To Remember

It’s been a week of mystery on the world stage, as a plane carrying 239 passengers disappeared literally into mid-air. As of Thursday, when I completed this column, no trace of the plane, its black box, or its passengers has been found. Did it veer off course, did it attempt to turn back, or did its pilot actually “land” on the water and the plane sink to the floor of the South China Sea? No one knows.

A bit closer to home, a mummified body, believed to be that of Pia Farrenkopf, was found in the garage of her Pontiac, Michigan home. As best as can be determined, she has been dead since 2008. Since she had traveled quite a bit, neighbors thought perhaps she had gone to Germany, and kept the grass cut at her home, while her bills were automatically paid from her checking account until it ran dry. That’s what ultimately brought authorities to her foreclosed home, where they made the unexpected discovery of Ms. Farrenkopf.

A third story, aptly titled “Grave Science,” told of the work of JPAC, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command. This military operation identifies the remains of American military personnel found in sites around the world. According to reporters Kelly McEvers and Megan McCloskey, “More than 83,000 people are classified as missing in action or prisoners of war from World War II and the Vietnam and Korean conflicts. The Pentagon deems 45,000 of those ‘recoverable.’ JPAC is charged with finding and identifying them.” In 2013, the remains of 60 people were identified, at the cost of one hundred million dollars. Let me write out the zeroes: $1,000,000,000.00. That’s how much per successful identification? You do the math, as I couldn’t figure out how to put the line over the repeating 6’s.

Now before you question my patriotism or concern for our deceased veterans, I wore a Viet Nam era POW bracelet until it broke in two, and its pieces still sit in my jewelry box. Major John Held encircled my adolescent wrist, and I prayed for his return, for his family, and for those still at war. And as I’ve watch the POW-MIA flag flying from our neighbor’s flagpole, I’m  grateful that we still remember. But how much is enough?

These juxtaposed stories, connected as they are by the specter of death, raise questions that are tough to wrestle with. What is the value of life? Of identifying remains? When do we move on? How do we seek – and find – closure? How will we be remembered? How do we live in a way that someone will miss us when we’re gone? Writer Annie Dillard describes our existential probing like this: “We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here.  Then we can at least wail the right questions into the swaddling band of darkness.”

Author Frederick Buechner provides us with additional perspective on this, as he writes of the need “to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.”

Even though seemingly forgotten in death as in life, we remember Pia and her kindred sisters and brothers in the anonymity of their lives and deaths.

Even when the sky over Malaysia is vacant, and the whole world asks, “Where is Malaysia Airlines Flight 370,” the cell phone will keep ringing, as those who have loved will hope against hope, remembering.

And even when the telegram grows brittle and the broken POW bracelet gathers dust, we pause to remember fathers and sons, brothers and sisters who died alone, far from home.

As Isabel Allende explained in Eva Luna, “There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them. If you can remember me, I will be with you always.”