I’m not sure if Westminster Abbey is a tribute to life or to death.
I know the tombs are full of bones and dust, but I also know the accomplishments of the dead are as lasting as the eternal sleep in this final resting place.
I feel the same when I read obituaries in the New York Times. I wonder if I’m being macabre by reading about so much death by so many different ways and means, but then I feel buoyed by the infinite ways that people spend their lives.
I recently read about Rommy Hunt Revson, the creator of the Scrunchie. Obituaries sometimes read like short stories. She was a nightclub singer in the 70s and 80s but tired of the lifestyle. At some point in the 80s, she became fixated on trying to create a hair tie made of fabric. I’m sure she had one too many nights of pulling out her hair while undoing her ponytail, tugging and yanking trying for that smooth release and ending up in tangles. The Scrunchie was the solution and became a must have accessory. She was able to patent the design, but spent a lot of time and energy protecting it, suing, paying legal fees, and fending off copycats. The obituary lauds the immortality of her creation citing an astronaut who wore a Scrunchie in space and donated it to the National Air and Space Museum and recounts that Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s collection of Scrunchies was almost as large as her collection of collars and gloves.
The paper is filled every week with these reports about deaths which are really about life. Some are familiar names, great artists or musicians, others are about lesser known people who leave me in awe of the way some people use their years on the planet. Like Gwendolyn Mildo Hall who used her skills as a researcher and activist to create a database of enslaved people giving so many the power to trace their roots and letting past generations mingle with the present.
And Sheila Tobias, who was the first to explore the idea of math anxiety which makes many very bright students especially girls avoid math classes and careers. She published her research in Ms magazine in 1976 and the impact on feminism and education reverberates today.
Walking through Westminster Abbey on our recent visit to London is a bit like reading through the obituaries. Instead of words, there are elaborate royal tombs with effigies lying in full stone regalia conveying the power and prestige of the bones within. Sculptures in the abbey tell stories that are as vivid as the written word.
The Monument to Lady Elizabeth Nightingale depicts a dying Eizabeth in her husband’s arms. Beneath them, a figure of death, skeletal and menacing, emerges from the crypt with a spear in hand aimed at Elizabeth’s heart. Elizabeth’s husband is reaching out in desperation to block the attack. His outstretched hand holds no weapons against the figure of death, a wraith of certainty who has come to claim Elizabeth. She died in 1731 giving birth to their premature daughter. The monument is moving, a testament to marriage.
There is a good chance, in a long marriage, that one of us will be dying and one of us will be helplessly battling the Reaper in all his creepy glory. One of us will succumb while the other roars at Death to leave the bedside, bolting the door.
But in this sorrowful sculpture as in the sorrowful obituaries, there is so much joy and love between the lines and inside these lives full of wonder and creation.
I try not to linger on the specter of death but instead I read the obituaries and visit the graves for the light, the light of creativity and of invention, the light of accomplishment and of talent, the light of passion and commitment to causes and vocations, the light of love and of family.