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Dear Dolly,
What makes a good funeral?
Dear funeral virtuoso,
A good funeral balances grief and gladness. Grief that the person is gone; gladness that the person was. Half sobbing, half laughing. School all speakers in this 50/50 rule. They won’t listen but at least you will know you tried.
A good funeral says lovely things about the deceased and also mentions their flaws. When the speakers sit down, you feel like they knew the same person you did and whom you came to memorialize.
A good funeral avoids individualism. Someone wise, like a preacher, says something wise about what everybody is really thinking about, which is their own death. A good funeral prepares us to die. It is death school. You graduate whether you flunk the courses or not.
A bad funeral avoids emotion and sticks with the facts. A bad funeral individualizes the life so much that there are no hymns, no sermons, no scriptures, no poetry, no takeaways for the living, just eulogies. The eulogy only funeral/memorial makes believe that life is all about how we uniquely live it. It is not. Life is also the collective deposited in the individual. It is the ancient wisdom and the current events that blend to make the person a person. They should at least get a liturgical nod.
A bad funeral is a performance, and you wish you hadn’t gone.
In life and death,
Dolly
Dear Dolly,
Why did British Artist Damien Hirst make art out of pills? Why is he likely the richest artist in Britain? Why did he start his career with his grandmother’s medicine cabinet? How did he brand himself so well?
Why did someone put a very large sculpture of a large lime green rocking chair on the lawn of the Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island? Why did Maya Lin create a water sculpture for stone workers in Newport, Rhode Island? Why do artists do what they do?
Why did Bella Bartok write simple pieces for piano? How do artists change the way we think? Better yet, why do artists try to change the way we think?
Dear wannabe artist,
You can make art out of anything. Arranging the food on a platter. Drawing the gloom that comes out of a cloudy day, the third one in a row. Sculpting the yogurt parfait. Putting on makeup.
Damien Hirst used pills to show us what he thinks life is: chemical ways to reduce the pain of being alive. I happen to be very fond of “the pill,” the one that allows for sexual recreation without procreation. Otherwise, I dislike pills. They pretend to alleviate pain and never really do.
The rocker maker is joking about the recreational aspects of living in a rich mansion branded place. Maya Lin really loved stones. Bella Bartok needed to be excused for how complex his own music was.
What else do you need to know? Art: where we know what we like and not much else.
Dolly
Who is the Dolly Mama?
The Dolly Mama is a spiritual version of Dear Abby. Her intention is to combine the irreverence of Dolly Parton with the surrender and non-attachment beloved by Buddhists. She wants to let go of what can’t be fixed – in either self or others – and fix what can by applying the balm of humor.
She is a spiritual handyperson, a soul mechanic, a repairer of broken appliances. Every now and then the combination of letting go and hanging on achieves sufficient balance for an improvement in spiritual posture, stronger spine, and personal peace. The Dolly Mama is not her day job. By day, she works as an ordained United Church of Christ and American Baptist pastor of a regular, if edgy, congregation.
