A Tutorial for Your Memorial

Shoot an arrow to the sky; make an arc of your distress. Release a mighty wail song in their name. Adjust your volume to oscillate between low-key weep, howling dog caterwaul, and ragged, stereophonic sob. Make your noise so animalistic and embarrassing people look away. Full draw a universe of your sorrowful sound from the darkest recesses of your stomach’s underworld. When this arrow lands, pull another. Pull as many as you need. 

Take a block of stone and carve yourself a shape. The shape is not important. The likeness, irrelevant. The weight of it—that’s the thing. Match its weight to the weight of your distress. Chip and grind and rasp and polish. When your hands are blistered, when the dust has filled your lungs to rattle, wrestle this shape onto a backyard plinth. Touch it when the stone is warm and you are cold with sadness. Touch it when the stone is cold and you are burning with rage. Feel the roughness of its imperfections under your bare hand of longing. Let the weather wear it as you wear your tidal grief: Slow and relentless. 

Rend your garments. Rend them into tatters, to the wind and sky and sun and judgement of crowds. Rend the absolute bedraggled exhaustion from them. Rend each piece of cloth to a sliver, to a thread, to a kind of melodramatic memorial lint. Leave yourself raw to the elements; as exposed as a penguin, as naked as a lie. With great care, tweeze a grief tick from the hide of your mourning. Put it in a jar. Drown it in alcohol. Be careful with that. 

Wear black. Black shoes, back shirt, black socks, black dress, black gloves, black hat, black glasses, black heart. Black underwear if you have it. Let the black hole of their absence suck you into an abyss of RGB 0, 0, 0 and swim around in it doing lazy, inconsolable strokes. Submit to it. Allow it to drape itself from your arms and hair and heels and get in your eyes and mouth and nose and smother you like a chocolate coated toffee. A human-sized, dark masked, grief toffee that everyone will see and comment on. “Too long,” they’ll say. Wear black. For a week, a month, a year. Honor for as long as you want. 

Slip on their heaviest coat or most ‘them-smell’ shirt. Stand in their wardrobe and breathe. Touch a button. A belt. An earring. A tie. Donate all of it or none of it, now or later. Should you choose to box-and-drop, embrace the Goodwill Predicament: the unbearable pain of letting go vs. the knowledge that someday, somewhere exists the possibility of a man in court wearing your grandfather’s best dress shoes. An Unintended Memorial by a Stranger. The greatest honor of all.  

Name for them a bridge, or a park. Place a plaque on a brick or a bench noting this to be their favorite place. Build a reflecting pool, a meditation garden, a shrine to their memory. Write a book, write a poem, write a song of their conquests and deeds. Visit that lonely road, that overgrown ditch, that guiderail on that bridge. Hammer in a white cross and paint their name crudely upon it. Position a ghost bike. Hang a notebook from a tree or a place a photograph in a Ziplock bag at that desolate stretch—the last known location of their spirit ascending.

If it helps, do it.

But above all, make a monument of your life. Find joy in the smallest things. Feel love whenever possible. Allow yourself to experience a lightness of heart, but do not stave off the heaviness when it comes. Invite happiness in and give pain its space. Jump to the clap of a thunderstorm and thrill to the electric lightning on the horizon. Became a champion of all seasons. Delight at the mystery of the ocean and might of the forest. Get rejected. Win over an enemy. Go to live music and pay too much for a hotel. Eat good meals with friends. Ride a bike. Sit in dark cinemas watching bad films with the sheen of popcorn butter on your fingertips and when you catch yourself wishing they were there with you, know that they are. That they always will be.

The best memorial you can make—the greatest honor you can pay to the departed—is to live the long and well lived life that they cannot. In this, you will aid their transition to the afterlife and your continued existence in the nowlife. 

This piece is part of a series called the “Summer of Song Dispatches.” To hear the story behind this piece, let me read it to you here 👇

This week’s amends…

"You're going to die. You're going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we're just going to be gone. The world's going to go on without us... You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself, you decide for yourself."

- Bob Dylan

Speaking of Bob Dylan, I finally got to visit the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A highlight of the Summer of Song and the one I was looking most forward to. I took so many photos and will eventually share more on Instagram when I go through them all, plus the Woody Guthrie Center next door, which was AMAZING! My feed is only up to Graceland, and that feels like forever ago.

On Rotation: "I'll Fly Away" by Gillian Welch & Alison Krauss

It felt fitting to post this song, though it's more a 'looking forward to heaven' song than a memorial song. It's from the soundtrack to "O Brother, Where Art Thou", which is a nod to The Odyssey, a movie I just saw. But I'm also sharing it because of the region it was shot: rural Mississippi, where I have spent a chunk of time hitting some key blues spots which I will be revealing over the next week or so on my instagram (a sneak peek of one is below).

As I mention in the podcast that gives the backstory on this post, I started going down a rabbit hole of death-themed songs. Or would that be and grave of death-themed songs? I made a playlist. It is a weird playlist, to say the least. Artists that wouldn't normally be in the same playlist, I mean. Feel free to suggest some additions (use the comment section here. You may have to make an account, which doesn't subscribe you to anything, don't worry!)

A reminder that all songs featured in this newsletter over the years are added to the giant mega super playlist of magnificents and magnificence which you can access with an effortless press of this button. 👇

I mention this song in the podcast. Go behind the song and hear songwriter, Ben Gibbard's thoughts on the theme and how he wrote it.

Part of the Summer of Song has been spent hitting some stops on the Mississippi Blues Trail, a route you can follow to hit significant places in the history of the blues. One of the places I stopped was at Robert Johnson's grave. (He sold his soul to the devil down at the crossroads, if you're wondering.

It has become a place for people to visit and pay their respects, although interestingly, there are two other gravesites in different locations that are also said to be where he's buried. Much like the location of the aforementioned crossroads, these locations are disputed and argued about. This is the one on the blues trail. It's out in the middle of nowhere at a small church in a small cemetery, surrounded by cotton and cornfields.

Here is a video that will explain Robert Johnson for you.

Shameless Podcast Plug

Listen to audio versions of The Stream on my podcast, Field of Streams, available on 👉 all major podcasting platforms 👈

Here’s Apple