Want to visit with the dead? Pray.

June 29, 10:32 AMSpiritual Life ExaminerRabbi Ben Kamin

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During this week of so many prominent deaths, and endless conversations and ruminations about the subjects of death and mortality and fate, many folks have naturally been considering our own dead.  Michael Jackson was not the first person to suddenly die at 50, Farrah Fawcett was hardly the first woman to suffer from a rare form of cancer and succumb at 62—their celebrity had nothing to do with their utterly human vulnerabilities and, in fact, served only to glaringly remind us of our own.

Meanwhile, a million “sightings” of Elvis Presley since his tragic death in 1977 at the age of 42 have failed to actually produce a single meaningful encounter with the brilliant, if self-destructive idol.  Poignantly, Lisa Marie Presley—the living link between Elvis and his successor icon, Michael Jackson—revealed that Jackson foresaw his own comparable outcome.  Narcotics, along with willing and egocentric physicians willing to dispense killer medications to larger-than-life but still smaller-than-death rock stars can easily provoke such self-fulfilling prophecies.

Real life, in the context of mortality, is the story of regular people suffering anonymously from the deaths of our loved ones and then aching for ways to find them.

In the end, what’s really left for the survivors of Presley, Jackson, Fawcett, and millions of other people, anonymous, hard-working, young, old, died naturally, compulsively, intentionally, in war, in vehicular accidents, at the hands of lovers, from myriad diseases, whatever it may be:  What’s really left is our need to visit with our beloved dead.  We will play Jackson’s music and honor an era and, yes, a man.  But we still need to visit with the father we lost, the grandmother who made us that warm bread, the brother who was taken from us inexplicably in somebody’s war.  Real life, in the context of mortality, is the story of regular people suffering anonymously from the deaths of our loved ones that nobody but us really knew and then aching for ways to find them.

There is a way to visit with the dead.  It doesn’t involve séances, media, computer-enhancement, incense, and it’s nobody else’s business.  It doesn’t even have to involve a religion.  Prayer is a chance to visit with somebody.  When you pray, however you pray, you recreate the meaning of a lost life.  You relearn someone’s values, his or her quiet place in your spirit.  You can practically hear his voice telling you what to do in that decisive moment when you were in pain; you can recall her laughter when something revealing was discovered between the two of you that lightened your sadness.

Prayer is the faithful partner of memory in keeping our dead very much alive because it gives them back the one thing all the fuss denies them—intimacy.  The dead don’t disappear when we allow them to continue to quietly inform our lives.

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