If you don't think ritual matters in how we process death and loss,
I'd urge you to take a close look at the coverage today from the
Netherlands, where the first bodies from the MH17 crash were received at
Eindhoven Air Base.
Ritual gives us process in the midst of chaos and despair, it gives us context and community with which to experience our grief and loss, and, ultimately, find the space to begin to heal.
Forty
hearses left the base, each carrying a single coffin. They traveled to
the town of Hilversum, an hour and a half's drive away, where formal
identification will occur. The overpasses were lined with people by the
hundreds, tossing flowers, shedding tears.
Ritual provides us
with an outlet for our personal grief, the grief we share. It gives us
community to cry with, it gives us arms to lift us when our knees give
out, hands to hold ours when we feel close to shaking apart.
At Eindhoven today, a lone trumpeter played The Last Post, a military song for those lost in war. A nation stood still. Church bells tolled, and the world mourned.
I am old enough that I was on the tail-end of “duck and cover” drills in
elementary school, a practice that felt as terrifying to me then as it
does ridiculous now. I remember the Cold War, could work my second-grade
self into all kinds of anxiety over the possibility of nuclear
annihilation, the big dark THEM that was the Soviet Republic
obliterating us all. Terrified, despite the fact that the threat was
largely theoretical.
Sting released “Russians” in 1985. I was
seven or eight at the time, and I remember one of our teachers playing
it for us and while it is perhaps a little overly trite in its messaging
the lyrics have stuck with me over the years. There’s no such thing as
a winnable war, Sting sings, it’s a lie we don’t believe anymore.
I
was lucky enough to be in the room when the Wye River Memorandum was signed in 1998, pressed
against a back wall watching history unfold before me. (It was maybe
the first time I really fangirled Joe Biden.) Arafat and Netanyahu and
King Hussein, President Clinton and Vice President Gore. There was a
palpable sense of accomplishment in the room, measured hope.
Or maybe I was just a young, idealistic kid who wanted to believe, desperately, in resolution. Because sixteen
years later it’s hard to remember what that hope felt like. There are no
easy answers, there is an abundance of armchair quarterbacking, and
image after relentless image of parents mourning their children. My
heart aches, from this place I live where that kind of violence is still
largely theoretical.
