Remembering Donna Marcille

When we met on Tuesday morning to begin planning today’s Celebration of Life Service for Donna, Kristi shared with me that one of Donna’s favorite books had been “The Prophet’ by Kahlil Gibran. I remembered that this book had been given to me as a wedding gift that over the course of my fourteen-year marriage I had yet to find the time to read. So yesterday, preparing for our gathering this afternoon I binged on everything Kahlil Gibran, getting lost in his words and falling in love with his life. So much deep wisdom poured from Gibran’s pen to our world that I could have easily found myself forgoing the pursuit of originality and instead standing before you and reading his poetic ‘Farewell’ - a portion of the poem which reads;

Brief were my days among you, and briefer still the words I have spoken.
But should my voice fade in your ears, and my love vanish in your memory, then I will come again,
And with a richer heart and lips more yielding to the spirit will I speak.
Yea, I shall return with the tide,
And though death may hide me, and the greater silence enfold me, yet again will I seek your understanding.
And not in vain will I seek.

Surely, we could not pass over his quote, “Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.” For here we have gathered, side by side, stuffing ourselves into pews broken-in by a thousand mourners before us. Here we sit in the indent of their presence finding ourselves heavy with a joy and sorrow rooted so deep in our souls it swallows us up into tear-filled laughter echoing into eternity. The fear and hope that we might lose ourselves, in what Gibran refers to as “this great separation,” pulls us toward each other- every soul rhythmically bobbing like makeshift life boats in this tide of fresh grief- the assurance that having been dropped in the sea of sorrow we have not been left to seek the shore alone.

In each poetic illustration of death, Gibran reminds us there is no celebration, no joy, without the presence of sorrow, without accompanied suffering. I have experienced this to be true – identifying a strong correlation, even by scientific standards, between the love one life pours out and the sorrow the end of this life produces. Donna’s life was defined by a great outpouring of love; her death the impetus of a great bubbling and overflowing of sorrow in each one of us. I always wonder if it is not the love we have for that person that gives way to our sadness, but the love the person offered to us and the fear that we have lost something so precious a very part of our existence is being questioned. The power of being loved, the power of feeling worthy of belonging. To celebrate the life Donna lived requires us to sit with the suffering we are experiencing. Joy and sorrow. Hope and loss.

Despite Gibran’s invitation to embrace our joy as being our sorrow unmasked, we have trained ourselves to avoid discomfort; labeling suffering as unnatural. In our community, sorrow wears many masks that leave joy unseen. I never know how to respond to the shaky words whispered after the loss of a loved one who has experienced a great deal of pain and suffering at the end of their lives. Most of us have spoken these words to ourselves, if not out loud, perhaps silently. If never spoken or thought, I would wager a bet that we have all been in the presence of a person who has uttered them. The ceremonious and perhaps obligatory declaration that the person who once was suffering now suffers no more. Words offered and received like a second-hand silver-lining.

Of course, the words are true. Donna is no longer suffering. Wandering into death she was released from the persistence of pain, the suffocation of her physical suffering. Biblically the suffering does not even require an end to cease, but is alleviated in the reception of a new life; one eternal narrative swaddled in mystery and bridged by a love beyond comprehension. I believe this new life to be as beautiful as Gibran describes;

“For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?”

Donna has stood in the wind and melted into the sun. She suffers no more. All of this is true.

It is also true that, whether we wish it to be or not that suffering transfers; as if suffering is a living organism in need of a host to survive. One person is set free and a whole community finds itself the recipient of a new involuntary symbiotic relationship. Perhaps the ambiguity I experience at the announcement of one person’s release from suffering, is the predictable multiplication of suffering I know is to follow. The heartbreak in a community when we lose someone who for so long brought us to life through the love they so freely gave. When the person we have lost has lived a life of love, their transition into new life does not extinguish suffering, it expands it.

One of my favorite United Methodist writers, Jan Richardson, says, “Loving is never just about opening our heart. It is about being willing to have our heart become larger as we make room for people and stories and experiences we never imagined holding. It is about being willing to have our heart become deeper as we move beyond the surface layers of our assumptions, prejudices, and habits in order to truly see and receive what—and who—is before us. It is about being willing to have our heart continually shattered and remade as we take in not only the brokenness of the world but also the beauty of it, the astounding wonder that will not allow us to remain the same.”

Suffering is not a rusty prison holding us captive but an all-wheel drive vehicle with GPS coordinates set to new life, to deeper joy, to renewed relationship beyond the boundaries of life and death. For as Gibran says, the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. In our suffering, we uncover the impetus in learning again how to return to one another in relationship beyond the physical limits of this world. In this moment, we are challenged to let our suffering stretch our understanding of all that we define as sorrow, so that we may embrace all that is to become our greatest joy.

Once you were her friend, you were her friend forever, Donna’s obituary reads. To live as a person of faith is to disallow death to dictate the term limit on our relationships. It is this faith that has domesticated death and suffering into vehicles to new beginnings; tools that transform relationships we fear we have lost only to discover that beyond the shallow definition of death, yet with us they still remain. In Donna’s death, she found new life as she was received into a divine existence beyond our knowing. In our lives, each moment offers to us new life with feet planted in the soil from which God formed us. An opportunity to live liminal lives – an expanded awareness within and beyond the borders of this space.  If we are courageous enough to sit with suffering and bold enough to continue to love – none of us will remain the same as all of us find ourselves reunited.

On Kahlil Gibran’s grave the words are written, I am alive like you, and I am standing beside you. Close your eyes and look around, you will see me in front of you.

In the daybreak of death’s visit, let us wake in this world as curious children, anxious to witness what the world declares to be invisible and to feel in our fingers that which the world defines beyond our grasp. This is what we find to be possible when suffering is the guidepost leading us back to the joy residing just beneath the trails map.