of a sorrowful day reminded me of an idea that Joan
Chittister poses in her spiritual memoir, Called
to Question. She suggests that life
made more sense before the invention of the lightbulb. “Without lightbulbs there were only so many
things you could do in a day and for only so much time. When night came . . . you had to stop, take
stock, sit in front of the fire, or sleep until the light returned.”
Oh. There was a time, even in my lifetime, when the natural rhythms of life
as defined by the sun and moon regulated our day, whether on the farm or in the
suburb. There also was a time, not so
long ago, when the natural rhythms of life and death allowed for a sense of
privacy both in the joy of birth and in the anguish of bereavement. While there were funerals and the
accompanying culturally-defined wake, they were for family and friends, not the
curious spectator intruding during a time of great sorrow.
Times
have changed, and our claims upon those in show business, professional sports
or politics have stripped away a level of privacy and consideration that all
people are owed in times of overwhelming sorrow. How I wished that Michael Jackson’s children
had been able to say good-bye to their father out of the public glare of the
camera. Can it be possible that even in
this world of mega-information, there are simply some things that are none of
my (our) business?