Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls

The vultures are circulating and last week one descended as my brother decided to take my parent's grandfather clock. Last summer, my mother said "I would like you to have the clock," a large grandfather clock that stood in the living room making these chimes.

Dad

This entire process can be like a consuming gray fog. I think it is important to compartmentalize -- to enjoy your immediate family and pets and your hobbies and put aside if for only a few hours thoughts about assisted living and dying.

I was interested to read that Mom showed emotion as you were leaving. While I was there, I never saw that, no matter how many tears were shed around her. I see that as a sign of recovery. Getting better is of course a relative term, but when I called her yesterday, her voice seemed clearer and she is now articulating compound sentences. However, Mom's cognition is no where near where she was at her prime, as the CD poignantly demonstrates.

I hope Dad continues his weekly letters, both for the discipline and because they do communciate important information. We had to smile when we put the letter we got two weeks ago up to a mirror to read it because he put the carbon paper on wrong. (Who uses carbon paper today?)

When it comes time to sell the house, Dad needs to be elsewhere. He needs to be given ample time to get the things he wants and he needs to clearly understand that when he leaves with those suitcases of things for himself and Mom, we will dispose of everything else one way or another. It is part of the paradox that is Dad that he is so tenacious onto holding onto stuff-- often broken and bad stuff such as chunks of metal and sticks of wood. I tried to throw out a box of magazines circa 1989 and Dad of course recovered them. For someone who is so spiritual, I would be hard pressed to find someone who is so materialistic. For some one who has so much faith, I would be hard pressed to find some one who is so faithless especially about family. For some one who is so frugal, I would be hard pressed to find someone who is so prone to gambling (excuse me, investing) in the stock market casino. For some one who has preached the blessings of God, I would be hard pressed to find some one who has lived a life so devoid of joy and fun. For some one who is so fearless in his faith, I would be hard pressed to find some one so fearful about the vicissitudes of life. For some one who is so gentle and kind, I would be hard pressed to find some one who as a consequence of his decisions so cruel and callous. It is these contradictions that have driven me as nothing else has to question almost everything that Dad fundamentally believes especially it terms of what it means to be a Christian and a father. From the very first breath I took, my own life has been a testimony to Dad's monstrous choices. The very week before Mom had her first stroke, I asked her if it was true that I was induced so we could go on the ocean liner to America in time and not lose our tickets. It was true, Mom said, and she added that someday she would tell me about it. Well, that day will of course no longer be. However, I have seen time again Dad putting money before health (as in the needlessly lengthy arguments for Dad to go to the hospital for his hip injury and Mom when she suffered her first stroke), religious organizations before family and people (where is the Biblical justification for boarding schools and homes?), and an ethic that seems largely predicated on the idea that ends justify the means (my cuteness as a baby was a means to win people to Christ, for example). "Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the earth." But is some ways, in ways that have hurt a lot of people, Dad has not being honorable. I've talked to Dad about this, and his position generally is that he is who he is and I need to be tolerant of him. Ok, but it seems to me that contradicts the premise of his entire life-- that people with God's help can convert. I don't think he can change because I think he likes the way he is right now. Evil it has been said is the shadow cast by good, and the great good that Mom and Dad have done have created whether or not they realize it great evil, pain, and suffering as well. I have come to realize that Dad doesn't make bad decisions, as all decisions that Dad makes follow logically from his presuppositions. However, I do believe that he generally is incapable of making ethically-grounded decisions-- the right choice in distinction to the religious choice. Dad, for example, won't do laundry on Sunday but he also won't spend an extra $500 so Mom can right first class on an airline. I don't think much can be done about it now except to resolutely resolve not to pass that broken baton to my children. But it does make me so sad.

I chatted with Tim for well over a half hour yesterday. I tried to keep it light, reassurring, and encouraging. However, I suggested that he separate the mail he gets into junk mail, personal letters, and bills. Baby steps. I also urged him to extend trust and transparency on financial matters especially to Wayne so that a structure can be put into place so that he can avoid to use his word "destitution".

Death of a Christian

From Execution Eve, by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Charles Pinckney Luckey of the Middlebury, Conn., Congregational Church was making his usual ministerial rounds, as usual on his motorcycle. Suddenly, rounding a corner, he lost his balance and fell.

