Tag / Death

by Michael

I Didn’t Realize He Was Leaving

On Wednesday evening, December 26, I was sitting next to Dawn and in front of Bryce in the B concourse of Midway airport.  We had successfully pressed through the security checkpoint, rearranged our clothes and shoes, and walked to our gate to wait for an hour before boarding a plane.  Bryce was eyeing some passenger’s ice cream, whispering to me about wanting some.  I told him to wait, to let me get settled.  I told him I had just sat down.  I told him to stop looking at the woman’s ice cream like that because he was scaring me and probably scaring her.

We were heading to Charlotte, North Carolina ultimately to complete our annual time with Grammie Joseph.  It would be a week where we would see the Gant museum, walk through the botanical gardens in Belmont, eat at Captain Steve’s, talk a lot, catch up, do nothing.  My aunt, Lynnie, called me while we were waiting to board.  I have a rule when certain people call my phone: I always answer.  I do not observe this rule for most people.  I’m a pastor so I cannot.  I meet with people and they say things to me, and when they say these things, it makes a lot of sense for me to stop the rest of the world as those people present their worlds to me.  So I’m “present” with them as they talk.  I ignore the phone.  I don’t hear rings in those moments.  But I make exceptions.  When my aunt calls, because my father has been in the nursing home in her city, I take her call, even if I need to ask if I can call right back.

As she always does, she asked me how I was.  There was static in the line.  Perhaps it wasn’t static.  Do cell towers allow for static?  It was choppy.  Whatever the interference, I couldn’t quite hear her clearly.  Some voice was droning about a passenger whose flight was leaving or some gate change.  There was Bryce switching to his mother and asking her for ice cream.  He’s been doing that more and more: shifting to her when I don’t answer the way he thinks I should.

Aunt Lynnie asked if I had gotten her message.  I pulled my phone from my ear and looked at it as if to ask it if it had rung without my hearing it.  Perhaps it sang while we were in the cab with the preacher cab driver who I talked theology with on the way to the airport.  “No,” I told her, “I didn’t.”  Then I thought—as she let out a long “Well,”—perhaps she called the house.  I heard her “Welling” and I had a flash of some indication of what was to come.  It was something spiritual, like and unlike the Welling in the black church, when people sometimes rock while they hear the preacher.  They say “Well” as they listen, and something about the “Well” makes what they hear stick.  My aunt’s well was different; she was stalling just for a moment, and auntie, in my experience, didn’t stall.  She breathed and she said it, quickly and clearly, without interference from cell towers or airport clutter.  My dad had passed an hour or so before that moment.

They were just arriving to the nursing home; the snow had prevented them from getting there sooner.  I knew Little Rock didn’t get snow.  I imagined my three Little Rock aunts, wrapped in coats, looking as lovely as always, dressed in care and concern and love and something familiar.  They were there, three of my father’s sisters, a group of faithful friends to him, and he was dead.  I asked her to repeat herself.  Actually, I said, “What?” I had heard her, but something in me got very cliche in that moment.  Or something in me needed to hear again.  Dawn heard me and she knew.  She had been down a path like this one when her father was snatched over six months after his stroke two years ago.  I felt Dawn turn to me.  I saw her take Bryce by the hand.  I was really surprised at that simple sentence from my aunt.  I wanted to turn to Dawn; I wanted to turn away.

I had just seen him.  This was my first thought: I had just seen him.  One week ago at the hospital in Searcy.  He hugged me twice.  I held him, walked with him.  I showed him pictures, something, I realize now, I did often on my trips to see him.  My second thought was: I just talked to him.  It was on Christmas Eve, two days before.  His voice was bright, brighter than usual even.  he talked to Bryce, asked about Dawn.  I thought he was getting better.  I didn’t realize he was leaving.

by Michael

I Didn’t Realize He Was Leaving

On Wednesday evening, December 26, I was sitting next to Dawn and in front of Bryce in the B concourse of Midway airport.  We had successfully pressed through the security checkpoint, rearranged our clothes and shoes, and walked to our gate to wait for an hour before boarding a plane.  Bryce was eyeing some passenger’s ice cream, whispering to me about wanting some.  I told him to wait, to let me get settled.  I told him I had just sat down.  I told him to stop looking at the woman’s ice cream like that because he was scaring me and probably scaring her.

