On Names, Memorials and Memory

Because I have to get around to ordering a monument for my husband’s gravesite, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the connection between names and being remembered.

Tony was buried on December 15, 2019, and the next month I started looking into what I always called a “tombstone,” which apparently they now refer to as a monument (kinda like how garbage trucks are now “sanitation trucks” and “used cars” are “previously owned”?).

But “monument” is good because a tombstone is a memorial that is also a monument to the person who died. Something to honor them as well as to have them remembered, identified for the future.

In Jewish tradition, having a tombstone is important, which I suppose is why anti-Semites destroy or desecrate tombstones in Jewish cemeteries—it’s as close as they can come to killing the person, blotting out their memory, as if they never existed. You are supposed to have a tombstone on the grave before the end of a year and there is an “unveiling” at the cemetery when it’s ready.

Tony’s birthday was July 31st. I still hadn’t made the arrangements, so I decided, time to get on with it before time runs out. Tempus fugit!

I’d been hesitating. Other things had taken over my life due to Coronavirus. I was grateful to be working, but it was demanding, especially when I had to teach online. I was also compulsively ordering food and supplies and wine, obsessing with staying safe, not wanting to get sick and die. I took care of all that bureaucratic work that comes with death, including having to fight a mistake where Social Security thought I too had died when my husband passed! But thank God Tony died before this horrible virus. He went out in peace; he was buried with dignity.

Now, it is time to do that last rite of honor. To get him that monument, engrave his name in stone and erect the granite tombstone where I can leave a small stone on top whenever I visit his grave. Another mark that he has not been forgotten.

Monuments are so much in the news these days in America. Many people want to pull down public monuments to people who were slave-owners, confederate “heroes,” or racists. The removal of Confederate flags is not enough. The statue of General Robert E. Lee is coming down in Richmond, Virginia. A statue of Christopher Columbus in Boston was beheaded; one in Virginia was spray-painted, set on fire, and thrown into a lake. Christopher Columbus was also toppled in St. Paul, Minnesota. Jefferson Davis was taken down in both Kentucky and Richmond, Virginia. Buildings and schools at elite universities are being renamed (as in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University) to erase the names of people from the past who were famous, but now infamous. One impulse to preserve; another impulse to blot out. I think of the prayer on Yom Kippur where we pray that we might be “inscribed in the book of life.” I think of Milton’s Paradise Lost where we are told that “Satan’s real “name” in heaven before the Fall has been permanently blotted out.

Many of the seventeenth-century poets I teach and love were anxious about having their names and words survive. Shakespeare tells the unnamed “young man” in his Sonnets he will forever “grow” in the poet’s “eternal lines” (Sonnet 18). The poet confers a kind of immortality, although the irony is that we do not know the name of that young man. It is Shakespeare, the poet, we remember. Robert Herrick ended his volume of more than a thousand short lyrics with a poem declaring that, despite the appearance of their fragility (like flowers), they “never shall / Decline or waste at all,” even though, “kingdoms fall.” Some people hope to find an extended life in having children. But we all want to feel that something of us will last, something material, yet more than material, a book, a poem, an engraved image of our name, as if our name expresses our self.

But I also think of those seventeenth-century writers who mused on the futility of our efforts to be remembered. George Herbert’s beautiful poem, “Church Monuments,” meditates on tombstones and monuments in the church and graveyard, some of them elaborate artifacts, and reminds us of their futility. He imagines the time in the future when even those monuments will become dust. Nothing lasts. 

Then there are those sonorous sentences in the final chapter of Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, an essay about his attempt to identify ancient burial urns that recently had been discovered in Norwich, England. “There is no antidote against the opium of time, . . . our Fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors.” He continues, “The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy.” And lastly, “Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory, a great part even of our living beings.” The beauty of his words, lifting the spirit, almost outweighs the sadness of the thoughts.

But we are alive now, in the present, treasuring and loving life as best we can, even in difficult times, and making monuments. Even knowing that nothing is permanent, we need to mark the significance of a life, make sure to have it remembered by those who still are living or will come after. I am not depressed and I am not morbid. For Tony’s birthday last week, I made a fragrant spaghetti sauce with garlic, onion, ground turkey, olive oil, chopped tomatoes, fresh basil, oregano; an apple crisp; and an arugula salad. Things Tony loved (well, not the arugula). I ate them in pleasure. Though I sat alone at the rosewood table, I had the company of good memories, thinking of our shared meals as I looked out at the dark sky streaked with scarlet, orange and yellow over the Hudson River. I felt grateful for the day, for being here and alive right now and relished a little more wine than usual.

I guess I’m ready to proceed with getting a monument. I love the Jewish prayer, “May his (or her) soul be bound in the bond of life,” though its meaning has always eluded me. Maybe it is up to each of us to figure out what it might mean, the ways a person’s soul could be “bound up in the bond of life,” or how we who survive might help it happen. Yes, gravestones, tombstones, monuments of granite, are one way, but only when engraved with a name, with words.

https://www.achsahguibbory.com/