ASTERS AND CHRYSANTHEMUMS

A melancholy Dutch poet, J.C. Bloem, wrote a poem about autumn that begins, "Asters en chrysanthemen / Het leven staat allengs stil."(Asters and chrysanthemums / Life gradually slows to a halt." Today (as I write, it's already evening) is, in France, le jour des morts, the Day of the Dead; in England, All Souls; for the Church, the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed. Chrysanthemums decorate tombs, and we remember those whom we have lost to our world. Some of us pray for their souls in the hereafter, perhaps hoping thereby to shorten their purgatory. Some just remember with tenderness and affection. Some still mourn, filled with the torn selvedge of grief.
I am always struck by the heart's selection of those whom it truly mourns. Embarrassingly, they are not always all our nearest and dearest: one may mourn one parent more than the other, one sibling more than another, one friend more than another equally close; and sometimes one finds oneself genuinely mourning someone one only met a few times. The heart has reasons reason knows not of, indeed.
The history of our faith's theology furishes many details concerning our future after that passage called Death: I wonder how many people know or believe them today. My mother, nearly 90 and suffering from Alzheimer's, once had a late-night conversation with me in which death came up. I asked her what she felt about it as it neared; and I've always remembered her answer. Ï don't know what happens,"she said, "but I don't think we're meant to know. That's what faith is: you go into the dark, trusting."
Many people believe that the dead are with us still, watching, encouraging, and sometimes even helping us. Our affectionate remembrance of them, our attention to their resting-place, and our prayers for them and for us, and for what still joins us to them: these are the quiet trusting joys that fill this day.