White Silence – Shorncliffe Beach, Moreton Bay, South East Queensland.
Sunday afternoon December 3, 2023.
In the days after Damien [Wamud] Kamholtz’s and Cameron Eaton’s funerals a friend suggested that a White Silence event might be be a positive grieving and healing ritual for family and friends and for those who didn’t make the 2 hour trip to Gympie for Damien’s farewell. Marissa Lindquist has been a regular participant in White Silence since 2012 and a Jugglers’ Board member. She knew Damien from White Silence and along with many others was deeply affected by his presence and untimely death. Would a White Silence ritual help family and friends?
In the book “Personal Grief Rituals” Paul Martin, [2023, Routledge] – grief counsellor and psychologst – unpacks grief and how some experience it, the path to healing and the impacts of temperament and family of origin parenting in that process. It is a book Damien recommended to me and, as he drew closer to his own death, found it too confronting to finish.
Martin in concerned in this book about the ineffectiveness of some funeral rituals to open some kind of healing grief process in a range of societies and cultures around the world, particularly in the USA. We could say that he would be unimpressed with the ineffectiveness of some funeral services and religious pastors in Australia in respect of grief and healing. Even the rush to move people from a chapel for the next funeral service at the local crematorium is indicative of something less than respectful of the grieving and the dead. However many many funeral services need to be scheduled, time for conversation and centering down should not be rushed at the place where the dead are finally farewelled.
Both funerals and following wakes – Damien’s and Cameron’s – were, in my view, affecting and positive spaces and times. They allowed for very strong emotions, deep grief and remembering lives of beauty and impact. From my experience of hosting and leading funerals and attending wakes, they were up there with the best. White Silence at Shorncliffe Queensland beach curated by Marissa with family and frends – in the presence of these two men – was a grief ritual I hoped would enable some degree of comfort through wordless silence, mark making and immersion in the sacred beauty of the space. I think it did that. At the end of the day we walked to the Full Moon Hotel and sat facing the twilight effect on Moreton Bay eating chips and drinking beers.
The cloud formation over the small inlet during our beach based canvas mark making seemed to spell out DAM[ien] or CAM[eron] before it disappeared on the wind. This appearance was not lost on us.
Martin’s book [ Personal Grief Rituals] suggests “creating unique expressions of loss and meaningul acts of mourning in clinical or private settings” was, I sensed with feedback and conversation , achieved for family and friends of both men. It was not a clinical setting in the strictest sense but one that was tailored to the White Silence schema, the knowledge of the men who had died and the families who had agreed to attend.
“Those who are let down by what culture offers can opt to play a more active role in their own journey through mourning. The individual can harness creativity and design personal grief rituals that meet specific needs and affirm what was unique about the relationship they had with the deceased. Personal grief can create activities through which the bereaved embody a more meaningful experession of what has been lost. They can be tailored to facilitate whichever feeling states require further venting. And they can help achieve absence-and-presence by countering whatever is impeding so that the bereaved can move forward while also maintaining a meaninful connection to those they still love. Lastly, the individual who takes the reins and guides themselves through mourning is more empowered for having articulated what the subjective experience of loss means to them, what it is they need in order to heal, and how to give oneself what they once depended upon culture to provide.” Martin, p75.
I am hopeful that what we curated on the beach on December 3 in some small way approached the vision of Martin’s to build on the funeral rituals and strengthen “absence-and-presence” for the grieving families and friends.
From Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Nostalgia”
Peter Breen December 18, 2023.
Peteskibreen's Blog 