A Memorial to Listening

Memorials to honor the departed are not supposed to be laboratories of learning. But learning is what I found myself doing the other night during a private memorial for a friend’s father.

The living room was a crowded garden of seated guests, with people overflowing from all sides. I decided to go around to the backyard where more people had gathered. From that vantage point, I could only see the backs of the speakers, but I had a direct view of the friends of the grieving who sat in somber attention.

Attention is the modus operandi of memorials, especially in an intimate space. I did not know the man whose life was being honored, but it didn’t matter. I was there for the same reason everyone else was– to bring comfort to those mourning, to confront as gently as possible the unforgiving, inevitable, final fact of life.

Looking at the many faces who were paying such close attention to the words of family members, what struck me was the attention level itself. The listening was unusually intense, regardless of who spoke or what was said. No one cheated a glance at their phone or whispered in a friend’s ear.

Maybe it’s silly to be surprised by such concentrated silence. A memorial is a moment of finality, a last chance to honor someone no longer with us. If we can’t pay maximum attention at such a dramatic time, when can we?

And yet, I couldn’t help wonder whether there was something to learn from the experience. I wondered whether it might be possible to bring a similar level of attention to other moments of our lives, other encounters.

After all, isn’t every moment final? Isn’t every encounter something we can never recapture? Perhaps, I thought, just as a life is final, and just as we honor that life with such care at its very end, maybe other moments of our lives are worthy of similar care.

I was thinking particularly of relationships, when we’re in conversation with a parent or child or sibling or friend or spouse or colleague or community member. Because these moments feel so plentiful, because we go through so many of them, there’s a tendency to treat them as such– as just another in a never-ending list.

What I felt at the memorial was the opposite. Not “just another” but “just one.” I felt singularity. The words we heard could only be spoken about that one person and only on that one night.

What happens, though, when the singularity is not as obvious? When it’s “just another” phone call with mother or lunch with a friend or Shabbat dinner with family? What happens during these everyday moments when listening is just as vital as the listening we do at a memorial?

I once heard a rabbi say that the deepest expression of love is to listen, to receive, because when we do that, we give to the other person the joy of giving, the joy of feeling needed.

That is what I learned the other night at the memorial. If only I could listen as well while people are still alive.