Jan McCormick is retired from careers in chemistry and interior design. She attended Mennonite and Baptist churches in her youth and became a humanist at the age of forty-nine.
Our twenty-nine-year-old son died suddenly after taking an illegal drug. He was our only child. Before my husband and I were able to see him, the authorities took possession of his body for autopsy. We saw Kevin two days later. Another two months passed before we were permitted to retrieve his belongings, which the police had ransacked.
Through all of this, we had no god in our lives to help us cope with the horror of losing our son. But, somehow, we arranged a beautiful memorial service that was attended by more than two hundred people, most of them Kevin’s friends who came from all over the country to remember him. The following August, we attended Burning Man, an annual counterculture arts festival in Nevada, and scattered some of our son’s ashes in the Black Rock Desert in the company of people who loved him.
But I get ahead of myself.
The day after Kevin died, my husband and I went to a funeral home to make arrangements. We knew immediately that we wanted our son cremated, in no small part to eliminate any possibility that the authorities could touch him again. We also yearned to avoid the traditional rituals of dressing up the body and viewing it publicly. We did not want to make a spectacle of him.
We wanted to see Kevin’s body before he was gone from us forever, and the undertaker encouraged us to have him embalmed so the experience would be bearable for us. This was accomplished, and we had our last visit with our son’s remains. Before entering the room, I asked the undertaker if I could put my arm under Kevin’s shoulders and hold him one last time, but he advised against it. When we saw Kevin, we could see stitches in the back of his head. I stroked his hair very lightly so that I wouldn’t feel how cold he was. We spent some indeterminate amount of time with him, and then we left him for the last time. At our request, the undertaker cut a lock of his hair for us as a keepsake.
Knowing we would have to settle his affairs, we went to Kevin’s fraternity house, where he had continued to receive mail after his graduation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). We were surprised to learn that everyone in the house knew of his death; it quickly became clear that people in the Boston area might want to celebrate his life in some way. We decided to plan a memorial service to be held at the MIT chapel. A biographer of Carl Sagan once referred to the chapel as “nondenominational with a vengeance,” and we knew from previous visits that this was an apt description. We requested permission to use the chapel and sent an e-mail to Kevin’s fraternity brothers, asking that they inform others who might wish to attend the service.
An Episcopal pastor associated with MIT’s chaplaincy office understood what we wanted and was sensitive to our wishes. We asked Kevin’s best friend to share with us what he knew about our son’s spiritual feelings, and his beautiful words reminded me of a quotation from Einstein’s essay “The World as I See It” that I had read years ago.
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.
We knew that some of the people attending the service would be Christians. Not wanting to offend anyone, we edited the Einstein quote. Regarding life after death, Einstein had also said, “let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts.” Whether from good judgment or lack of courage, we chose to delete this sentiment from the reading. I printed copies of the quotation and made them available at the service for people to take home.
Two days before the service, we were surprised to learn that our permission to use the chapel might be rescinded, due in part to negative media attention surrounding the circumstances of Kevin’s death. After several distressing hours, we learned that, to its credit, MIT had decided to allow us to proceed.
On the morning of the service, six days after Kevin’s death, we arranged framed portraits of him in the chapel. We had rejected the common practice of asking for charitable donations in lieu of floral arrangements, and the chapel was filled with flowers. Kevin was an artist whose medium was light, so his friends installed an exquisite lighting display in the chapel as a remembrance of his life and work. Kevin’s ashes were placed on a table at the front of the room, along with a picture of him wearing a T-shirt that said “Liberty.”
Our service consisted of readings from Wordsworth on the loss of youth, Emerson on the futility of grief, the above Einstein quote, and the Bible. Our reading from the biblical Book of Matthew (5:11) included the phrase, “Blessed are ye when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely.” This, we intended for the media, who had used our son’s death to sell their product.
Kevin enjoyed Bach, and the chapel had a pipe organ, so we had the organist play Bach as people entered the chapel and during a quiet period during the service. The pastor planned the flow of the service and directed it with great skill. She spoke about celebrating Kevin’s life and gave those in attendance the opportunity to speak. This was the heart of the service. We were moved by the number of people who spoke and by the love they expressed. The service concluded with the lighting of a candle, and our family, along with Kevin’s friend Dustin, formed a circle at the front of the chapel. We held hands as the pastor said a secular benediction.
As my husband and I turned to leave the chapel, we were overwhelmed to see that people were standing in the back of the room and filling the vestibule and the areas immediately outside the building. When we spoke to people as they left the service, we learned that Kevin had had a powerful influence on many of them. It was this outpouring of love and gratitude for our son’s life that sustained us through what was the most profound day of our lives. My husband told me that, for him, it was better to know for certain that Kevin had had a positive effect on people’s lives than to hold onto some vague notion that he was “going off to the sky.”
After the service, Kevin’s friends held a potluck dinner at his fraternity house. They had made T-shirts, a video, and a CD of his favorite music to remember him by. People who had come long distances to attend the service celebrated seeing old friends again. There was hugging, crying, laughing, and joyful retellings of stories. We told people we intended to go to Nevada to scatter Kevin’s ashes in the Black Rock Desert, and Kevin’s friend Faye suggested that we wait until August and go to Burning Man so that Kevin’s friends could participate in the scattering. This turned out to be a brilliant suggestion.
Our trip to Burning Man was painful and cathartic, difficult and rejuvenating. There is hardly a state of mind that isn’t magnified by the stark reality of the desert and the surreality of Burning Man. Most therapeutic for us was the opportunity to be reunited with Kevin’s friends. In the months between his death and the desert trip, Kevin’s friends worked tirelessly to salvage pieces of his digital artwork that had been damaged by the authorities. Kevin created much of his art expressly for presentation at Burning Man, and, with the help of his cocreators, the art was restored. The pieces made the trip to Nevada and lit up the night sky on the playa.
Burning Man is rich in venues for remembering the departed. It is at once a celebration of the here and now and a recognition of the fragility and brevity of life. We wrote our thoughts on scrap lumber and placed them, along with photographs of Kevin, in the Temple of Hope. In our travels around Black Rock City, we discovered that other people had written notes about Kevin and left them at other locations.
The most moving part of the trip was our gathering to scatter his ashes. Kevin loved watching the sunrise at Burning Man, so we arranged to meet at 5 a.m. About thirty people joined us as we viewed projected photographs of Kevin and then walked together to the Temple of Hope. We paused there as a few people added their pictures and memories, then we proceeded to the east, past the edge of Black Rock City. We walked in silence. When the sun had risen, we opened the box containing Kevin’s ashes. Using a tiny silver spoon, each participant took a scoop of ashes and scattered it on the playa. Shortly thereafter, people resumed talking and dispersed, heading back toward the camps.
The final act of our tribute to Kevin was to witness the burning of the Temple of Hope. Seeing the Temple burn was an elemental experience. Against my will, I had imagined my son’s cremation, and now I watched as our words and images of him went up in flames. Burning Man offers a place where we can return, however briefly, to our origins as human beings, enthralled by the power of fire to destroy but also by its beauty.
From the moment we learned of Kevin’s death, the horrible truth that we had lost him has always been with us, but we also know that truth is our ally. Amid all the false information and bureaucratic errors surrounding his death, the truth about who Kevin was and how he lived his life remains. It is truth that we struggle with every day and every hour, the truth that he is gone. But the knowledge that his was a life well lived and that the impact of his life remains in the hearts and minds of the people who knew and loved him—these are the truths that help us live another day.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
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