A New Way to Mourn: An Update

Hey, it’s Michael. This week, The Daily is revisiting our favorite episodes of the year, listening back and hearing what’s happened in the time since they first ran. Today: the story of the new rituals that we create in a crisis. It’s Tuesday, December 29. Catherine, I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about what you’ve been watching from your home in Toronto ever since the pandemic started hitting North America.

Well, I have written a lot about death over the years. It’s one of those things that, for whatever reason, it interests me and I keep coming back to it. So because I’ve always been interested in death and written about death, I’ve been looking through the birth and death notices. And the obits have been really interesting because something that I’d never seen before at the bottom — whether or not the person had died of Covid, many of them have died just of old age or of cancer, or whatever else — but at the bottom, I started to highlight these statements that seem to repeat themselves over and over again, which were things like: “Though we cannot celebrate her life now, a happier time will come when we can all come together,” or “A celebration of her life will be celebrated when it’s safe for us to be together. We will get together when we’re allowed to get together.”

And so that planted a seed, a thought in me. The public part of mourning is ritualized in our society by coming together. We come together and we acknowledge the passing, and we have a sense that this is real and we are grieving together. And if this isn’t happening or we’re delaying this, what does that mean? How are people coping without that ritual? Is anyone trying to do this differently?

So then I found kind of the perfect person for this.

Who did you find?

His name is Wayne Irwin. He’s 75. He’s a retired minister at a church in Canada called the United Church of Canada. It’s kind of the preeminent Protestant Church here.

He was a minister for more than 40 years, meaning that he presided over hundreds of funerals.

Wow.

He’s sort of a master of ceremonies at a funeral. He knows how they work. He knows the importance of the ritual.

But in the ten years since he retired, he’s also been helping churches go online. So he was kind of like the perfect person to move from a funeral in a building into an online funeral. And then something tragic happened in his personal life and he lost someone very close to him, Flora May.

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today, my colleague, Catherine Porter, on the changing way that we’re grieving in the era of the coronavirus.

It’s Friday, April 24th.

They met way back in the early ‘70s. He was married and she, I believe, was either married or recently divorced, but soon to get divorced. And Wayne tells the story about going to a church music workshop with a youth group. And at lunch, holding his cafeteria tray, scanning the room, looking for a place to set it down and eat, there was a space next to this short, very small, brown-eyed woman.

It was her, Flora May.

She grew up not far from where I’m talking to you, in the countryside outside of Toronto. She was a farm girl. In fact, one of her friends told me that before she went to high school, every morning she had to collect the eggs from more than 300 hens.

[LAUGHS]

Yeah.

Very quickly, within about two years, they started collaborating. She had really great musical skills, but also was a poet and wrote a lot.

And so they started collaborating doing new hymns together and writing songs. He would put her lyrics to music. And over time, both of them became single parents. And about 20 years ago, he says, when they were both single at that point, they had an awakening, that they both sort of looked at each other and realized that they were in love and they had been in love. By that point, Flora was in her 70s. And when he did propose, he was substantially younger than her, 15 years. And he said she laughed hysterically because she couldn’t envision being married to him and he was so much younger than her. So he said, well, I took the proposal back and said, well, maybe we’ll do this at another time when it’s not so uproariously funny to you. And he proposed again with a crossword puzzle. And she literally went to her children and asked for permission, basically, to get married again and for advice. And she agreed. They got married and they had lived this wonderful second life together.

They traveled up to Alaska. They walked up Mount Sinai.

They went to Antarctica when she was in her 80s, late 80s.

And up until last summer, they were traveling in Europe together. And it wasn’t until then, he says, that she sat up in bed one night in Rome and said, I can’t breathe.

And slowly, their world started to get smaller and smaller.

By March, the world around her is worried about COVID. And she became very worried that she would get this and it would be an awful death, as did her husband. So her life that was already smaller became even smaller. They stopped taking so many visitors because they were worried about the spread and her getting it, and they would spend their days mostly together. So on a Sunday at the end of March, they were having a quiet day.

