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So much of who we are is retained in our memories. We are the collection of all we’ve done and all we’ve thought and felt before. And most of our relationships use memory as foundation, with each new experience or conversation building on the last. When someone’s ability to remember fades, they not only lose themselves, we lose them too, because the ground on which we stood, the ground of our history together, is cracking. It can feel almost like those things we did together never happened if the person with whom we shared those experiences no longer retains them or isn’t alive to remember them with us. Death comes in many different ways. We lose some people long before they are really gone, and some we lose in a flash with no warning or preparation.

It seems to be part of the human condition to want to hold on to our own lives and to do all we can to hold on to the lives of those we love, even when they are no longer with us. We remind ourselves of our stories, of the jokes we told and the moments that were so perfectly us. Once they are gone, we hold on to the people we love through our memory of them. We recall family dinners and Christmas mornings and summer vacations. Often there are stories that feel like they perfectly describe “us.” I have one with my dad when we swam too far into the ocean and fought our way back, falling asleep on the sand. It was perfectly us. Or getting caught in a rain storm with my grandmother and running under someone’s deck to wait it out while we laughed—something my grandmother and I did often together. Or my great uncle pulling me into his office to ask me about some religious questions with which he’d been wrestling. Or my best friend, who died very young, pushing me in a shopping cart that she and I stole from the supermarket we passed on the way home from high school. Those are my sweet memories, the snapshots of our lives that no one else remembers, for which I am the bearer now.

You have them too. Those precious moments, those sweet memories you carry of someone you loved and lost. Those memories are the beating hearts of life and death, keeping people alive while simultaneously reminding us of their deaths, of the great loss we carry. Sometimes those memories are unfinished, requiring us to feel our way into accepting those relationships even though they ended mid-sentence. Death offers us little choice but to complete the relationship on our own, without the benefit of shared closure. We imagine those last conversations, the ones that didn’t happen. We ask our beloved why they did what they did, or why they didn’t do what we needed them to do. We tell them we love them, maybe wishing we’d said that far more often. We make our confession and offer our apology so that we might say good-bye.

Death, and the grief that follows, are sacraments. They are the places the Holy is known, a sacred and common ground. We console, commiserate, and comfort. And we let go. Ultimately, our task, our final act for all those we love…we let go.

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Rev. Peggy Clarke

Minister at First Unitarian Society of Westchester, New York

Rev. Peggy Clarke is a Unitarian Universalist minister currently serving the First Unitarian Society of Westchester in Hastings on Hudson, NY.  She is also the Racial and Social Justice Consultant for the NY Metro District and the chair of the national UU Food Justice Ministry. Rev. Clarke sits on the Steering Committees for both UU Environmental Justice Collaboratory and Commit2Respond and chairs our UU Food Justice Ministry. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies and Peace Studies and a Master’s in Historical Theology with a concentration in Medieval Mysticism from Boston College.  Her doctoral work was in American Religious History.  Rev. Clarke was the college Chaplain at Iona College where she also served as Adjunct Professor in the Religious Studies Department and Co-Directed the Iona Spirituality Institute for 12 years.  She is a GreenFaith Fellow and the co-founder of InterGenerate, an organization dedicated to food justice, thus creating the possibility in Westchester County for equal access to food that’s good, clean and fair.  Peggy lives in the woods with her husband, son and two dogs.

Latest posts by Rev. Peggy Clarke (see all)

• Silence as a Spiritual Tool - December 1, 2020
• On Love and Death - October 1, 2020
• The Creative Spirit - April 1, 2017