Where do you go after The End?

I went to a fabulous free concert last Saturday night. The all volunteer LGBT+ ensemble, BandTogether, was giving the last concert of its 26th season. The theme of the concert was Movie Time, and we got to hear music from movies as diverse as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Gone with the Wind, and Platoon by composers as varied as John Williams, Elmer Bernstein, and Samuel Barber. The band has grown from 10 members to 100 in the last 25 years. And to make it even more amazing, there are two equally talented and unique conductors, Gary Reynolds, who founded the group, and Jeff Girard, who joined a year later. Their concerts are held in the 560 Music Center in University City, now run by Washington University. The Art Deco structure was built in 1930 as the Shaare Emeth Temple, and is a rich environment for the concerts.

Making it to this concert was a big deal for me. My husband, Stephen and I had been going to their concerts since the late 1990s, though we stopped going a few years ago with Stephen’s relentlessly encroaching disabilities. I’m trying to pull the pieces of my life together again after this beloved spouse/soulmate of nearly 4o years died in February of this year. Just last week we had a memorial mass for Stephen at Trinity Episcopal Church in St. Louis, and interred his ashes into the memorial garden there, just as my ashes will be interred there in a few years. I loved my life with Stephen, even when it got hard, and I became his full time caretaker. Our life together had become the rock on which my living was built. But after two months of crying, talking, reflecting, begging and praying, I have concluded that nothing is going to bring that life back. Stephen is still in my heart, but Stephen is gone, and I believe he is truly resting in peace. And so in the past few weeks, I have explored taking brief junkets to the Missouri Botanical Gardens and the St. Louis Art Museum. But this BandTogether concert was the first event that I decided to go to.

The End as Far as We Know, Part 3

I’ve been sharing with you my reflections during my grieving the loss of my spouse, Stephen Nichols, and particularly my quest to better understand my loving relationship with Stephen now that he has died. I’ve been helped through this process by the thinking of David Lightman, the host of a three-part series recently presented on PBS, Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science. I reported on and reflected on the first two episodes of this series, but I’m not going to report on the third one. While Lightman doesn’t really find an answer to his profound questions about consciousness and meaning, he does succeed in sketching out an expansive picture of how this inquiry might continue to proceed if it is to have a solid footing in established scientific inquiry. He concludes by reminding us that as human beings, we are connected to the Universe. He gets down on his knees in the grass with a magnifying glass and becomes engrossed in the plant and insect life that he finds there. That is one thing we can always do: carefully examine and connect with whatever is in our surroundings. However, as good and informative as Lightman’s inquiry has been, and as bright and informed as he and his several interviewees are, it seems to me that Lightman has missed the mark in several ways.