That’s beautiful.

Yeah. It sounds like a pretty perfect death, doesn’t it, in many ways, to be held? Particularly at a time now, when so many people can’t hold their loved ones. He recognizes how lucky that was, that he was with her and holding her when she passed.

What happens in the days after Flora dies? How does Wayne, this man is so well-versed in the familiar traditional rituals of death, try to cope with it?

He knew that he had to start planning for her funeral. He set about doing that immediately. And for him, when I asked him if he thought about delaying this funeral, he said, absolutely not. Not for a second. So when you see the bottom of her obit, it says an online celebration of life will take place on Saturday, April 11 at 10:30 a.m. at this website, with online visitation also available from 9:30. In lieu of flowers, please send donations here.

And what do his preparations for this online service look like?

Well, in my mind, I had this image of him as being like a switchboard operator.

He starts calling people and asking them if they can contribute something, or would they like to contribute something?

He’s talking to the organist at the church.

And going through what hymns she’d like to play.

He’s reaching out. To the woman who sang at their wedding.

He’s reaching out to the grandchildren and asking them to contribute, even just small, little pieces, like 15 seconds of little memory snippets, recording them on Skype or using their own cell phones.

The service begins to take this shape.

And he’s trying to basically number them all, slot them all, and getting them all in order so that on the day of the service, at the time of the service, that everyone sitting at home can press a button and watch the service at the same time.

He did acknowledge that this was not what they wanted, that they would have much rather been together, but this is where we are at. He said, I’ve done so many of these and they just take a life of their own, and you do the best you can do. And it will be what it will be.

We’ll be right back.

So Catherine, the next morning, what happens?

Wayne says he gets up. He has his breakfast. He listens to some music. And then he gets dressed as if he was in person at the funeral. He wore a special tie he bought in Damascus. It’s his Easter tie. He said he put on his shoes that were tight and uncomfortable but would remind him of the formality of the moment and the importance of the moment. And then about an hour before the service was to start, he started to work on the Zoom visitation.

It wasn’t smooth at first, although there was something marvelous about the technical difficulties that were happening.

Yes.

Like these things are always awkward, people coming in and paying their respects. It’s always a bit awkward. People don’t know what to say.

And each person is kind of waiting to step in and say something.

And in some ways, all of these technical difficulties sort of substituted for that awkwardness.

There was an old friend of Flora’s came on, and it was clear that she had never done this before.

But Wayne became the minister of the moment.

There are people arriving from New Jersey.

And Vancouver and —

He started introducing one another.

Calling on each person, welcoming them into the room.

And allowing them that moment to step forward and introduce themselves to the other members of the family that all gathered.

And say hello and says it’s so great to see you.

It slowly took on a life of its own. Yes, there are 40 of us in here now, and here’s some more coming in.

Sorry, the dogs are barking in the background.

Remembering Flora and bringing memories of her farm.

The funny little poem that she gave someone.

So then the service begins. And I’m sitting at home in my office, watching the service, and it was everything Wayne had described. There were very, very traditional elements of it.

Two ministers speaking, one from home in an armchair and one in the church, which is a beautiful church, you can see. But he was incredibly close. Like instead of seeing a minister up at the pulpit from the distance, you could see his face, as if you could reach out and touch his crooked mustache. I kept looking at how his mustache was crooked. He was so incredibly close.

And then —

The organist playing with his husband and the hymn rolling down the screen.

And there was a little girl dancing and the slide show with music. And it really, to me, felt so much like a mix between a funeral and a wake. There were so many hands.

And then at the same time people were still in the Zoom room. So you could not only watch the service, if you had been in the Zoom room, you could watch other people and get this element of other people’s reactions. You could see them singing. You could see them crying, which I think, for many people, you need almost a permission to cry. So seeing other people crying is very soothing.

You could watch other people watching this funeral.

Yeah. And there was Wayne and he was in his beautiful tie and his beautiful suit, and he was singing when the hymns were there.

