Afterword: Post 6: Service

My friend and teacher, Charlie Robert Silano, died on May 23rd, 2011, outside in his hammock, on a warm afternoon.

We had of course, been expecting it, and yet it was a surprise. He had been cycling through good days and bad days, crises and rallies, with no discernible pattern or rhythm, for weeks. It had seemed at first that he couldn't survive another day, and then he could and did and then when he finally didn't it was a shock because there was nothing different about that last bad day than all the others.

I wasn't on campus that day, had not been, actually, for a few days. I found out an hour or so after the fact when Allen sent out a group text alert--"he's gone."

June saw me check my phone and didn't need to ask what the text said. She took me in her arms.

A few hours later, Allen sent around a more carefully thought-out message, sharing what information he had about Charlie's last days and hours, and inviting all who wanted to come to a meeting to discuss next steps.

Charlie himself had left no instructions as to funeral services and so forth, insisting "I'm too busy still living to bother with figuring out what you all should do after I am dead." He had not needed to tell us that his body could not be embalmed or incinerated using fossil fuels or sealed into an expensive, rot-proof sarcophagus, or anything else of that nature. We'd all been his students long enough to be as offended by such prospects as he was. But there are laws that more or less require expensive and environmentally destructive funeral practices, and so we not only needed to plan a meaningful farewell service but also to figure out how to break the law on his behalf.

I will tell you what we did, but not how we arranged to do it. I do disguise our identities in these stories, but there are limits to what I can hide and precautions that I must continue to take.

A few days after his death, a group of us gathered in a partitioned-off section of the Martial Arts Studio with Charlie's corpse, which was already starting to smell faintly of rot. There were six of us, all men--me, Rick, Steve, Breathwalker (a former student and ally whom I had only recently met), and two members of Charlie's family--all met to prepare his body. Allen was there, too, holding space for us, wordlessly paying attention.

We stripped and washed the body, dried it, and then wrapped it, confronting the physicality of his illness and death in the most direct, uncomfortable way possible, confronting reality, as he would have wanted. We took our time. There were moments in that process that the body seemed very much to be Charlie. Seeing him naked and ruined hurt, and we held his hands, touched his face. There were moments when what we worked with was very much an object, an animal corpse, and we worked efficiently, with faint disgust or detachment. Allen watched all the moments without comment, accepting the unendurable, his existence its own continued teaching.

In what did we wrap the body? Layers of wax-infused cloth, to begin with, then clean cloth, like a mummy, though we left the face, hands, and feet bare, and a plain white t-shirt. The layers replaced some of his lost muscular bulk, made him look a little more normal, but that's not why we did it--we left his exposed skin unadorned, waxy-looking, his face frozen in a somewhat unnatural expression, though we did close his eyes. We were making of him a fire-starter.

We intended to cremate the body, but to do it ourselves, in a bonfire, and human flesh has way too much water to burn easily.

Once we had him wrapped, we placed him on a clean, white sheet on a hand-made stretcher and placed another sheet over him, tucking it around him as though he were in bed, leaving his arms, his head, and his feet free.

The six of us lifted the stretcher--it had six, not four, handles--and stood wit our burden by the door, the back door that led right outside. Allen went to the door and knocked on it. Karen opened it from the outside. She wore her samurai sword and her ceremonial knife.

"We are ready," Allen said, formally. "We request a guard."

"Come. We will guard you," she replied, and stepped to the side.

We came out, awkwardly negotiating the narrow door and then walking formally, Allen processing at our right, Karen at our left. Our guard consisted of women, each of them carrying a staff of the sort used in one form of Japanese martial art (a weapon traditionally used there by women), except for Karen and her sword. Sarah and Charlie's sister marched before us. We were flanked by Nora and Raven G., and four more women fell in behind us. Together we processed around the building to the part of the Central Field where we hold the Burning Man Ceremony and where the soil is already scorched and wouldn't mind being scorched again. There, the rest of the extended school community awaited us besides a massive pile of kindling and wood and a row of recently-acquired low cast-iron tables of the kind used for garden furniture.

We laid Charlie's body on the row of tables and held a kind of viewing there for an hour or so. Then we prepared the bonfire.

We faced a serious logistical problem, here, for Charlie's friends and family and admirers extended well beyond the campus community and included people who could not be trusted to know the laws we were breaking. We had considered having a private cremation followed by a separate memorial, but somehow that did not seem right. Instead, we opted for something far more difficult and dangerous, holding a public cremation but not allowing the public to know what it was.

We covered Charlie's body, including is face, with another sheet. I expected that to be very hard--the last moment I would ever see his face--but it wasn't his anymore and I was glad to be able to stop resolutely confronting it. Then we laid fuel under the tables, so the flames would come up through the iron and claim the body. Then we covered all of it with a layer of wet plywood, then laid bundles of sticks over top--there were to be two fires, one under the body, claiming it, and the other above it, with the plywood in the middle. We would feed both, adding more plywood as needed, maintaining a kind of temporary oven until the object cooking inside it could be rendered unidentifiable. We even added bundles of sage and other aromatics to disguise and complicate the scent of burning flesh.

The strangers arrived at dusk, hundreds of them, in time to see the fires lit without knowing what they burned.

We had set up a low stage and a small sound system, and we circulated sign-up sheets for anyone who wanted to speak or perform. Once night had settled and the fire was burning brightly, Allen went first, sitting on the stage on a simple stool, and speaking calmly, intellectually, in his capacity as a psychologist, a philosopher, and a minister of sorts--he welcomed everyone, explained how the memorial would go, invited everyone to watch the performances or wander around campus, socialize, or sleep as they liked, and then he explained an idea of his that everything has an end and a beginning in both space and time. He held up one of those glitter wand things, an item reliably visible in the glow of the bonfire and the tiki-torches surrounding the stage, and said "we can see that this wand has two ends, and that after its ends it is not there--and yet the wand clearly exists. If the end of a wand in space does not invalidate or cast doubt on its existence, why should the end of a man in time invalidate or cast doubt on his?"

