Stories monuments tell

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I’m home again after a two-week “highlights” tour of Britain with friend Eunice Sloan, and reflecting now on personal highlights – Evensong at Westminster Abbey, for one, Stonehenge, for two, and so on and on. I won’t bore you with a list but want to share a few thoughts instead about public monuments, erected for commemoration, which become for tourists a kind of stand-in for whole swaths of history and meaning.

Ever since taking a course about memory and commemoration for my history degree, I’ve been intrigued by the art of monuments. They both reflect and shape public memory; they’re never entirely neutral. (Think, for example, of the religious imagery wrapped into many memorials of the First World War.)

Some statues of persons we saw on the trip did the work of reminder, of a “big” person but also everything associated with that life, as with the figure of Churchill across from the Parliament, which was being polished and waxed the day we viewed him, or a possible likeness of William Shakespeare in Stratford on Avon, where I just barely managed to squeeze in a photo before yet another tourist rushed forward to pose beside him as if to imbibe his genius or signal they’d had to study one of his plays in high school.

In the case of the Beatles, I couldn’t resist rushing in either, to claim a connection I suppose, however tenuous. The monument to Prince Albert in Kensington Gardens seemed complicated, inaccessible, layered – to my mind – with the sentimentality and obsessive ornamentation we associate with Victorian attitudes to grief.

Two monuments, each involving two men, told me stories that have been playing in my mind, as stories do.

One was at Trafalgar Square in London, where the fourth plinth brings contemporary art to the public square. A new piece called “Antelope” had been unveiled just days earlier. It shows two men, backs to one another, one considerably larger than the other.

Here’s the description from a London press release:

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Samson Kambalu’s bronze resin sculpture restages a photograph of Baptist preacher and pan-Africanist John Chilembwe and European missionary John Chorley, taken in 1914 in Nyasayland (now Malawi) at the opening of Chilembwe’s new Baptist church.

Chilembwe is wearing a hat, defying the colonial rule that forbade Africans from wearing hats in front of white people, and is almost twice the size of Chorley. By increasing his scale, the artist is elevating Chilembwe and his story, revealing the hidden narratives of underrepresented peoples in the history of the British Empire in Africa, and beyond.

John Chilembwe was a Baptist pastor and educator who led an uprising in 1915 against British colonial rule in Nyasaland triggered by the mistreatment of refugees from Mozambique and the conscription to fight German troops during WWI. He was killed and his church destroyed by the colonial police. 

It’s a powerful piece, not particularly subtle about its anti-colonialist message, but inspiring and necessary in our time. I’m glad I got to see it.

I’m also glad I got to see a relatively recent sculpture on the Isle of Man which celebrates the achievements of two British mountaineering “legends,” John Mackenzie and Norman Collie, who climbed together in the Cuillin mountains of Scotland for many years, making various discoveries in the terrain and developing climbing techniques. Their story as told us on the tour related the large difference in class between scientist/professor Mackenzie and crofter/guide Collie, and perhaps it could be said that the way the men are posed (Mackenzie standing) pronounces on that, but we were also told about a friendship so deep they were buried beside each other. What speaks to me here is not their relative positions as much as the way each gazes upward in the same direction, to the mountains, as if to say it was the intensity of that shared love that united them.

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photo: Eunice Sloan

The progression of grief

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Walking this morning, I was thinking about grief, how it progresses through time and changes.

When my husband Helmut died in February 2021, I kept a kind of visual journal of grief, for even though I generally traffic in words, that activity helped me represent what I was feeling. For example, on a day in which I’d been busy with a variety of activities and then, afterwards, found myself overwhelmed with aloneness, though not crying, I expressed it as my upper body full of tears. IMG_1087

Eventually, however, the 98-page sketchbook was full, and by then it was November and less was “new” in the experience of grief. The first Christmas passed, and more crucially for me, New Year’s, which I approached with dread because the year in which he had still been alive would then be finished. The first anniversary of his death came and passed as well, which also signalled changes.

For an entire year I had found myself unable to move his keys from the ledge where they had always waited when not in use, but now, finally, I hung them on a hook under my jacket, as a spare set in case of need. Also — and I’m not sure why — I began after a year to sleep on “his” side of the bed. (Of course, alone in a queen bed one can push into the middle or all over as much as one wants, with no one pushing back, but I’m talking about the side of getting in and out.)

People with experience of grief told me the second year could be harder than the first. I don’t know if harder is the word for me, but certainly there are new challenges and questions. There’s a brutal finality that still confronts me, which no “magical thinking” of keys or leaving his side of the bed open could dissuade, nor moving keys or switching sides accomplish either, a finality that seems the more brutal because of how persistent is the disbelief around the truth that this is how it is. The challenges are the questions involved in shaping a new existence in the face of it: Is there anyone who truly needs me now? Who is witness to my life? Since I’m still here, what should I be doing with this time? 

