Poetry by Judy Dystra Brown

By Donna Mansfield

Ihad a very unusual grief reaction to my husband Chuck’s

death in January 2021. I lost my memory. Couldn’t remember my pin number for my cell phone, my daughter’s name, to pay the mortgages or credit card bills or how to solve any problems. My mind was a blank. It was terrifying.

My son and daughter, seeing that I couldn’t take care of myself put me in Casa Nostra, an assisted living facility for a month. There, I could be alone and cry, be fed three meals a day, have visitors if I chose, be given medicines and helped to take a shower. People were kind.

Slowly, I began to recover my brain power. I had the added benefit of working with the staff chiropractor to release the grief that was causing body pain. The sound of pain is not silence and I was encouraged to cry and scream. That works and thankfully the chiropractor could tolerate the noise.

So it was that time passed and we hadn’t planned or carried out the memorial service. My husband had been in Alcoholics Anonymous for 48 years so we had a small gathering at the Legion in order for his AA friends to fill Chuck’s oldest daughter in on our 21 years in Mexico, as well as the process of his recovery journey.

But that wasn’t the official Celebration of Life that would include family and friends from places where we had lived in the US. So, we planned the formal occasion to coincide with his birthday.

During her last visit when he was alive, this daughter, Hope, had asked her father what he wanted included in the ceremony. He told her the songs, the poetry and that he wanted the first chapter read of Robert Rourke’s The Old Man’s Boy Grows Older. One might think these questions would be hard to ask but Chuck had had a debilitating illness for 12 years, a heart attack and stroke and lately had started having TIAs. He had lost his ability to walk and was in pretty much constant pain. It was time. Jokingly he asked for a five-day funeral having heard of fiveday weddings held in India.

Since Hope works at the Apple home office, she volunteered to create the video of Chuck’s life. She solicited friends and relatives for photos to include, and they poured in.

A local friend set up the Zoom meeting and collected emails of the folks who wanted to attend. Chuck’s other daughter was selected to read the poem he chose and his son played Happy Birthday and Moon River on the saxophone. I read the eulogy that I wrote which consisted of short clips about our 45 years together. And Hope played the loving video she compiled that documented a life well lived.

Next the people who had gathered from around the world to participate had their chance to share: first the family and then friends.

I am including the YouTube link for the video because I want everyone to see what is possible and how it becomes a treasure that can be viewed over and over. I have seen it many times and every time I do, he comes alive again. https://sites.google.com/view/ chuckgiles/charles-e-giles

Much of the resulting celebration was serendipitous but easy to replicate. We did it because of Covid but it is a common-sense approach for Mexico memorials and Lakeside in particular. Not everyone can afford to fly in for funerals; waiting a few months to conduct the ceremony is considerate for everyone involved and allows the family to emerge from shock and deep grief to remember every detail they want to include. We have the support staff locally to make this kind of thing happen.

I don’t think there is any book of etiquette on how memorials are to be done, or in what time frame. It is important to talk to the potential dying to ask how they want to be remembered, to begin to think of the things you want to have highlighted about your life together and how you want to participate.

Even though we had months to prepare we still forgot many people. It has been wonderful for me to be able to give the link to Chuck’s memorial, months after his death and have people get back to me with compliments of how accurate it was in describing him and how comforting to be able to participate, even so long after his death and the memorial.

By Sydney Gay googlesydney@yahoo.com

The most loving exciting teachers in my seventynine years of life have been musicians who faced danger, loss and sorrow without

losing faith in God. For example, the Denver Symphony Orchestra invited friends and families of the fifteen students murdered in 1999 at Columbine to the Nazarene Church for a memorial concert. I arrived early and watched families frozen with fear take their seats. Instead of playing traditional church hymns the orchestra began with Bach’s Fugue in D Minor, then Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony followed by Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C sharp minor which he wrote at the age of nineteen.

After that a finale which stunned. As conductor, Jerry Nelson, raised his baton, a huge video screen lit up with a scene from the 1997 movie Titanic; his orchestra played My Heart will Go On as Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio stood on the bow of the ship with their arms opened to all the mystery of love and life.

The lyrics were well known, “Every night in my dreams I see you, I feel you. That is how I know you go on. far across the distance and space between us... wherever you are I believe the heart does go on.” The gorgeous depth of this music entrenched so firmly into the consciousness of every person in the room that I could feel grief being released in a way that was absolutely divine.

After this a new opportunity came to meet courageous people. I flew to Port-au-Prince Haiti, a French speaking jungle island where Nazarene volunteers are invited to build schools, hospitals, and orphanages. Haiti is the only country in the world with a government dedicated to the voodoo religion. Marie Laveau, the Queen of Voodoo, was born in New Orleans. Voodoo didn’t scare me. New Orleans is where I was born.

The next day we went to a children’s concert in Port-au-Prince. Volunteers from the Boston Symphony Orchestra taught ten-to fourteen-year-old kids how to play Bach, Beethoven and Mozart Every piece was performed with enthusiastic perfection. One year later they were invited to debut in Carnegie Hall, every seat sold within a week. Courage, faith, fearless generosity made all of it possible.

Ajijic: Twenty-two years ago music composer Victor Manuel Medeles began CREM, a Lakeside children’s choir with orchestral training. Until the pandemic, CREM had sixty students, instructors and tutors, orchestra, choir, chamber group and ensemble training with generous support from the English-speaking community. Although this support seems to have faded away, children performing classical music brings joy to the entire Lakeside community; discipline, courage and faith stays alive when families are struggling to survive. Professional guidance is needed to allow the children’s orchestra to continue.

Sydney Gay