WHEN THE CHURCHYARD ISN’T BIG ENOUGH

By MICHAEL PERKINS

Every man’s death diminishes me. 

                                                 John Donne, No Man Is An Island

IT DOESN’T TAKE A SEER TO GET THE IMPRESSION THAT, these days, we seem to be, more than ever in our history, a nation of mourners. No longer do we merely express the formal, private grief that marks the graveside service or the official funeral. The far reach of death into nearly every arena of public life has made grief more of a communal phenomenon than can be contained in the local churchyard. And since loss is occurring in more and more settings, mourning has likewise burst the bounds of the cemetery. We mark the lost where they have fallen…which is amongst us all.

Just as the photography of our grandparent’s loss was partially defined by images of closed factories and shantytowns, the images of our day are increasingly crowded with our own epidemic of loss, in what could be called the Great Age Of The Public Shrine. Enormous dumps of flowers, drawings, plush toys, hand-written sentiments heaped onto sidewalks near the sites of shootings; floods of mementos strewn near the places where soldiers, athletes, film stars, or even, as seen recently in Manhattan, a briefly wild owl have closed out their lives. The new surge sees tidal waves of sadness and sympathy playing out on every street in every city, as if grief had reached flood stage and jumped its banks across the entire world. Photographs of these scenes are both part of the display, composed of effigies of the lost, but created anew as well, an active commentary on what Civil War historian Drew Gilpin Faust called the Republic of Suffering.

I happened upon this improvised memorial along a beach in Ventura, California. To his friends, “Jake” deserves no less a marker than the war generals or explorers frozen in marble in parks across the country. Those traditional monuments celebrate general loss, while our new unbounded churchyards measure the impact of the individual upon other individuals. In capturing these new variants on sacred space, we can share a unique process in which all of humanity feels linked to all other humanity. It’s a new kind of mourning, all inclusive, ubiquitous. Shared.