Jonah's Memorial Service

Jonah's memorial service was an Indian Shaker service. Because my friend Jeff is married to Louise, Jonah's mother, and because I was a part of their wedding, I have worshipped at an Indian Shaker service before. The combination of Indian chanting, candles, bells, singing, and worshipers crossing themselves created the holy feeling of sending Jonah on a trail to the Great Creator.

I had never heard much about Jonah's talents and gifts until tonight. Jonah was a graffiti artist and several of his fellow artists were present, young men who snuck around at night with Jonah and helped him bring form and color to bare walls. I realize his work was not welcome in some quarters. I realize his work was not appreciated in some quarters. I realize that he had to have fellow artists on lookout for him so that he could sneak into shadows when the police came around to where he was doing is work/vandalism.

Pictures of his work were available at a table at the long house. His work was bright, vivid, full of vitality. Most of the times I'd seen Jonah at Jeff's house he rarely spoke. He seemed lethargic, apathetic. But he had a passion for color, for spray paint. I was happy to hear one person after another bear witness to how much this art meant to Jonah. Knowing about this passion inspired me to see Jonah differently than I ever had before.

Jonah lived an active night life. He lived a life at night near rivers and on the sly on the streets of Eugene. Listening to his street/night friends speak about their love for Jonah illuminated how he had a band of brothers who lived lives full of adventure, escapades, and brushes with the law. I realized, more than I ever had before, that Jonah had fellowship with a lot of friends and that they lived on a particular edge of Eugene society that rolled on the brink of law breaking and was held together by a high regard for and a deep loyalty to one another.

Grief engulfed Jonah's mother Louise. As tradition dictated, she had cut her hair very short. Throughout the dinner preceding the service she buried her face in the shoulder of one family member, one friend after another. Behind her sunglasses and with her hair shorn and with her diabetic shaking, Louise seemed years and years older than she is. Grief aged her shockingly. Her wailing, as friend after friend and family member after family member came to comfort her, filled the longhouse to overflowing. I've never heard pain so mournfully expressed.

When, after the formal Shaker ceremony, she addressed the congregation, it was as if Louise visited us from a higher plane of reality, with prophetic insight about the deep value of the Indian traditions she had learned as a child and had passed on to her children. She told the youth present to slow down. She wailed with confusion about the fact that her husband had died shortly after his twenty-ninth birthday and now the same had happened to Jonah. The meaning of this coincidence was lost on her. It was lost on all of us. It was eerie and grievous. It is unjust.

I know little to nothing about Indian traditions: last night we shared a generous buffet dinner; friends filed to the front one by one to shake Louise's older son David's hand and tell us about Jonah; the Shaker ceremony followed; the family gave each of us a gift; Louise spoke; David sang a prayer.

I thought the entire night, the entire experience of death seemed profoundly familiar to the gathered friends and family of Louise. Too familiar.