The Fear of Canonization

There is this idea that the best way to kill a revolutionary ideal is to idolize their leader, converting them into harmless icons that can be put upon a pedestal. How many Che Guevara t-shirts are there? How many Martin Luther King Jr Boulevards? 

I think in some twisted way this happens to us as well. When we lose someone, when they disappear from our lives, our nostalgia grips us and takes hold and their memory is forever unblemished and held above. I fear this will happen to you too, now that you're gone. 

Time is a skilled curator; it removes the clutter, the contradictions. Sanding down rough edges and polishing fragments of a friendship into relics. Soon I will no longer remember the things that irritated me, the arguments and pettines, the ways we failed to understand one another. Instead only the glow around them. 

Reverence is often a gentler form of forgetting. I will build a statue where a person once stood. I will elevate you so high above me that I can no longer see you clearly. A fog of immaculate memory will cover all your flaws and absences. The reality of you will become an impossible idol, that asks nothing of me but worship.

Perhaps that is the final cruelty of loss: not that people pass, but that they remain only in forms that we cannot talk to. They cannot disappoint us, cannot contradict our stories about them, cannot step down from the pedestal we have built. We call it remembrance, but often it is a kind of canonization.

I saw The Sheep Detectives recently, and in it the sheep possess a strange power to forget—an unimaginable ability to cast memory aside in exchange for bliss. Is that a better fate than creating a forgery of you in my life? A Chaplain once told me that although his father died thirty years ago, he still feels him at his ear, arguing and responding with his every move. Is that better? 

I don't want the sheep's life. I want you in my ear, telling me I've done wrong. I loved someone who could change, fail, surprise me, and leave. And if I turn you into a saint now, then I will have lost you twice.