Last week, I attended a memorial service for a student who recently passed away. I arrived early, planning to take a seat and pay my respects to a student who always made everyone around them better, asking about others even while they were dealing with the decline in their own health and physicality. When I entered the space, I expected to just sit and wait for the memorial to begin; however, when I entered, the choral group, consisting of current students and recent graduates were rehearsing the song they would sing during the memorial.

I listened to students I have grown to know over the past few years sing Daniel Gawthrop’s “Sing Me to Heaven,” and as they sang, I looked at each of them on stage and realized that while I had expected to keep it together during the memorial I may not be able to because seeing each of them, standing on stage and singing to pay respects and remember a friend gone way to soon, I may not be able to keep it together. I watched and listened as they sang,

Sing me a lullaby, a love song, a requiem
Love me
Comfort me
Bring me to God
Sing me a love song
Sing me to heaven

The memorial commenced, and as the program progressed, I kept thinking about the students, and I also kept thinking about our need for community and communal grief and remembrance. I am a solitary person. I have no issue being alone all day, or for multiple days: reading, writing, watching television, playing video games, playing music. Yet, I also know that I need people, even though I am an introvert. The singers on stage and us in the audience gathered not just to remember a friend and student, we gathered to support one another and to engage in a communal act, a communal act that provided a space for comfort and solace.

During a course on the history of rhetoric, I learned about Aristotle’s three genres of discourse that he presents in Rhetoric: deliberative, judicial, and epideictic. What stood out to me in this breakdown was the temporal aspects of each genre. Deliberative rhetoric concerns itself with the future, through the creation of laws and legislation. Judicial rhetoric concerns itself with the past, what happened. Epideictic rhetoric, while praising or blaming someone, even in the case of doing this after their passing, deals with the present. While it focuses on someone who has died, typically in the form of a eulogy, it concerns the present moment, serving as a balm to those who remain.

In its focus on the present, epideictic rhetoric also calls the audience to action. Chaim Perelman writes, “The orator’s main aim in the epideictic genre is not to just gain a passive adherence from his audience but to provoke the action wished for or, at least, to awaken a disposition so to act.” The best example of epideictic rhetoric doing this occurs in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when Marc Antony eulogizes Caesar and calls about the audience to act, leading them to riot.

During the memorial, individuals spoke about the student’s love of life, his humor, and his concern for others above himself. I thought back to having him in class, the COVID year when we went into lockdown, and then seeing him on campus over the past few years, even amidst his medical struggles. He always had a smile on his face, always engaged with lessons, and always had time to talk. I thought about seeing him perform in numerous productions and the power he had in his acting, the ability to draw the audience into the performance and make us feel a part of it.

It was fitting to have the memorial in the theater on campus, and that at the end of the memorial everyone gathered on the stage to light candles in remembrance. We all stood on the stage, in a circle, lighting one another’s candles, partaking in another communal act of remembrance and passing on the light that the student and friend provided to each of us, thinking about our own connections. I looked around the circle, seeing students I’ve taught and known holding back tears, embracing one another, and being together in their grief.

As we stood there, holding our candles, someone spoke, mentioning that a single light always remains lit in a theater, the ghost light. They pointed out the light stays on for practical purposes, so people can see where they are going when they enter a dark theater, but they also said the ghost light reminds us of the person we have lost. It serves, in a way, as a physical reminder of their presence, the fact that they remain with us and we keep them alive. They may have died physically, but they have not died.

Following the memorial program, we exited to the lobby and signed balloons to send up to our friend and student. I grabbed a ballon and wrote a quote from Lillian Smith: “Death can kill a man, that is all it can do to him. It cannot end his life because of memory.” Death is not the end. Memory remains. Memory sustains. Eulogies and memorials carry on the individual’s life, bringing them into contact with us again even though we cannot embrace them or look them in the eyes or hear them. They call us to action, to embrace one another and to care for one another, loving the physical moments we share together and never forgetting them when the time comes.

Getting older means I’m going to say goodbye to individuals more frequently, saying that I will see you again and remember you. It means I will take part in the communal act of remembrance, leaning on others for support and being there to support those around me. It means that I will, eventually, be the one that leaves this physical plane of existence, succumbing to the physical limitations of my body and moving into the memories and stories of the world. This is why, for me, the epideictic is the most important genre of rhetoric because it concerns itself with how we act and respond. It concerns itself with who we are and want to be as individuals. It concerns itself with how we treat one another.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about my eventual demise, and as someone who has moved a lot and feels unrooted to a specific place, I know that I want to be cremated. I know that my roots don’t seep into the ground in my birthplace or anywhere else. My roots extend outward, connecting with others nearby, growing and feeding off of one another. For that reason, I merely want a memorial service where those roots join together and my memory migrates from myself out into the world through others, themselves connecting me with others, continually repeating the process.