Mourning Times
Daily life moves quickly. But some moments deserve reflection. This past week we had such a moment, with the funerals of Aretha Franklin and John McCain.
Detroit engaged in a week-long celebration. Neither the 6-hour concert nor the 8-hour funeral could fully encompass the generous, soaring gift of the life of Aretha Franklin.
Former City council person JoAnn Watson said of her friend, "Listening to her music brings chills because there's no voice like Aretha's voice. She was a woman filled with a stirring soul that touched your heart, evoked passion, and special insight. There's just not another voice in the universe comparable to Aretha Franklin. She truly was our queen. She was a wonderful woman. A wonderful woman, more than a singer, more than an entertainer or an actress. She was a woman who felt deeply about causes. She was as committed to human rights and civil rights.”
She loved Detroit. And Detroit loved her back.
Throughout the funeral, much of America learned about the life of a woman who represented what is best in us: generosity, commitment, family ties, faith in people, and purpose. Hour after hour we heard about the qualities of life that matter, qualities missing in our public lives.
Franklin’s funeral was followed the next day by that of John McCain. The Senator orchestrated his own funeral to send a political message. Unable to defeat Trump in life, he made one last effort.
Former President Barack Obama captured the essence of the challenge. “So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse, can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult, in phony controversies and manufactured outrage,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s a politics that pretends to be brave, but in fact is born of fear. John called us to be bigger than that. He called us to be better than that.”
Funerals have long been focal points for political action. Whatever their contradictions, tyrants fear them. When public spaces become brittle and restricted, the democratic impulse finds new forms of expression. Historically funerals have been transformed from private grieving to calls for public action.
Consider the funeral of Emmett Till. In 1955, 14-year-old Till was murdered in Mississippi and his body dumped into the Tallahatchie River.
Against the instructions of officials, Mamie Till Mobley, Emmett’s mother, insisted on an open casket, vividly displaying her son’s mangled body, only recognizable by the initials on a ring. She said, “Let the world see what I’ve seen.”
She wanted to “put that body on display for five days and people could walk by and see what racism had really generated.” Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender published the photo of Till’s body. Thousands of people walked by the open casket in Chicago. Most historians agree that this moment helped push America forward into the civil rights movement.
In the mid-1980s as people in South Africa struggled for liberation, funerals of protestors became places for demonstrating against the Apartheid government. Decreeing a state of emergency, the white government banned outdoor services and said that the presiding minister “shall not at such a ceremony in any manner defend, attack, criticize, propagate or discuss any form of government, any principle or policy of a government of a state, any boycott action, the existence of a state of emergency or any action by a force or a member of the force.”
Funeral routes were set by police and “public address systems and the display of flags or banners are outlawed.”
People defied the ban, ultimately toppling Apartheid.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it was at the funerals of gay men that the queer community was forced to articulate the meaning of our lives and relationships, again, again, and again, often in the face of hostility.
Such moments require us to define values that matter, values we aspire to for ourselves and our communities. Far more than legal actions or anonymous letters, these moments, where we grapple with the meaning of our lives, call upon us to reflect on who we are, and who we want to become. They have the power to change us.