We were heading to Charlotte, North Carolina ultimately to complete our annual time with Grammie Joseph.  It would be a week where we would see the Gant museum, walk through the botanical gardens in Belmont, eat at Captain Steve’s, talk a lot, catch up, do nothing.  My aunt, Lynnie, called me while we were waiting to board.  I have a rule when certain people call my phone: I always answer.  I do not observe this rule for most people.  I’m a pastor so I cannot.  I meet with people and they say things to me, and when they say these things, it makes a lot of sense for me to stop the rest of the world as those people present their worlds to me.  So I’m “present” with them as they talk.  I ignore the phone.  I don’t hear rings in those moments.  But I make exceptions.  When my aunt calls, because my father has been in the nursing home in her city, I take her call, even if I need to ask if I can call right back.

As she always does, she asked me how I was.  There was static in the line.  Perhaps it wasn’t static.  Do cell towers allow for static?  It was choppy.  Whatever the interference, I couldn’t quite hear her clearly.  Some voice was droning about a passenger whose flight was leaving or some gate change.  There was Bryce switching to his mother and asking her for ice cream.  He’s been doing that more and more: shifting to her when I don’t answer the way he thinks I should.

Aunt Lynnie asked if I had gotten her message.  I pulled my phone from my ear and looked at it as if to ask it if it had rung without my hearing it.  Perhaps it sang while we were in the cab with the preacher cab driver who I talked theology with on the way to the airport.  “No,” I told her, “I didn’t.”  Then I thought—as she let out a long “Well,”—perhaps she called the house.  I heard her “Welling” and I had a flash of some indication of what was to come.  It was something spiritual, like and unlike the Welling in the black church, when people sometimes rock while they hear the preacher.  They say “Well” as they listen, and something about the “Well” makes what they hear stick.  My aunt’s well was different; she was stalling just for a moment, and auntie, in my experience, didn’t stall.  She breathed and she said it, quickly and clearly, without interference from cell towers or airport clutter.  My dad had passed an hour or so before that moment.

They were just arriving to the nursing home; the snow had prevented them from getting there sooner.  I knew Little Rock didn’t get snow.  I imagined my three Little Rock aunts, wrapped in coats, looking as lovely as always, dressed in care and concern and love and something familiar.  They were there, three of my father’s sisters, a group of faithful friends to him, and he was dead.  I asked her to repeat herself.  Actually, I said, “What?” I had heard her, but something in me got very cliche in that moment.  Or something in me needed to hear again.  Dawn heard me and she knew.  She had been down a path like this one when her father was snatched over six months after his stroke two years ago.  I felt Dawn turn to me.  I saw her take Bryce by the hand.  I was really surprised at that simple sentence from my aunt.  I wanted to turn to Dawn; I wanted to turn away.

I had just seen him.  This was my first thought: I had just seen him.  One week ago at the hospital in Searcy.  He hugged me twice.  I held him, walked with him.  I showed him pictures, something, I realize now, I did often on my trips to see him.  My second thought was: I just talked to him.  It was on Christmas Eve, two days before.  His voice was bright, brighter than usual even.  he talked to Bryce, asked about Dawn.  I thought he was getting better.  I didn’t realize he was leaving.

by Michael

Dancing with Death

When I started blogging, my friend David told me to blog about the things that I think about, the things that matter to me.  Lately I’ve been thinking about the decline of my father’s health.  That’s why I’m posting this on both blogs.  I’ve not had much free mental space over the last few months because my dad has been there taking it up with a thousand questions of varying sizes and shapes.

