Damien Le Guay: “A special All Saints Day”.

Damien Le Guay is a philosopher, he teaches end-of-life ethics, and is president of the National Funeral Ethics Committee.

Last published work:

41 spiritual hygiene exercises

This All Saints' Day 2020 will remain, as every year, the great moment of reconciliation between the living and their dead, when 35 million French people go to cemeteries to renew the dialogue with their ancestors, pay them homage, lay flowers (25 million flower pots and bouquets) to better weave post-mortem stories with new generations.

There is a permanence there, a sense of loyalty, a need to connect with our ancestors which escapes all analyzes of modern fluidity.

It is also necessary that the new constraints of sanitary protection, enacted and re-enacted (with the closure of churches from Monday) do not interfere too much with this essential annual meeting, this festival of cemeteries animated, for a week, by visits, prayers, thoughts, flowers, words.

In hospitals, many patients on the verge of death (covidae or not) were, this year, confined with a formal ban for relatives to see them one last time.

But this funeral migration will have a special tone this year.

For months we have seen, in many ways, numerous attacks on the attention we all should have for our dead, on the last care we owe them, on the rituals that help us to better leave them and to better to find us.

In hospitals, many patients on the verge of death (covidae or not) were, this year, confined with a formal ban for relatives to see them one last time.

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Then, for sanitary measures, once dead, they were put in a thick white plastic house of the most airtight.

The face could not be seen.

Families suffered as well as hospital staff.

As for the funeral ceremonies, reduced to the minimum portion (with funeral operators often confined to the minimum minimorum), they were at best confidential, at worst postponed until later.

We have even seen funeral directors say that it was obligatory to go through cremation alone - which was wrong - or not to want to lead the body inside churches.

There too, what pain for not being able to be there when it was essential, for not having held hands, not seeing one last time, not accompanying those who were essential to our lives to the cemetery.

Do we not say "

"!

It is necessary to be ignorant of many realities of mourning to have forgotten our imperative duties towards the dead

So when we have been forced to stand out of sight, doesn't the heart tell us that there is some kind of betrayal there?

So many abandonments, certainly justified by health constraints, but unjustifiable in the name of the community cohesion of the living with the dead!

What human damage, psychological shocks, emotional trauma, guilt for having, under constraints, abandoned at the end of life a father, a mother, a spouse!

We must be ignorant of many realities of mourning (with a scientific council devoid of philosophers, ethicists and psychologists ...) to have allowed all these human failings, to have forgotten our imperative duties with regard to the dead.

Macron-Créon did not hear the voices of the thousands of Antigone who cried in the desert - before it is true to soften his position in the face of the outcry.

This All Saints' Day 2020 will be a privileged moment to come to terms with all of this dormant suffering and all these suffering deaths.

And now psychologists, caregivers, companions, chaplains are seeing secondary traumatic effects, regrets that keep coming back, people who are inconsolable for having been "

" to the funeral.

They try to relieve a myriad of frumpy mourning, started on bad foundations, hampered from the start and seemingly unable to start - like so many broken records.

Some 100,000 people died during the lockdown.

How to manage all these anthropological short-circuits, and these tens of thousands of “

” or “

” (to use Marie-Frédérique Bacqué's expression)?

How to bring aid and assistance, help and benevolence towards these wounded invisible wounds, to these suffering bereaved who suffer from all these shortcomings - which are so many reproaches?

We are entitled to think that this All Saints' Day 2020 will be a privileged moment to come to terms with all this suffering in dormancy and all these suffering deaths.

Double reconciliation therefore.

Double pain.

Double mourning.

Double appeasement.

If the funeral was jostled, when it was not reduced to three times nothing, the "

" was too.

Let us insist a little on this second aspect of mourning.

The gestures and words of the rites have the task of giving substance to our emotions, to let them express themselves in order to better discharge them.

We have forgotten a little that the gestures and words of rites have the task of giving body to our emotions, to put them to music, to let them express themselves in order to better discharge them;

but that they are also there (Louis-vincent Thomas tells us) to appease the dead and let them find peace.

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By dint of insisting on the sole dimension of our personal grief in mourning, we put aside the conditions to be met to let the dead go.

He must take the boat, pay the boatman and reach the land of the dead.

So we have to take leave of the dead man as well as dismiss him, push him to somewhere else, so that he does not come back to haunt us and even accuse us of abandonment or mistreatment.

Psychoanalysts rightly insist on the guilt linked to the trauma of an irremediable loss of a human being who is the founder of what we have become.

And if to this unpayable debt of love is added, in 2020, an unconscious offense of "

", this annual meeting of All Saints' Day will have an even greater importance than in past years.

Three tasks seem more essential than ever: consolation, collective communion, reparation.

Consolation is therapy for the heart brought about by reunion.

We meet as a family with the deceased, around him, to better share, all together, the same affection at half mast.

And when shortcomings took place, noting them, sharing them, asking for forgiveness, puts on the path to less stormy mourning.

Collective communion establishes reconciliation with our ancestors.

We all have to mend our souls.

And our dead contribute to it as long as they are on the side of blessed presences - which is the work of mourning

The dead of yesterday, to join the world of the dead, will slowly take place in the great family of ancestors - all those who help us find our place for having passed on to us the torch of life.

And then, of course, for believers, this communion (which is a communion of saints for Christians) enables them to get in tune with those who benefit from celestial beatitude and are henceforth citizens of the divine homeland.

As for reparation, it is an incessant work of healing intimate wounds, wounds worn since childhood, wounds that remain forever to suffer from having been unloved.

The Jewish tradition insists on the duty of each one to contribute to the "

" to avoid the work of the negative and to make men more just for each other.

We all have to mend our souls.

And our dead contribute to it as long as they are on the side of the blessed presences - which is the work of mourning.

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May this All Saints' Day, more necessary than ever, help us all to live better in peace with ourselves and with our dead and to help, above all, those who have suffered this year from multiple funeral failures.

These can then put back into the flow of life all these covid funeral nodes, these persistent traumas.

For everyone else, we have the opportunity to resume the conversation in proximity to our dead and send them back to an even deeper sleep.

Happy All Saints Day to all.