And he was super absorbed in listening to the minister. And he was snacking at one point.

[CHUCKLES]

And during the playing of “Hallelujah,” he was in tears. He was showing the full range of emotions and seemed incredibly gripped and present with the service.

Right, this very thing that he had created.

Yeah. Yeah. Like he said, you can set the train rolling, but then it will do what it will do. And there was all of the parts he had brought together, but the magic, also, of the moment, of all these contributions of people, what they said and their memories of his wife. All these elements of community, he was feeling, as he says, nourished by them and held by them.

I wonder if, in the end, it felt like you had been to a funeral, in the way we have always thought of funerals.

Yeah. I think for me, it did.

Speaking to people afterwards, many told me that this felt deeper and truer and more loving than so many of the funerals that they had been to, and more revealing of Flora. One person talked about how he wished he could do his mother’s funeral again.

And do elements from this, because so much of what we do when someone dies is set out in what we think we need to do and how the elements need to be like this, and it becomes quite wrote.

In some ways, a lot of our rituals we’d never question. We just sort of sink into them and they become like old, worn down armchairs. They’re really comfortable, but in some ways, I think the discomfort of the situation and the forcing of coming up with new rituals that are meaningful means that it feels more authentic and more real.

Also, I just think that we’re at this incredible time of mourning as a world. We’re all grieving our lives and grieving the lives that we’ve had before and worried about what’s going to happen in the future, and we’re all sort of stuck in a state of suspension. And some of the grief therapists that I talk to, the counselors, they say when you lose someone you love deeply, you want the world to stop. And the world has stopped. We’re all like in this collective place of reflection.

And Flora’s son said that because he couldn’t be busy and running around doing the things he would normally do to distract himself, he’s just been settling in his grief and thinking about his mom in a way that perhaps he would not have been.

I’m curious how Wayne is faring since the funeral. Have you checked in with him?

Yeah, I’ve checked in with him a few times now. I talked to him the day after. That night he watched “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which he said Flora did not love. But he loves it.

[CHUCKLES]

He’s also just been reading her poetry and going through the books of her writing and delighting in that. In this of suspension, he’s using some of the time to really sink in and reflect and say goodbye.

We’ll be right back. Since the episode aired, Catherine got back on the phone with Wayne to hear how he’s coping without Flora.

How have you been?

I’ve been fine, I’ve had, I’ve had days where I felt quite sad. I’ve had the odd day where I’ve felt lonely.

I started sort of sorting things out. Like the first thing I did was to rearrange the condo here and to move her — we had a large master bedroom, and she had one end of it for her office. And then I found a box in the storage and I opened it up. And here was all this poetry there from earlier years, going way back to 1960.

Wow!

And so I got that out, and and I said, we’ve got a treasure here. And because they were so rich, I thought, oh, these need to be shared and. And it was my friend Alan who who essentially called me and said, what would you think about putting the collection together? And I said maybe we could collaborate on that, because I know how to get this published and. And so we we went at it, and we managed to get that book together. And I now have been able to share it and continue to. There’s such a sense of satisfaction in that for me to share this with the people who were her friends and who knew her. I’ve had some wonderful responses from people.

This has been healing for you, I can feel why. Also you feel like you’re sort of you are stitching her legacy and continuing her ministry through the publication of the book. What do you think she would she would make of it?

She’d be embarrassed.

And I’m saying, it’s OK, dear. This is what you believed, this is what you wanted. And you were not in a position to get it out there, and I am. So here it goes. Because people need to hear this.

But I occasionally tell her, “I still love you, you know.” I used to say that to her. I used to say, “I love you this morning,” “I love you this afternoon,” “I love you this evening.” I used to do that every day. And it was kind of a half joke, because, you know, we’ll see about tomorrow.

This episode was produced by Lynsea Garrison and Annie Brown, with help from Luke Vander Ploeg and Sydney Harper. It was edited by Lisa Tobin and engineered by Chris Wood and Marion Lozano. That’s it for The Daily. I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.