The ways we honor icons in our communities

by Maria Kopke, Guest Editorial

A queen, a composer, and a surfer.

There is no obvious connection here, until I mention that I’m talking about Queen Elizabeth and Stephen Sondheim: two people who, in very different proportions, are symbols of a community and an era, and whose recent deaths had a big impact in the communities they represented.

As for the surfer, you have likely never heard of him, so let me tell you. He was a Portuguese man named João Alexandre, known as Dapin. He was not exactly famous, but was a star within the Portuguese surfing community. Many saw him as the best national surfer ever, and all agreed that he was a sportsman ahead of his time who revolutionized surfing in Portugal. He was a regular presence at his local beach, so much so that he had almost become a part of it - it was hard to imagine the beach without him.

He died on the 29th of November, 2021, three days after Stephen Sondheim. His contributions to his community, much like Sondheim’s, were considered immeasurable, and his death, also like Sondheim’s, was an equally immeasurable loss.

When the Queen passed away in the beginning of September, I was reminded of those two figures. Regardless of my personal feelings about her or the Royal Family, seeing people around the world come together to mourn and honour this person they have never met but who, in one way or another, had an influence in their lives, I was touched. And I was brought back to November 2021, when these two communities were in mourning. And though the scale was significantly smaller, the weight of the moment was just as heavy.

As a performer and a musical theatre lover, Sondheim’s death felt particularly heavy to me. This was a man I have never met but whose work has had a huge impact not only in my life but in the lives of musical theatre lovers around the world; someone who, in fact, changed and defined this community forever.

I read the accounts of the people close to him, watched the videos of performers singing his songs to carry on his legacy, the biggest names on Broadway gathering at Duffy Square in his honour, the dimmed lights of the Broadway theatres. And although I wasn't physically there, there was a sense of connection to the community, even if only through a screen.

I didn't know Dapin either, and I am not a surfer. But having a surfer brother (who also happens to be a local at the same beach as him), led me to witness the effects of his passing not as a member of the community but from the strange position of being outside looking in. I was at the beach on the day the local surfers gathered in his honour. The rituals surrounding the deaths of surfers are simple, but some of the most beautiful I have ever seen. Friends and family paddle out and form a circle in the ocean. They splash water in the air, throw flowers, make speeches that cannot be heard from land and belong only to the ones present, and to the waves. At Dapin’s ceremony, one of his boards was also being passed around, for those who wished to sign it.

It was a strange feeling, to walk away from the crowd and see the world outside of the ceremony go on as usual. The people going for swims, bathing in the sun, getting ice cream, had no idea that just a few feet away from them, hundreds of people, young and old, were having to learn how to put back together a puzzle with a missing piece. It was just as strange, after hearing about Sondheim’s passing, to hang out with friends outside of the musical theatre community and having to explain who he was, why he mattered and why his death meant something to me. It seemed impossible that not everyone knew.

This wasn't the case for Queen Elizabeth, of course - entire countries literally stopped and her name echoed in every corner of the world. But when we are talking about smaller communities, like Broadway, Portuguese surfers, or a family, there is a brutal contrast between what goes on within the group and outside of it. On one hand, there is a fundamental shift in our lives and the unshakable notion that nothing will ever be the same from now on; on the other hand, the harsh realization that everyone else is oblivious to this major event, and that, for them, everything is exactly the same.

Rituals help to materialize the concrete ways in which a community changes after one of its members is gone, besides bringing us together in the comfort of knowing that the world did not go on as usual for just everyone. Whether it is a song, a moment of silence, a circle in the water, the telling of stories, the things we do in the aftermath, alone and together, help us to make sense of the most perplexing aspect of our experience as humans.

It is also through rituals that we ensure that our loved ones remain after their death, in our communities, in ourselves, and in the physical world around us. The songs we sing in their memory become the songs that always remind us of them; the flowers thrown into the ocean become a one with the water and the sand; the anniversaries we celebrate become traditions to be passed down to younger generations.

This immortalization of people through simple gestures was a concept dear to Sondheim himself. Describing the song ‘Sunday’ from Sunday in the Park with George, he recounts that writing the word “forever” brought him to tears, and explains: “I was suddenly moved by the contemplation of what these people would have thought if they’d known they were being immortalized”. How fitting to have Lin-Manuel Miranda read this passage at Duffy Square, making “forever” the very word through which we remember Sondheim.

Yes, it is hard to imagine the beach without Dapin, Broadway without Sondheim, The United Kingdom without the Queen, our lives without the ones we love. But we are not without them. Through our rituals, they stay in our communities, and we carry them everywhere we go. They stay in the space between the waves and the sand, in the kids who grew up looking up to them, their catchphrases which everyone else picked up on, a stranger’s laughter which sounds just like theirs, a stroll in in the park, on an ordinary Sunday.