The municipal cemetery in Mattoon, Illinois, contains a monument to the union soldiers who died in the Civil War, as do many other cemeteries in the area. The burial ground in Mattoon contains the graves of approximately 260 union soldiers including three generals. Those monuments and graves are decorated every year and so, too, is the grave of an unknown Confederate soldier who died while being transported to a prison camp.
Frank Taylor, my grandfather, shortly before his death.
The cemetery also contains the remains of my grandfather, Frank Taylor, who died at age 43 in the flu epidemic of 1918 leaving a widow, a son, and a little four-year old girl who would become my mother. His grave is decorated occasionally by family members who live nearby and by his far flung progeny when they make pilgrimages to the small Central Illinois city to recall childhood memories and share a few words with the ancestors.
But no public ceremonies recall Taylor or the other 650,000 victims of the flu epidemic. Ironically, many of them were the survivors of World War I, having returned home victorious but doomed. The flu spread among the returning troops and along the railroad lines that carried them home, which is where Grandfather Taylor worked. The flu epidemic left about as many dead as did the Civil War, but there is no memorial to them in Mattoon or in almost any cemetery in the country, save the one in Barre, Vermont, where a grandson had a marble bench carved in memory of of the pandemic fallen.
This raises the question of why and what should we do now?
We should lament.
As Richard Rohr has written,
"Prayers of lamentation arise in us when we sit and speak out to God and one another—stunned, sad, and silenced by the tragedy and absurdity of human events. Without this we do not suffer the necessary pain of this world, the necessary sadness of being human.”
It is, of course, possible that the 545,022 (as of March 31) Covid pandemic dead in the United States will simply disappear from our public consciousness, consigned to private grief, along with the 2,796,561 worldwide with the total still climbing rapidly. But failure to publicly lament misses the historic and theological power of shared sorrow.
Sharing the sadness together joins anger and faith. Anger and complaint is central to the lamentation process, and the presence of complaint does not make the voice less Christian, less spiritual, or less American. It is simply a groan: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Psalm 22).
There are many forms of lament—the Psalms being among them. To me, one of the most powerful is the requiem, music that grew from the funeral mass into what are often memorial concerts. Among them are Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, and a Hebrew Requiem written by Austrian-American Eric Zeisl as a memorial to those lost in the Holocaust.
A requiem for the Covid dead would be powerful and fitting, and one is being composed by Claremont Presbyterian Church’s choir director and organist Geri Demasi. His favorite requiem is the Durufle’ (largely because of the organ part), but he is consulting the Faure’, Mozart and Brahms for structure and even some more modern composers (John Rutter, Mark Hayes) for inspiration.
He is collaborating with Pastor Karen Sapio to weave music and liturgy together.
They hope to be able to hold a premier this fall or early next year, a commemoration of voice, instrument, and spoken word that remembers the souls we have lost and prays for God’s grace for them, and us. He notes:
I have always wanted to write a major work, but only if it could make a genuine musical and spiritual contribution that would fill a genuine emotional and liturgical need. I feel that this moment in time might represent the single greatest emotional and liturgical need that we have faced, and I am grateful for the opportunity to respond.
At this point I have portions of four movements that are in various states of progress, and I add to them daily as ideas present themselves.
The finished product will honor the dead fittingly and allow us proper lament.
Photo: Anton Shuvalov via Unsplash