My dad is demented, meaning, he has dementia.  What is the appropriate form for that sentence?  Is my father demented?  It feels like a misuse of language to have to write that way: my father has dementia.  It’s one word or two too long.  Plus, it isn’t true.  Particularly since it feels most days like dementia has my father, like the synapses in his brain are freezing over or cracking or deteriorating or doing anything but firing in the way all my college classes suggested synapses do.  I paid a lot of attention to those classes at U of I.  I got mostly good grades, though I hated statistics and could have done better in Don Dulany’s course, especially if I hadn’t been devoting all that time talking to schizophrenics at strange hours through the night.  But these days I’m thinking that I could have paid more attention.

Anyway, my father’s dementia and the accompanying decline in his condition is essentially unsettling.  My experience of him and his health feels like all the sturdy things in my history with him are getting up, spinning around, and landing in a different place from before.  It feels like every conversation with him, each road trip to Little Rock, leaves me tired from the passing lane and sweating after a long dance with this disease.

And I’m not the one doing the real dancing.  I catch myself to say this.  Over the last six months, since we found out about the strokes and since we’ve started to confuse (i.e., not be able to tell) the stroke’s grip for the dementia’s, I’ve remembered consciously that it’s my father who is suffering.  And that’s the worse part.  Not our collective suffering as we watch or join in as a family responding to our loss and grief.  His suffering is the basic problem here.  I can recover.  Can he?

And I wonder to myself if there is a little grace in my dad not knowing how much he’s suffering.  And I check myself again at the hint of such arrogance.  Can my father, complex man that he is, be written off by my saying, “Well, he doesn’t realize what’s happening to him?”  How can I trust that?  How can I take comfort in the corrosive way the disease is handling him so that his head is all messed up, his memories following?  How can I be encouraged that his brain, eating or sucking or dropping away all the memories which make him him, is so distorting his reality that he is in some way spared?

I ask these questions because I want to be spared.  My father isn’t spared.  We aren’t either.  And these instances of death, these suspensions of time, when I’m not sure if my dad is “there” or “somewhere else,” are not healing.  They are small deaths, and they are upsetting, unsettling, and disturbing.  He is as pained as anyone in this.  He didn’t wish for this end.  And he can’t find the ways to express that any more.  Not on most days.  He’s the one really dancing.

Even though his feet are inching into a straddle some days and stepping normally on other days, it is my dad’s feet that I’m watching.  It is his pair of legs that my eyes fell to the other day as he walked to me on the arm of that nurse.  I had been buzzed into the acute care facility in Searcy, the place where they specialize in treating elderly men and women with psychiatric problems stemming from the disease I keep thinking looks like Skeletor.

He was shuffling slowly, arm wrapped in a sturdy nurse who introduced himself as Billy.  Daddy recognized me and that recognition was a gift even if I was struck by my dad’s gait.  It was an interior compromise, thankful for the recognition and willingness to overlook the pulchritude.

I could overlook that daddy looked bad, really bad.  Bad the way he was when he had the stroke in July.  Bad like when I first saw him in July, my brother Mark at my side, I was wondering where my father’s weight went.  Bad like I saw him for the first time as a truly different figure, no longer the man with muscles and a bench press in his basement with weights I’d never be able to lift.

My father’s arm was attached to his nurse, straddling, dancing, and I met him the rest of the way, took the other arm, and listened to the music of his experience and started dancing with him.  We walked slowly, really slowly.  And instead of going to the designated room, we sat in the closest chairs.  I suggested them because the distance to the room was too far for daddy after the stint from his room and too far for me after driving those eleven hours.

by Michael

Dancing with Death

When I started blogging, my friend David told me to blog about the things that I think about, the things that matter to me.  Lately I’ve been thinking about the decline of my father’s health.  That’s why I’m posting this on both blogs.  I’ve not had much free mental space over the last few months because my dad has been there taking it up with a thousand questions of varying sizes and shapes.

