Yesterday someone I follow on Bluesky commented that this is the 25th anniversary of September 11 coming up, and "it's gonna be kind of unhinged what we see from Official Channels" and first of all, I had forgot it was, and second, they are right, it's gonna be.....well, they used a harsher word than my unhinged but.
It's kind of amazing to me how long ago because I do have some vivid memories of it (I guess sudden trauma will do that).
But the biggest thing I thought of later yesterday, driving home - Barber's "Adagio" came across Sirius XM and I remembered the Friday after it happened. The suggestion had been made that we stop and light a candle, and just pause. I decided fitting music might help and Barber's Adagio was what I chose to put on my CD player. That was in the crummy sad little apartment I lived in when I first moved here (and they still seem crummy; there have been news stories lately about drainage/sewer problems where some people's tubs back up and I'm glad that wasn't a thing when I lived there nearly 30 years ago now, it would have undone me).
But anyway. We weren't supposed to have candles (fire risk) but I had a couple so I put one - a little votive type candle - in a tumbler and lit it, and set the tumbler on my coffee table and just....I guess I cried. I didn't at that time know of anyone who had died (I later learned someone a year behind me in prep school, who had worked at one of the financial firms, died when the towers collapsed, but I had barely known him). A cousin witnessed it firsthand and I think it changed him in a number of ways.
And I also if that's when the country kind of went off the rails, and got to the state it's in now. I mean, looking back. I still remember seeing pickups with bumper stickers saying things like "Arab Hunting License" on them which was pretty racist and horrible to me (My father, being a geologist, sometimes had students going into oil and gas who had grown up in various Middle Eastern nations, and were of various ethnicities that would fall under the umbrella "Arab," and also having known some immigrants from that part of the world - Jordan, and Iran - and just....the "these are not bad people, ,it is only a few people who fell under the sway of evil beliefs..."). And also frankly some of the what is called "glurge" that came out - oversentimentalized stuff about first responders and the people in the towers and all of that.
And I also think back with horror on what was called The Falling Man. I guess the least graphic way I can say it is there were people who realized their choice was to jump, or to burn, and they chose jumping. There was a whole article and later a whole documentary, and that's not something anyone needs in their head, I think.
But we're probably gonna get it.
I mean, I would be okay with a moment of silence for those who perished (or, heck a moment of silence for EACH person, which would make for a very quiet day), but I can imagine this is gonna be used for propaganda and i don't like it, I don't like how a lot of serious and solemn things (like some of the current boatstrike deaths) have been memeified. When a person dies, it's solemn. I don't care if they were a bad person. I don't care if it's a horrible criminal sentenced to the electric chair. Taking a human life is horrible and solemn and when we forget that we lose some of our humanity, and travel further down the path of dehumanizing people SO we can kill them without feeling guilt.
The second thing is the Graham funeral. I watched a few minutes on CSPAN at lunch, mainly because I wanted to hear the sacred music. I like sacred choral music and it's less common now than it once was. I could do without some of the encomiums, which seemed laid on pretty thick and also.....given what some folks said about him in life, they seemed a bit insincere.
But whatever.
It occurred to me that all (Protestant, at least: I have never as I can remember seen a Catholic or Orthodox funeral) Christian funerals are similar in their general shape. Perhaps moreso if the person's remains are there rather than if it's a memorial service taking place months later. (But even then - my dad's memorial service, some 4 months after his death, and Del's service here, which was, IIRC, about half a year later, had some of the same elements). There are Bible readings, and people give their remembrances, and in my dad's case, that letter he wrote was read...and we sing (Well, at Del's we didn't,, because it was still kind of late-Pandemic, and the campus choir sang)
I think of the two I remember best: my maternal grandmother's (the first funeral of someone I really knew that I went to) and my dad's memorial service.
At grandma's, we had the "family time" or "visitation" the night before; that was kind of rough on me (And I think on my mother, because no one told us....) because it was open casket and that was my first ever experience with that, and there were Other Things that happened. And I remember just sitting as far back as I could, by myself as much as possible, and trying not to cry too much (this was literally days after she had died so the shock and grief were still new). The funeral itself was.....oddly happier? There were lots of remembrances of her, some of which I didn't know (like: she had apparently had three miscarriages before the six children she did have, and of those six, only four made it to adulthood). But we also shared funny memories, and we sang hymns, some of which I remember her singing at her house when we visited.
And with my dad's - well, his loss was the hardest for me; I think losing a parent, all else being equal, is harder than losing a grandparent - but more time had elapsed, I'd had time to sort of adapt my mind to the fact of his being gone. And again, there were happy remembrances, both in the memorial service itself and at the lunch after. And I think the hymns we sang were ones he had chosen? He had done a lot of pre planning.
I suspect it's very difficult to do a funeral - even with the person's preplanning - if you don't know them WELL. That's why in 2021 I wound up presiding over an interment of ashes of a woman I had known from church and AAUW - she had died (car wreck) in late 2019 and her daughter - with whom she had been living at the time - had hung on to the ashes, but later on the daughter decided maybe she'd be better with her parents here, and she got permission to inter the ashes here. And at that point, the man who had been our minister had left, and Del - who had been interim after him - had died, and we had a new minister who had never met Liz. So it fell to me, as head elder. (I think I wrote about it on here).
It was scary, but I did it. And apparently her daughter thought i did a good job. (I admit I mostly used the sort of boilerplate Scripture one would use at a funeral, and there were no hymns as we had no accompaniment and I do not sing a capella, not to lead music. And I opened it up at the end for folks to share memories, and that may be why they thought it was good, people like being able to do that sort of thing and I think it does help in grieving).
And anyway: yesterday was the seventh anniversary of my dad's passing. So I was thinking about that a bit again yesterday. Oh, on some level I do still miss him; I don't think you ever "get over" it, but I have reconfigured my life around it, and I think that's the best you can do about loss.
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