Special article by Contributor Jamie Sue Austin
I’m part of a group called the Paper Flower Funeral Club. Often many beautiful, small, cemeteries are left neglected during secular remembrance holidays. With the residents families dead and gone there is no one left to honor their memories. Our group is dedicated to the revitalization of old, forgotten cemeteries through the placement of handmade paper flowers.
(Here is one of our members making a purple rose J We try to use bright colors so they can be seen from the roadside.)
This year I will be heading the placement ceremony at a small local cemetery. The placement will be on October 30th. October 30th is often known as Mischief Night or Devil’s Night in the United States. It is not uncommon for acts of trespassing and vandalism to occur on this night. In part an October 30th placement protests the negative acts conducted on that date, however the main reasoning behind selecting the date is because its proximity to the pagan holiday of Samhain which celebrates the yearly harvest and pays honor to the dead. It is believed that the veil between the living life and the afterlife becomes thinner as Samhain approaches allowing those that have passed before to hear the petitions of their supplanters.
Heading the placement is a matter I take very seriously. What I say as we place flowers on the graves represents our intentions to honor those who came before us for their contributions to our lives. In the same way that someone who presides over a funeral must feel a twinge of guilt for not knowing the correct thing to say I too am facing a considerable amount of frustration in selecting the right words. How do I sum up the lifelong contributions of strangers who, most likely, are from various religious, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds? My audience is 100 years dried into dust beneath the clay, forgotten, and un-revered. How do I emphasis our connection to them?
You see, nothing exists in a vacuum. The decisions made by the bones below when they were with flesh are as real and with consequence as the decisions we make today. They built the roads we drive on, formed the companies we work for, settled the towns we live in, and created the law and common practices we abide by. The local culture we experience now is result of their constant tinkering. The lessons we have learned from our collective past were hard taught at their expense. The water leeched from the remains beneath our feet generations before our birth is the same water in our cup today. And while we wish we were much removed from then, untouchable by the cold and quiet grave, we are but one breath from becoming the same as and a part of them. What words best connect the beating butterfly wings of the past to the winds of today?
It’s hard to convey the sense of unity that we all should feel. If the footprints we leave behind in our daily walks were not washed away by rain or wind or sun… if they were collected, catalogued, and kept for prosperity… if our fleeting thoughts were bottled and shelved, we could see our effect on the world. We could watch the piles of footprints grow, build warehouses for our bottled dreams, and know the intimate details of the lives before ours. We would see the path carved for us by the actions of our ancestors. We could better understand how to carve a path for our decedents.
But, we are fickle temporal creatures. Eternity stretches out around us in all directions and we see only a glimmer of a fraction, a mere glimpse of the now. The past is a far away thing, a distant fairy tale, a story we tell our children. The future is a wistful dream, a wisp of white smoke rising in the distance; intangible and ethereal. The bits in between are ancillary characters to our personal dramas. How can I explain a concept that I barely grasp myself?
Jamie Sue, I think you already, and most eloquently, have.--Candace
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