My dad is demented, meaning, he has dementia.  What is the appropriate form for that sentence?  Is my father demented?  It feels like a misuse of language to have to write that way: my father has dementia.  It’s one word or two too long.  Plus, it isn’t true.  Particularly since it feels most days like dementia has my father, like the synapses in his brain are freezing over or cracking or deteriorating or doing anything but firing in the way all my college classes suggested synapses do.  I paid a lot of attention to those classes at U of I.  I got mostly good grades, though I hated statistics and could have done better in Don Dulany’s course, especially if I hadn’t been devoting all that time talking to schizophrenics at strange hours through the night.  But these days I’m thinking that I could have paid more attention.

Anyway, my father’s dementia and the accompanying decline in his condition is essentially unsettling.  My experience of him and his health feels like all the sturdy things in my history with him are getting up, spinning around, and landing in a different place from before.  It feels like every conversation with him, each road trip to Little Rock, leaves me tired from the passing lane and sweating after a long dance with this disease.

And I’m not the one doing the real dancing.  I catch myself to say this.  Over the last six months, since we found out about the strokes and since we’ve started to confuse (i.e., not be able to tell) the stroke’s grip for the dementia’s, I’ve remembered consciously that it’s my father who is suffering.  And that’s the worse part.  Not our collective suffering as we watch or join in as a family responding to our loss and grief.  His suffering is the basic problem here.  I can recover.  Can he?

And I wonder to myself if there is a little grace in my dad not knowing how much he’s suffering.  And I check myself again at the hint of such arrogance.  Can my father, complex man that he is, be written off by my saying, “Well, he doesn’t realize what’s happening to him?”  How can I trust that?  How can I take comfort in the corrosive way the disease is handling him so that his head is all messed up, his memories following?  How can I be encouraged that his brain, eating or sucking or dropping away all the memories which make him him, is so distorting his reality that he is in some way spared?

I ask these questions because I want to be spared.  My father isn’t spared.  We aren’t either.  And these instances of death, these suspensions of time, when I’m not sure if my dad is “there” or “somewhere else,” are not healing.  They are small deaths, and they are upsetting, unsettling, and disturbing.  He is as pained as anyone in this.  He didn’t wish for this end.  And he can’t find the ways to express that any more.  Not on most days.  He’s the one really dancing.

Even though his feet are inching into a straddle some days and stepping normally on other days, it is my dad’s feet that I’m watching.  It is his pair of legs that my eyes fell to the other day as he walked to me on the arm of that nurse.  I had been buzzed into the acute care facility in Searcy, the place where they specialize in treating elderly men and women with psychiatric problems stemming from the disease I keep thinking looks like Skeletor.

He was shuffling slowly, arm wrapped in a sturdy nurse who introduced himself as Billy.  Daddy recognized me and that recognition was a gift even if I was struck by my dad’s gait.  It was an interior compromise, thankful for the recognition and willingness to overlook the pulchritude.

I could overlook that daddy looked bad, really bad.  Bad the way he was when he had the stroke in July.  Bad like when I first saw him in July, my brother Mark at my side, I was wondering where my father’s weight went.  Bad like I saw him for the first time as a truly different figure, no longer the man with muscles and a bench press in his basement with weights I’d never be able to lift.

My father’s arm was attached to his nurse, straddling, dancing, and I met him the rest of the way, took the other arm, and listened to the music of his experience and started dancing with him.  We walked slowly, really slowly.  And instead of going to the designated room, we sat in the closest chairs.  I suggested them because the distance to the room was too far for daddy after the stint from his room and too far for me after driving those eleven hours.

by Michael

Inconvenience of Death

My next four posts will pull from my day yesterday.  It was a different day, unlike most of my Sundays.  Granted, as a pastor, I meet with people on Sundays.  I pray with people.  I talk about God, squint my eyes, and answer questions people have.  But this Sunday was unique.

I left home, and by the time I was passing the perimeter of blue and white officers around the president’s house, I got a call in the car about the death of a member’s mother.  Then I headed to a meeting before worship where me and another member talked theology.  I officiated a wedding for a couple and then ended the day meeting with another couple who’s expecting their first son in 7 weeks.  Inside those movements were all the other details of the day.  I harassed a few men from church for not wearing helmets while bicycling.  I hugged and held people.  I picked up my son and we went to retrieve his grandmother who would sit with him while we were out.  It turned into a long day.  Most of my Sundays are not this full.

