As a child, Memorial Day brings visits to the cemetery, a place of grassy green fields blanketed in silence, winding paths, and strange stone markers. At age six, following the family tradition of laying flowers at the burial site of my grandparents, I ask several probing questions.
“Dad, are Grandma and Grandpa really in the ground? Do they want to be here? How do they eat? Can they stop being dead?”
Never one to avoid his parental duty, Dad kneels down and explains that yes, his parents died and their bodies are buried here, that everyone dies eventually, that some day he will die, that some day I will die too, and though he doesn’t know what it is like, it is forever.
Stunned by what he says, confused and alarmed by his nonchalance, I tell Dad I don’t want to die. My childish curiosity rockets from disbelief to concern to tears to terror. When I break into inconsolable sobs, the family’s grave-side visit comes to an abrupt end and we leave the cemetery.
Growing into myself
As an adult, I recount this incident to a psychologist-friend who remarks on the degree of ‘existential angst’ I experienced. His characterization grabs my attention for, unknown to him, stacks of personal journals attest to years of difficult questions and deep reflection. Compared to more light-hearted friends and family I often feel ‘heavy’ and out of place—woefully in need of ‘fixing’.
I read the book The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, in which author James Hillman explores ways the destiny of an adult may be visible in the child’s behavior. His insights invite me to look at my serious side differently. Perhaps my desire to throw it off like ill-fitted clothing is misguided. Perhaps the challenge is to wear it like royal vestiture.
Emboldened, I remind myself we live in a time of staggering change. As poet William Butler Yeats wrote 100 years ago, “Surely some revelation is at hand.”
Surely serious questions are necessary to its coming. Surely serious reflection prepares the heart to receive it.
Suddenly (like revelation!) I understand the part of my nature that frequently leaves me lonely or disturbed is uniquely valuable and alive. Lived seriously, my serious side serves the arrival of an unfolding, uncertain, participatory, indeterminate, emerging, revelatory, global future.