Notes from my Knapsack 5-13-21

Notes from my Knapsack 5-13-21

Jeff Gill

Spread versus containment

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Memorial Day is nearing, and Granville plans a parade and ceremony on May 31; stay tuned for more details as we get closer, and the banners go up on Broadway to honor our six surviving World War II veterans.

Summer is coming, and outdoor activities are clearly ideal in so many ways, COVID or not.

One book I'm looking forward to this summer is a new John Maclean book, titled "Home Waters" which comes out June 1. It's a family memoir, and you may be familiar with his father Norman writing about how "A River Runs Through It" which was itself a memoir about the Blackfoot River in Montana in many ways. John went on to be a journalist, and along with his global awareness and perspectives, he ended up helping pick up a loose thread from his father's estate, "Young Men and Fire," which turned John into a primary documentary non-fiction author on the subject of wildland fires, and those who fight them.

I can recommend any of John Maclean's books, tragedies though so many of them have been, but I look forward to "Home Waters" because he will get to work in a different register, as it were. When you are attempting, even in the breadth of a book's length, to sum up all the complex human and environmental detail that resulted in the deaths of those who chose to go out and fight wilderness conflagrations, you have to make many tough choices about whose stories to tell, and how you get not only from ignition to accident, but weaving in the aftermath of those firefighter deaths, lessons learned, and sometimes not learned, but always asking why.

So while looking forward to reading how John asks some very different questions when "Home Waters" comes out, I'm thinking back through those earlier works, and stories, and questions. Because I keep seeing parallels between epidemiology and wilderness firefighting. Arguably, I know little about either (I can hear you in the back mumbling "or nothing!"), but my natural bent is towards metaphor and comparison, and how we can learn in one field from the successes and failures we already have in another.

We all know, from the news if nothing else, that there are numbers around wilderness fire outbreaks, and if we have any imagination at all, we know those numbers only cast faint shadows of the human let alone natural costs they represent. Yes, we're sensitive to the number of deaths: "four killed as forest fire rips through a national forest…" The acreage is usually mentioned, even if most of us would have trouble really imagining what a thousand acres "looks like," let alone a hundred thousand acres.

And then there's containment. "The Whoosit Fire is now 65% contained." It's a figure calculated by the amount of fire line dug around it, the fuels involved and the wind direction and what's in the way. 100% contained we can imagine, but 50%? It almost sounds like there's no difference between 0% and a line halfway around, if the wind turns.

For the COVID situation, the spread seems pretty wide, but in Ohio, 10% of us appear to have had it, some extrapolate that to 20% total cases recovered from having the virus, along with 40% started on the vaccine, over 30% completed. Allowing for overlap, you have us somewhere around 50% either having had it and/or vaccinated. That leaves 50% who could still get it.

I would argue, then, that we're a long way from containment. The fire is still burning, however you measure it. And we have fire line to dig, and flames to put out, before everyone is safe.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's swung a Pulaski a few times but never in harm's way. Tell him how you think we need to put this fire out at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 5-15-21

Faith Works 5-15-21

Jeff Gill

On a hill, far away

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This spring I've taken a longer than expected detour into cremation, ashes, and their disposition.

As a genealogist and historian, we're losing something with the end of the last best permanent record, an archive for past generations I've benefited from in many ways. Trust me when I say I have many and conflicted feelings about the skyrocketing frequency of "at the request of the departed, there will be no service, and a private service at a later date." 

What I've gotten myself into here is a side-effect of responding as a pastor and preacher to friends and acquaintances who find themselves in the position of having to take care of "the event." Some churches and faith traditions very specifically forbid scattering ashes; most no longer forbid cremation, but instruct survivors to handle the urn or container as they would a casket, with a reverent committal ceremony in sacred ground, a family plot or cemetery mausoleum.

Much more common, though, is a family decision to just ask the mortician to cremate the body, picking up the heavy small box of ashes, and scattering them on their own, at a later point and who knows what location. I see some parallels, which no one will thank me for pointing out, to the move towards event weddings, and having a friend officiate in a converted barn or banquet hall. Except apparently lots of people enjoy sending away for a ministry "certificate" and filing with the Ohio Secretary of State to become a legal officiant for a friend's wedding. The line is not as long to get the privilege of presiding over a scattering ceremony.

Just to be clear, in no state do you have to be licensed or ordained to conduct a memorial service. To prepare a body, yes; within a church building, those rules about who can officiate are for that faith community. But I'm perfectly willing to affirm that anyone can do a funeral, it's just that they aren't as simple as they appear (also something many ad hoc wedding officiants have learned the hard way). Having a clergymember assisting is a practical choice in most cases.