So today I want to think about yesterday.  First, the notice of death’s coming.

Death is hardly convenient when it comes.  I say this as a man who has done some thinking about the confusing event.  I go back and forth between considering death an enemy and grounding my view of it in faith.  My own faith rewrites the story of death.  Christianity has encouraging things to say about death.  And still, good words, strong words, feel weak when death comes.

As I thought about the shocking news on that call yesterday morning, I wondered like most people what was on God’s mind.  I wondered whether the deceased had power over her own exit, whether she was close enough with God herself to choose when to meet him on the other side of life.  I wondered about her daughter, her son, her husband, and her son-in-law.  I turned off my radio because the gospel music I was listening to crowded the long thoughts of nothing-but-wondering.

I ran over the conversations I’d had with our member.  I saw her two days before.  I wasn’t sure if she had traveled to see her mother.  I’d later learn that she was with her mother when she died.  In the car, I heard myself whispering things about grace in the midst of death.  I was talking to myself in the car, rehearsing truths, but the truths came too quickly to take root.  I turned the music on again, thinking that music was the best thing to hear when the inconvenient angel hovered.  I told myself that music was better than truth.  Music was better than an answer with fast feet.

I held that member in my mind all day.  I thought about her during the worship service.  I mentioned her to a few people.  The weight of her grief was on me as I went throughout the other parts of my day.  As much as I was present with everyone else, I was accompanied by the anguish of that member and friend.  I imagined the pain, the anticipation of it I had seen in her eyes during our talks about her mother’s cancer, her father’s disposition, and her brother’s long-term care.

It’s interesting to me, inexplicable too, how you can be somewhere fully and yet be somewhere else.  How you can be with people and have some other matter grab you by the ear or the stomach.  Have you ever said to someone something like, “I’m with you in spirit”?  Or “You’ve been on my mind”?  Those words get at the wonder of being in two places, being with two people, being split, I suppose you could say.  I was very much with the couple I was marrying yesterday, but I was also with the couple who was lingering over the last days they had with their now dead beloved.  I was with my son in the car, but as a pastor, I couldn’t help but recall the shadow of death that cloaked over the otherwise bright day.

I read these words last night in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “truth”

The dark hangs heavily

Over the eyes.

Isn’t that an image of death?  Hanging dark.  Heavy dark.  Eye-covering dark.  And that darkness, that hanging drape is hardly ever truly welcome.

by Michael

A Prayer

In a way September 11 has become a day when people in the United States are being reminded of death and loss and grief.  Many families were impacted by the multiple and horrific deaths ten years ago.  And I’m sure people are saying a lot of prayers.  I want to add one of mine, praying for people touched and held by that tragedy and by other deaths as well.

Dear God,

I pray for fathers who have lost their children.  Be gracious to them, and help them live under the weight of their pain.  Help them find people they trust to share that pain with, and please use all kinds of people to strengthen and comfort and hold them together.  I pray that you would speak to them about how you’ve suffered over time and that your suffering would provide windows and doors and openings for them to feel that life is possible.  Enable them to live with splendid memories of their children in their minds.  I pray that you would befriend them.  I ask that you would help them live each day, no matter how long that day is.  Let them find solace in you and in your things.  May they experience your love in surprising ways.  And I pray that they would grow into more loving men, that they would resist the temptations to close and narrow and shorten themselves because of their large hardships in having lost their children.

I pray for children who have lost their fathers.  I ask that you would gift them with space to remember well the men that they loved, that they had good or bad relationships with, and that they called father.  Help them laugh.  Collect their tears when they cry.  Grant them people and loved ones who will encourage them as they visit the hard and grueling memories which come during their losses.  Make sense of the world when they can’t.  Listen to them when they talk to their fathers, when they scream their names in hopes that death didn’t really keep them.  Carry their hopes into your heart, and turn their best prayers into opportunities for your will to be done.  Console them.  Convince them that they are loved by you.  Love them as best you can.

