*Disclaimer: This post has a couple photos that neither Cassie or I would be very proud of sharing. In part due to a lack of good ones. Hope you enjoy!*
My Little Dirtbag
Cassie had a way of making people smile. She reveled in her quirks and she flaunted her weirdness. That made Halloween her time to shine. It’s as if she thought to herself, “What costume could I wear, that no one else ever would?” In highschool, she and her friends dressed as the cast from Up!, replete with one dressed as boy scout, one dressed as a house, and Cassie dressed as Carl, the old man. Our sophomore year of college, Cassie dressed as a pumpkin—just an orange plastic bag with crumpled up paper to fill it out. Last year, she dressed as… a bag of dirt.
Surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly), she rocked every one of those outfits. But she always had plans for more. As far as I know, there were two costumes she really wanted to wear for Halloween: 1) Sonny and Cher (except I would have to be Cher and she would be Sonny) and 2) this hotdog outfit she found at Target.
So when a costume party came around this year, I decided to use it as an opportunity to live out one of her/our dreams. I decided against the hotdog (much to your disappointment I’m sure).
The Sonny Side of Life
I decided to dress up as Sonny Bono. I ran into a little problem though. I didn’t decide on the outfit until a couple days before the party, and no one sold a Sonny Bono/Hippie Rockstar costume for anything less than $40. There was one from Walmart, but it wasn’t available in store and I didn’t have time to wait on a package to arrive. I had to make it from scratch.
So I was off to the charity shops! I wasn’t surprised when there weren’t any bell bottoms on the racks of Goodwill or Salvation Army. But luckily I know how to sew. So I picked out a pair of cheap pants that kinda fit, a nice but large floral button-up, and a costume-wig that appeared to be lightly used. The pants needed to be brought in and flared out at the ankles. The shirt provided the extra material to add to the pants. The wig needed a haircut.
For as much trouble as I had getting my sewing machine working (and then my friend’s sewing machine once I broke the only needle for mine), and for as little amount of time I spent actually working on the pants, and for the few bucks I spent, I think I did a decent job of the costume.
The whole thing was a little bit of a stretch without having a Cher to partner with. Not to mention, the costume party was primarily for my church’s youth group. A good number of people got and loved the costume—except they were the parents dropping off the youth, and none of the people actually at the party. I didn’t have high expectations though.
Masks
I have no clue how to tie in any of this back to my faith. But with the context of dressing up, it seems like an appropriate time to discuss the masks we wear when grieving. It’s a common enough metaphor to explain away everyone’s “fakeness”. And it is the truth to a large degree—nobody’s life is perfect, so we wear masks to cover up our cracks and broken parts.
That’s the first purpose for wearing a mask: to cover up shame. Just as Adam and Eve covered up their nakedness with fig leaves and hid among trees after the story of their first sin. It is shame that we try to hide.
And you might ask, “What do people who are grieving have to be ashamed of?” I think C.S. Lewis, in his journal following his wife’s death, described it best:
An odd by-product of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don’t. Some funk it altogether. R. has been avoiding me for a week. I like best the well brought-up young men, almost boys, who walk up to me as if I were a dentist, turn very red, get it over, and then edge away to the bar as quickly as they decently can. Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.
To some I’m worse than an embarrassment. I am a death’s head. Whenever I meet a happily married pair I can feel them both thinking. ‘One or other of us must some day be as he is now.’
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
It’s the shame of feeling like an emotional burden. Just like no one goes to a funeral with balloons, no one would go to another’s birthday party and break down in tears. The shame comes from those feelings—feeling like being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It seems embarrassing to be surrounded by people who are happy and then feel sad. It is embarrassing to join friends who are celebrating milestones in their relationships, and then feel the urge to cry as I miss Cassie. So I try to cover it up sometimes.
My verdict on these masks? I think they’re okay. Many will disagree. Some will say I shouldn’t be embarrassed and I should just feel how I feel, others be damned. Some will say that if being around other people makes me sad than I just shouldn’t put myself in those situations. But we have to remember that there is another side to masks: to have fun.
Halloween couldn’t exemplify that any better. Halloween costumes let us show people the things that we aspire to be—happy, wild, unburdened by certain realities. We choose characters that we think we could act out. Sometimes we don’t feel like the heroes we really are, so one day a year we have an excuse to put on a cape and remind people that we can be super too. And more than that, we get to party and eat candy with a ton of people for no particularly good reason.
In my thoughts, I am genuinely glad for my friends as they reach their dreams and keep moving on to better things. If my emotions don’t match my thoughts (which happens 90% of the time), then I’ll put on a smile and celebrate too. It feels good to smile. It feels good to laugh. It is nice to not feel like a big bag of crazy who cries in the grocery line making the cashier uncomfortable. And it feels good to inspire joy or confidence in other people. I might not want to smile some days, but if I can buck-up and push through a day, finding something to be happy about, then I feel like I accomplished something. Yes, even if it is forced. If I can use a mask to rejoice with the people who are rejoicing like I want to, and not like I feel, then I will feel accomplished.
I still take the mask off with a good number of my friends. It’s not a “fake-it-till-you-make-it” kinda deal. I am still open and honest with a lot of people close to me. And they would testify that I more or less schedule in a break-down with them on a weekly basis.
Long story short, masks are good sometimes. Adam and Eve used fig leaves to cover their shame, and God redeemed their situation by providing a covering of his own—He didn’t tell them they were wrong for feeling ashamed, nor did he make them constantly expose the rawest parts of themselves. The story goes that our God gave them another cover, to make them feel they can endure the world, while making sure they owned up to the underlying problem, both to him and to each other.
It’s okay to wear a cape and mask on Halloween. It’s not okay to wear them to work and at home every day. There’s a time and place for everything. I think facades are no exception, especially if they make you feel stronger.
