Burial Vessels

12″ x 6″x 6″

A loved one requested that I sculpt funeral urns for herself and her husband. I declined. How could I do that for loved ones? It seemed macabre. Then, as fortune would have it, I read Richard Dawkins’ haunting thought. “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.” He referred to the sobering realization that the unlucky have never been born.

“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”

His words left me with a lingering sense of wonder. They also freed me to work on the vessels that will at some future time hold the remains of loved ones. The pieces took months to make. What at first seemed macabre, turned into an activity that provided extended moments to reflect on the gift of loving relationships.