If I were to sum up the first year visually, it might be thick vertical lines — lines of grief, say in purple, alternating with thick lines, say in green, of going on, as in coping and adapting. This, then this, then this. To sum the place that time has taken me now, I would use horizontal lines. Layers. Simultaneous. The most obvious layer perhaps what my sister, also a widow, meant when she said “you get used to it.” Doing the things of each day. There’s a solid layer of joy as well. As in my walk today, following a trail in a ditch and comprehending the subtle but rich colours of autumn grasses — cream, yellow, white, brown. As in fears overcome, and some upcoming travel to anticipate. As in my children, grandchildren, friends. As in the youngest grandchild, who, as babies do, delights me with his visible curiosity and cheerfulness. Another layer I call quest, short for the questions mentioned above. And always a layer of memories and missing, solidly in the mix though not dominating or excluding the rest of life as much as earlier.

walking a trail in a ditch
my youngest grandchild

Concern and influence

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While I was picking blackberries on my way home from Tsawwassen Commons, a man on a bicycle passed me on the path and exclaimed, “You’re stealing from the birds!” He sounded quite serious, though he must have been joking because there are thousands and thousands of blackberries on those bushes. I called back cheerfully, “I don’t think so!” He was too far down the path for me to say, instead, “The birds get the best ones — the ones out of reach!” or “These crazy thorn-covered branches protect their own!” As happens frequently, afterwards I think of better things I might have said.

I ambled along the trail and filled up the yogurt container I carry in my little backpack since there are blackberry bushes bursting with berries in many of the places I happen to walk, but after I’d mulled a more clever answer to the bicycle man, I was thinking about whether to respond further to certain situations of which I’m aware — situations of harm done and subsequent pain — and if I did, how? I was thinking of a pastor friend’s blog post about his awful experience with denominational authorities, and authorities in the same denomination recently censoring an anthology of women’s stories I edited, and the collapse of a beloved congregation with grief in its wake, and it seemed something further must be done about these situations, though not regarding the beliefs involved as much as the behaviour contained within them. In a panic to control belief, I thought, all manner of bad actions had been done, had been justified, and were sliding into the past now without accountability.

…thinking about whether to respond further… and if I did, how?

Many years ago, when it was the wisdom-book of the day, I read Steven Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. One of his insights, which continues to help me, was the relationship of concern and influence. Covey pictured our concerns as a circle. Inside that circle is a smaller circle labelled influence. In other words, my concerns are often much bigger than my influence upon those concerns. What I take from this insight/diagram is to look at my concerns and, in my inevitable desire to effect some change, consider carefully what influence I can possibly, realistically, bring to them.

So as I was filling up my container, trying not to get snagged by out-reaching branches, which I swear leap forward if one is anywhere in close proximity, I wondered how much influence I had left, if any. I’d spoken up in several ways in the above scenarios and also worked on a small committee that organized a petition for redress for the pastor friend, which unfortunately yielded little besides pieties and excuses. Was there any point, I wondered, in telling a story much on my mind these days — the story of the time when I worked at the denominational magazine in 2004 and all the staff were women and a leader friend told us of a recent Board of Faith and Life meeting in which a board member unleashed a rant about us, using the worst labels he could think of, it seemed, without quite calling us Beelzebub? We laughed it off and went back to work but what hurt was the stunned silence he told us had followed, no one speaking up in our defence, the chair then carrying on with the meeting.

The story had a happy ending, however, because some weeks later our friend, perhaps bothered in retrospect by his own silence, told us he’d rallied his fellow board members and they’d given the ranter an ultimatum: withdraw the remarks or resign. Apparently said ranter did the former, and while it’s possible he didn’t change his mind about us, a line about charitable behaviour had been established and our friend and his colleagues had used their influence to establish it.

…a line about charitable behaviour had been established, and our friend and his colleagues had used their influence to establish it. 

Would there be any point indeed, I wondered, to tell such a story? The story, in essence, seems a model and a plea to those who have influence where I have none, folks like pastors and seminary professors and colleagues of the denomination’s pinnacle leaders, who, as far as I know, though I don’t know for certain, have been mostly silent on these matters. Was there any hope of persuading them to prioritize behaviour, of persuading them that the health of their denomination is surely their concern, of pleading that they rally and declare that these harming actions must be withdrawn or somehow addressed or we no longer have confidence in the leaders responsible?

I reached home, and still had no answer about whether I had a wee edge of influence left to touch my concerns or rouse the influence of others or whether a simple story and plea would be like shouting after a bicycle man already out of earshot. I saw the half-finished jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table and thought of the enjoyable slow rhythm required for its completion; the patience of many pieces and a steady process of finding the one by one. Maybe, I thought, it’s a puzzle piece I’ll place when I find the spot it fits.

Or maybe I’ve already placed it.