The Dead or the Past: Speaking No Ill

De mortuis nil nisi bonumr
Wow, Latin. I hope you are sufficiently impressed.

Ideas just sound better – or look better in writing – when they are expressed in Latin. The dead language gives the simplest thought a gravitas that it wouldn’t have in English.

In fact, I have a slim volume entitled, “Latin Quips at Your Fingertips” by Rose Williams that is just chockful of handy Latin phrases with which to annoy friends, impress strangers and influence no one.

The only problem is, that book is on the bottom of a stack eighteen books high that teeters on the edge of the top of my bookcase above my computer. Since whipping it out would cause an avalanche, I don’t consult it very often.

The phrase above is common enough that I didn’t have to consult my “Latin Quips”. You’ve undoubtedly heard it before. Maybe you’ve even used it yourself, either in its high-falutin’ Latin or its plain-Jane English rendition. It means “Speak no ill of the dead.” Or, if you want to be literal about it, “Of the dead, nothing but good.”

The phrase is often used in a context ripe with double entendre (that’s French): someone will say, “Well, I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but” and they say it with such a gleam in their eye that you know that they would like nothing better than speak ill of one particular dead person and that, in fact, there is nothing you can do that will stop them from doing it. The “but” is, if you will forgive the pun, a dead give-away.

But others use the phrase to mean exactly what it says. I have officiated at numerous funerals at which the phrase “Speak no ill of the dead” has been raised to the status of mob mentality. Perhaps we are blessed, when a loved-one dies, with a compensatory amnesia that let’s us forget all the bad things and remember only the good things about the one we lost.

It was my practice, when meeting with the grieving family prior to the funeral, to help them begin to reminisce about their loved one. Usually the session would begin with stunned and even sullen silence, progress through overt grief, and end with fond anecdotes and laughter tinged with sadness. It was a start of the healing process.

On occasion, though, I would notice one or more persons who did not participate in the swapping of stories. They would sit, taciturn, with a haunted look in their eyes. I usually tried to seek them out separately at some point during my contacts with the family because I knew that they had another story to tell.

It wasn’t that I was looking for dirt, and I would never think of divulging to another member of the family – or anyone else, for that matter – what these people told me. It is just that I knew that something had happened in their interaction with the deceased that had hurt them and that they would not even begin to heal as long as they were forced to “speak no ill of the dead.”

Only by telling their story, and being heard, could they begin to exorcise the demons of a bad relationship and hopefully begin to move on to that compensatory amnesia.

I think we experience a similar ‘compensatory amnesia’ with regard to the past. I don’t know what the exact Latin phrase would be and I’m not going to risk pulling out my Latin quips. I’ll just toss in an extra word and we will call it: De tempus mortuis nil nisi bonum. Of times gone by (dead) speak no ill.

That idea is at the root of nostalgia. We look back at the past with fondness, remembering only the good. When we have undergone a traumatic upheaval in our lives – either because of mistakes we have made or through no fault of our own – it is tempting to escape to the compensatory amnesia of nostalgia.

The trouble is, there is often that one (or more) tacitu
persona within us who cannot participate in the telling and re-telling of fond memories of the past.

Here’s the kicker: unless we can listen to that those forlo
voices who had a different experience of our past and who were hurt by it, we cannot really heal their traumas. And since they are really just repressed parts of ourselves, we cannot be whole and well.

One wonders if the saying “De mortuis nil nisi bonum” didn’t begin out of an ancient fear that if we spoke ill of the dead, they would come back to haunt us.

In terms of our psyches, unless we allow ourselves to be honest about the past, to remember the good and the bad, our past is guaranteed to come back to haunt us.

If you have a story that is eating away at you, find someone to tell it to.

If you are one of those with whom someone chooses to share their truth, just listen. You don’t have to solve their problems, change their attitudes, correct their memories, or defend those cheerful souls who blithely remember only the good. All you have to do is listen.