memorial meditation

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

In addition to being a great poet, John Donne was in his capacity as Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, a great preacher. In the passage I just quoted, Donne is reflecting on how interconnected we all are and how it is that the loss of one is a loss to us all. At memorial chapel we ring bells to memorialize those people associated with our school whether they are former students, administrators, teachers or persons somehow related to people who are or were directly involved in the life or history of the school. But it is good to remember that Donne’s meditation on precisely what we do here today. The bell tolls for each of us gathered here today and by extension everyone. I can imagine someone randomly walking down the street just as we begin ringing the bells and wondering “Why are the bells tolling so solemnly?” Donne’s reply is perennially to the point: “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” “Howso?” our imaginary pedestrian might ask in response, and Donne would reply, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

It is interesting how bells have a special property of immediately focusing our attention. We use them to mark the hours, to call to prayer, to celebrate the close of a wedding as the couple hurries out just married, or even to celebrate a holiday such as a revolution. Bells pealing often seem to bespeak freedom and release. My mother used to ring a little silver bell to call the family to dinner. Wind chimes have a lovely randomness in their ringing in the breeze. For Emily Dickinson a bell announced the onset of a spiritual crisis in her lines “As if heaven were a bell and being but an ear.” For Emily this was not a pleasant frame of mind.

The sound of bells have interesting properties: the tone begins suddenly and then slowly attenuates until finally slipping across the line into inaudibility. Those properties are analogous to the way we grieve. At first we are suddenly shocked by our loss and then our sorrow emanates wavelike from the center of our grief and slowly dissipates sometimes over a period of years and perhaps even then not fully.

Recently I had an occasion to develop some very old photograph negatives of my mother when she was a young woman. The pictures hit me almost like the sound of a bell, reawakening my sorrow and grief at her loss even though she died almost twenty years ago. In the ensuing several weeks, I have been remembering her but with less pain as the sorrow is transmuted into love just as a bell tone is less shocking as it continues to sound over time, giving us an opportunity to enjoy and to contemplate the tone.

I have also been thinking about how grief over my mother’s death merges with grief in general as a condition of being human. Today we remember the losses to our community but also remember that we are all “in it together”, the living , the dead and those known as “the living dead”, those who have died but not as yet passed out of the memory of the living. “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”