But let's say there is no one available or appropriate to the occasion, and the person presiding is you. What do you do? The word has gone out to family and friends, and you're arriving at a hilltop in a national park or a family cabin next to a public waterway, and everyone expects you to lead the service. How does it go?

I've gone into the practical at length because if you don't have a smooth, seamless set-up for those tangible issues (scissors or a very sharp knife, situational awareness of how the ashes will behave out of the bag, what to do with the remaining materials at the end) then the fumbling and confusion become most of what people remember. You don't want that, lay or ordained.

You need a rally point: a table, a stump, a place to set the container. You may need to guide people into where they should go to stand or sit (there being no aisle or pews to steer them). Once together, you really should have a clear start, regardless of time (but starting early is risky because late arrivals can be very distracting). A song or soloist is nice, or at minimum a "Thank you for coming."

You say why you're here not because they don't know, but because it clarifies matters. That's why we have any ceremony at all. "We are here to honor the life and mark the death of [Name]." If it's a purely secular ceremony you're after, that I can't help you with. I would advise anyone to pray after the opening; you don't have to call it an invocation, but I would want to ask divine blessing on the occasion and those gathered.

The rest is simple. You invite people to speak or not, as the family prefers; you tell as much truth as the occasion allows, but the happier memories tend to be central because the sorrow is already there, with that box and what it means. Be honest, within reason. Be humorous, when it's earned and not forced. Be reverent, whatever that means to you. And then scatter the ashes as you've prepared to do.

If it were me, I'd close in prayer. Keeping in mind the whole act, however engaged in, is a form of prayer, one that will be remembered.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; his ashes are not ready to be scattered in any case. Tell him what you have in mind at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 5-8-21

Faith Works 5-8-21

Jeff Gill

Ashes on the landscape

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Last week's column evoked a response like none I've ever had, and I'm rewriting what was going to be a second half to reflect some of it (part three next week, in other words). Cremation, and delayed services, are a subject of intense and even painful interest for a great many people. I knew it, but I'm feeling it all the more after reading your messages (and if I missed any replies, my apologies).

Households with a black plastic box on the counter, or in a cabinet, are many. And I have to add, this was an issue building up well before COVID closures came along. At my last parish ministry post, there was a point a few years ago where I had four boxes of cremated remains sitting under my desk. Cremation and waiting for another date, or for a partner's death, has been growing as a choice for years, but people are still very unsure how to deal with them literally in their hands. So asking a minister to hold onto them makes a certain amount of sense, even if it added a strange atmosphere to my office (they've all been since distributed appropriately).

Add to this the fact that more people, especially since the last year, have no church affiliation, and have taken the cost effective option of cremation only and just "pick up" the remains from the funeral home: who is in charge, and how do they handle things for final honors? Particularly when it's intentionally wished to be informal and low key?

I don't have to "like" it to understand that between cost and calendar, cremation is the new normal . . . but without clergy and funeral home support, people don't know what to do. And I'm too much a realist to say "well, everyone just go back to church." So I hope to help - plus I get many requests for "tell me what I need to do" from friends who are going to other states and places to scatter, and realize this many not be as simple as people think . . . which it is not.

To repeat from last week: if you're the one in charge, open up the box. It's okay, they won't jump out at you. You'll see a heavy duty plastic bag, sealed shut. You can't just tear it open, and that makes sense, right? So you need a tool to open it in hand at the location you're taking them to.

And the contents are five to seven pounds of grayish material. It's about half heavy and pours right out and down, and about half powder that does what powder does. So you need to figure out where people will stand, where you will be, and where these ashes are going. It's also where I strongly recommend that you, well, practice. Go to the spot in advance, or a similar location if you can't get there beforehand, and take a canister of talcum powder from the drugstore. Open it, pour some out. Yep, where a bunch of that goes is where those ashes will go. Yeah, it can swirl or reverse direction. Glad you practiced yet? It's just talcum powder. This time.

Ashes can be "in-urned" and put behind a niche in a cemetery, or in the ground. That may be looking like a better idea as you think about this, but it will have to be paid for, up front. If you want to go to a previous family gravesite and scatter ashes there, just understand the cemetery rules may require a fee for doing so. I'm not defending that, I'm just cautioning you. Ditto for placing an urn in a casket, which makes even less sense to me, but I don't run a cemetery.

Please understand: just because the deceased asked to have their ashes scattered someplace does NOT mean you have the right to put them there. On someone's front yard to settle a score, for instance. I've seen some strange locations requested, and as a minister, have had to explain "that's not a good idea." Placing ashes in a container in an appropriate place is the safest, and some say the most respectful option.

But if the last request was for scattering, and you know it's alright to gather people there and do so with permission, I'll offer a few more words on how you might go about that.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; his ashes are not ready to be scattered in any case. Tell him what you have in mind at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.