Lighting a Lamp

In grief and celebration

It’s been a long while since I last wrote in this space, not since early March when my father was in hospice. He died in late April. I miss him. I miss him very much. It’s taken me awhile to get back here to this blog space, but here I now am. I may do this blog differently than before, but I’m not sure yet. For right now, I’m sitting writing a post.

To continue the topic of grief but to add to it, importantly, the topic of celebration, I’ll tell you about an event in which I recently participated. A local cemetery held a lamp lighting ceremony one clear, warm evening in mid-September. The event planners set up long tables with chairs on the shore of a lake inside the cemetery grounds. There must have been about 300 or more people there. On each table was set multiple flat plastic boxes, about the size of a large serving tray, filled with art supplies: markers, colored pencils, crayons, stencils, stamps, ribbons, glue sticks, and more.

Lantern kits included a wood base (about 10” by 10”) that contained a round hole into which was fit a plastic battery-operated candle. At each corner of the base was a slender foot-long wooden peg. Around these pegs would later go a sheath of paper divided into four equal rectangles. In the two hours before dusk, and before the sheath went on the lantern, each of us set about drawing and coloring and glueing on the paper whatever art design we wanted to depict our loved one, our grief, our hope. When we were done, we slid the sheath across the four rods, and voilà, a personalized lantern.

While we worked, Sarah Morris, a local “country-leaning Norah Jones” sang on stage. A couple of food trucks were there. You could get egg rolls and more at one food truck and finish them with a brownie sundae from another.

Looking around the tables I saw many people working on a lamp of their own. I saw others working together with another person or in a group. Many of the lamps were covered with photographs. Many had drawings in bright colors. Others were covered with writing: notes of love, poems, names, quotes. Ribbons flowed from several. Who were all these people going about their lives while holding such grief, such love? I tried to imagine the people I pass everyday, and even those who I think I know well, who are carrying hidden grief.

At dusk, we lit our candles and set the lanterns into the water. The emcee then read the names of persons for whom the group was grieving, which we had been asked to provide in advance, while a bugle played in the background. The reading of the names took about an hour. An hour! Names of all varieties: English, Eastern European, German, Russian, Indian, Sudanese, Somali, Chinese, Mexican, Japanese, Laotian, Swedish, like mine, and so many more. During the reading, everyone was silent.

I might have been tempted to assume my grief was unique to me, for a variety of reasons because of who I was, how much I loved my father, the kind of man he was, on and on. But that would be a mistake. On that shore, watching our lanterns join together in catching a current, listening to the names, one after another, it was clear: we were in this together. Alone but together, we had each come to make a thing of beauty and meaning in honor of whom we grieved. Together, we sat listening to the names of each other’s beloved. Together, our lanterns floated.

Until next time and in hope.

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[Photo: taken of the lit lamps on the water after dusk.]

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