I pray for families, spouses, friends, and loved ones who have lost people that we love.  Will you show us how to react to ourselves and our fears and our questions?  Will you aide us as we run away from truth?  Will you give us courage when we fall into fear and stumble through illusions?  Tell us who you are.  Give us perspective when we need it most.  Open us to light when the world around us goes dark.  Death is difficult, so be with us as we respond in our own ways to the difficulty that doesn’t go away.  Teach us that life and death are known and handled well in your hands.  Be for us what nothing else can be.  Continue to connect us daily to the truth of your power over death, of your ability to right the wrongs of injustice which lead to death, and of your greatness in the face of something that feels so big as grief.

I pray these in and through Jesus Christ,

Amen

by Michael

I Don’t Know What to Title This Post

I imagine that looking down my “Previous Addresses” feels like a rattling roller coaster.  I write about ordination, dreams, a friend’s music, writing and, now, death.  I hope you hang in with me as I blather about what may seem like scattered things.

So the last post was on dreams; this one, death. 

My wife’s cousin (which makes him my cousin in law) died.  I don’t know when he died.  That bothers me because I love to know things.  I love to know details like times and dates.  There’s cruelty in not knowing when Christopher died.  We know when he was born.  We know that he too recently graduated and started studying at Columbia College downtown.  We know he was an artist and a merciful friend.  We know he drowned.  We don’t know when.

Christopher died and probably more days ago than are bearable to think of.  He died after enjoying an evening with friends, after jumping in Lake Michigan with those friends to swim, and after helping save the life of one of those friends.  His body was recovered after what felt like countless days.  He was identified.  My heart lurched when I asked Dawn if her aunt and uncle had to identify the body.  There is something unnatural about a parent burying a child.  Absolutely.  But even that sounds to my mind like a bit less tramatic–and no these traumas can’t be compared–than identifying your child’s body after it’s been submerged all those days.

We funeralized and memorialized Christopher in two gatherings, one Saturday mostly for family and a few friends, the other Sunday afternoon where friends and fellow artists packed into the tiny Bond Chapel on the U of C’s campus.  In both places words were spoken over this man’s memory.  The priest, the friend, the relative–all of us thought of this young man’s life.  It was short, but it was full.  Even with its fullness, the grief of seeing his life end makes me feel robbed.  Robbed of his smile.  Robbed of the nod in his head as we passed on 53rd Street.  Robbed of his concern and question, “How’s Dawn and the baby?” 

The one way I’m making sense of this is by thinking about hope beyond the grave, whether that grave is a temporary crack under a large lake or a “permanent” resting place like the plots in Oakwoods or Mt. Hope or Lincoln.  I’m thinking about what Christian theologians call the Christian hope.  It’s the hope that speaks to the day and days when all our griefs are remedied by God’s good finish to this part of life. 

It’s a fantastic claim that the Christian scriptures make: God will make all things new.  Ponder that, even if you don’t believe it.  Ponder, if you will, God making new. 

Believing that we have a hope is a kind of dream.  It’s elusive.  It can be captured and it can’t.  Sure, it’s a belief, a matter of faith.  I come to these beliefs daily and not just when death gets this close or closer.  I make these claims and press them upon people as a matter of vocation.  And like pastors before me, it seems so much easier to speak about hope than, at times, to have it.  I’m grateful for those splendid minutes when long hope and faith and belief feel much stronger than pain, anguish, and sorrow.  It stands far off sometimes, but hope comes closer, at least eventually, after pain.

If there is something to be said when death comes and opens its large hand to take or escort or snatch or accompany a loved one, it is that death is much less powerful than the hope we have.  Of course, it’s a hope in Christ.  Nothing else.  Just him.  For some, that’s literally unbelievable.  For others of us, it’s simply what we have.