Then he paused and drew a ragged breath.

"I really believe that," he said, "and the idea is comforting to me, far more comforting than ideas about afterlives that seem so resonant to others but that fundamentally do not work for me. I offer it for anyone else who find themselves emotionally ill-prepared to believe what their intellects cannot accept--and yet, intellect itself only goes so far. I have no reason, no dogma, no credo to support it, but I find I cannot believe that my friend is really gone."

His voice suddenly broke.

"Charlie!" he called, looking out above our heads and into the night, "where are you? Do you see us gathered here, do you know that we all love you?" And the firelight shone on the tears on his face.

It is that moment that embodies for me, more than any other, the essence of being a master, of being of the Six--at no time is Allen ever purely professional, in the sense used in the outside world--he never pretends not to be a human being for the sake of his job, and if he needs to contradict himself, to admit to doubt, to weep, he does so. And yet even at his most personal moments he never leaves behind his role. That night he wept in public not because he could not help it, though I believe that was true also, but in order to role-model grief, in order to give us permission to do the same.

He sat a moment, weeping quietly, and then without another word left the stage. Joy read the name of the next person on the list.

The bonfire and the performances continued all night--our intention was to go from sundown to sunrise. I don't remember them all, and I don't intend to describe all of those I do remember. I did not go up myself, though I was considering it, and had my tin whistle in my pocket just in case, but it didn't feel right. Instead I watched the others and at times I mingled with the crowd, talking to the others, finding out who had come. His entire extended family seemed to be present, as were many former students, and probably the majority of those who wear the Green Ring, maybe sixty of us--some lived too far away to attend, and others have died, but those who could come did.

There were others, too, people who knew Charlie from the classes he taught at the community college, people who had read his writing, people from the AA groups he'd attended. Some of the eulogies were unintentionally funny as people who knew Charlie from one area of his life made clear they knew nothing about areas. Some made jokes about alcohol because they didn't know Charlie was in AA, and some AA members peppered their speech with 12-step truisms, apparently unaware that many in the audience wouldn't understand--none broke Charlie's anonymity openly, meaning that people who didn't get the references simply ended up confused.

Some people just delivered straight eulogies. Others sang or danced. Some did both. Allen came up on stage a second time about an hour into the event and brought his guitar. Without introduction or comment, he sang and played "The Boxer," a song I'd never paid much attention to before but have always loved since, honoring, perhaps, a time in Charlie's life and an aspect of his personality that most of us never saw, the scrappy, worse-for-wear, yet indomitable fighter.

Hours later, Sarah (the farm manager, not Steve's wife) took the stage. She, as I've said, was devoted to Charlie and had helped with his care in his last week or so. She sang "The Garden," a hymn I have heard at other funerals, but never so appropriately, since no one else found God so deeply in gardens.

And he walks with me and he talks with me
And he tells me I am his own.
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.

As she sang, I noticed Kit standing near the stage, yearning towards it somehow. She wanted, I'm sure, to join Sarah and sing. I thought of what I'd learned the day I'd overheard her beg Charlie for forgiveness, and I knew why she wanted to get onstage and why she didn't go.

Sarah surely meant the song in its obvious way, but there is another, vaguely blasphemous way to read the words--that the "me" in the song was not Charlie but Sarah, walking in the garden not with God, or not especially with God, but with Charlie.

Either way, there was something solitary, something that not widely shared, something Kit, anyway, could not have. As Sarah came down off the stage, she and Kit embraced and held each other for a long time.

As the hours wore towards dawn the people tending the fire judged it time to stop replenishing the plywood and let the inner and outer fires merge. They kept refueling the outer fire for a while and then let it begin to burn down. I had returned from mingling to watch the end of the fire and to see the final performances before an audience much dwindled by the need for rest and sleep.

Dawn was starting to color the sky but the air still seemed dark when Steve Bees took the stage to sing, unaccompanied, "Bridge over Troubled Water."

He had, by that point, become a very accomplished singer, if not quite to the level of Art Garfunkel, but his performance of that song on that night pulled him out beyond himself, articulating a promise he had been living, the essence of his own mastery, for the whole world--but for Charlie specifically as well.

Towards the end, Charlie had needed help, first with keeping track of his meds and fetching things, cleaning things, self-care details he wasn't always strong enough for, then help with more basic things when he could not get get out of his hammock for days, when he couldn't bring himself to eat. Mostly he sought help from women. Charlie was not what I'd call sexist--he respected his female colleagues as his equals and supported his female students as fully as his male ones--but he was somewhat traditionalist in certain ways. I think he believed that nurturing is a woman's role, not a man's, and he was not comfortable being looked after by men. He relied on Nora, on his sister, Mary, on Sarah, and on Joy, and did his best to keep men from knowing how weak he really was. And yet, there were things he needed a man for, both for bodily strength and for propriety--and he chose Steve Bees.

Please go watch a performance of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" so you can get a sense of what this was like, how the song grows gradually, building to a crescendo, a promise, to be there in the face of difficulty, selflessly.

And when the song was over Steve stumbled and his face went slack a moment as the thing that had song through him let go. He coughed a little, taking a little while to get his bearings again, and the growing light of dawn shone on the lenses of his glasses.

The bonfire behind him was dying down. There was no sign that there had ever been a body among the ashes.