Remembered

Remembered

Following the death of his wife, C S Lewis wrote, “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything” (page 8, Kindle: Tingle Books). While beautifully expressed, his words are achingly sad and familiar. 

We can also know the pain of loss, and what it is to be sustained by the comfort of remembering. We carry, curate and defend our memories, and we dwell deeply in them at significant times and in significant places. To remember is to remain, albeit inadequately, in life together.

In 1975 Julie Garciacelay, from California USA, disappeared while living and working in Melbourne. Her aged mother Ruth has been searching for her ever since. 

As Ruth reaches the end of her life, she wants her daughter to always be remembered and her name to be spoken and heard in the city where she was last seen and known. 

This is Ruth’s legacy for her daughter as together we will honour and give thanks for what remains real and true about Julie. 

That naming and remembering will happen in our Southbank neighbourhood, at St Johns Church (20 City Rd) at 9am on October 18. The event will be live-streamed to Ruth in California. You are welcome to support Ruth and be there. 

In his book entitled, Sum: Tales from the Afterlives neuroscientist David Eagleman writes …

“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time” (page 23, 2014, Edinburgh: Canongate).

Naming, and naming out loud, is important for our remembering and our grieving. Names enter into and express the fullness of identities. For some cultural communities names and the memories that they communicate are so powerful that they will only again be spoken when the time is right. First there is a time to be quiet and sorry. 

To name is to know, to dwell (grief is never fast-paced), to honour and to love. We will not stop loving, and so, as if harvesting Lewis’s sad expanse spread over everything, we gather fragments of remembered lives by speaking names, thereby learning to live with and accommodate our own sadness. This is something that we can help each other with. 

From 9am on Sunday, November 3 we will celebrate a “All Saints” or “All Souls” festival at St Johns. This is an opportunity for you, in a sacred place, to name and remember those whose deaths you grieve. 

If you wish, there will be an opportunity for the names of your loved ones to be publicly spoken for the hearing of all at this little place in our neighbourhood. A place that you can quietly return to and dwell in, under the expanses of your own absences, as you need it. 

“This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted” (C S Lewis, page 41, Kindle: Tingle Books). •

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