He arrived home that mid-October day in 1974, a little bedraggled. But this didn't matter much-- he was always a conspicuously informal dresser, though never affectedly so. In fact, there was no trace of affection in him, which is one reason he was so greatly, and quietly, popular with his congregation.

What vexed Luckey was that he-- a perfect physical specimen at 50, tall and rangy and handsome, with the face of a 30-year-old and the physique of a long-distance runner-- should have lost his balance. So he went to a doctor, suspecting that he had something wrong with his ear canal. The doctor examined him, couldn't find anything, and everyone hoped that whatever it was would go away.

It didn't. Luckey began to lose his vision and, in a few weeks, was losing the motor control on his left side. By December, he was blind. A legion of specialists surveyed his wilting frame, and a name was spoken which squirts ice water among even hardened doctors. It was diagnosed as Jakob-Creutzfeldt disease, and there are few recorded cases of it. Something about a galloping degeneration of the nerve cells. The prognosis for him: up to six months. Cause? Nobody knows.

They took Charles Luckey to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York to "confirm" the diagnosis. It was only there that he yielded to depression, when they poked about and asked him questions, to measure, scientifically, the physical and intellectual deterioration. Before and after the poking, he was obstinately cheerful and affectionate, dictating to his secretary farewell letters to his friends, letters exalted by a curious dignity that had attached to him even as a teen-ager. Then, on the Sunday before Christmas, propped up at the lectern by his 17-year-old son, he preached his last sermon to a congregation racked with pain and admiration.

The crisis came shortly after. He called his secretary and dictated a letter which he sent to a few friends, and which was pronounced by the retired, aged chaplain of Yale University "the most moving credo of the Christian faith written in my lifetime."

"What"-- Charlie dictated-- "does the Christian do when he stands over the abyss of his own death and the doctors have told him that disease is ravaging his brain and that his whole personality may be warped, twisted, changed? Then does the Christian have any right to self-destruction, especially when he knows that the changed personality may bring out some horrible beast in himself? Well, after 48 hours of self-searching and study, it comes to me that ultimately and finally the Christian has to always view lifer as a gift from God, and every precious moment of life was not earned but was given by grace, lovingly bestowed upon him by his Creator, and it is not his to pick up and smash."

And so I find the position of suicide untenable, not because I lack the courage to blow out my brains, but rather because of my deep, abiding faith in the Creator who put the brains there in the first place. And now the result is that I lie here blind on my bed and trust in the sustaining, loving power of that great Creator who knew and loved me before I was fashioned in my mother's womb. But I do not think it is wrong to pray for an early release from this diseased, ravaged carcass.

"Lovingly given," he closed the statement, diffidently, "to my congregation and to my friends if it seems in good taste."

It seems to me in very good taste, and I pass it along, with the word that at least that final prayer was answered. The coma began two weeks later, and on January 20, 1975, he died. There had been no personality change. That, all the dreadful powers of Jakob-Creutzfeldt couldn't do to Charles P. Luckey.

Happy Mother's Day

For some of us, it won't be an easy Mother's Day, with my mother's memory now almost completely faded and her ability to commicate in any way almost completely gone.

A Christian View of Death

John Donne writes

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so
One short sleep past, we wake eternaly,
And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.

For the Christian physical death isn't a dread enemy. The death that Christians hold in dread is not the death of the body but the death of the soul.

I came across a letter my parents wrote in 1980. "In our last prayer letter, mention was made f the fact that Harold's sister Elsie and sister-in-law Irene were both in critical health condition. We must now report with sadness that Irene passed away January 1st and Elsie on January 4th. We are reminded that the Lord gives to each of us our appointed time and tasks and that while life is short and fleeting for all it is yet long enough to be significant, especially when lived out in the will of God."

Airline pilots have a catch-phrase where weather conditions are optimum- CUVU-- ceiling unlimited, visibility unlimited-- and that is the hope that God gives us. "Even there shall thy hand lead," says Psalms 139:10. Discovery of God's steadying hand begets quiteness and confidence for the road ahead. In the economy of God, we are needed. We can lend our strength to "whatever things are true. . . honorable . . . lovely . . . gracious . . . excellent. There is pain in the loss of those we have loved, but such persons we honor not by retiring from life but by carrying on with courage, faith, and hope.

Remind me, God, when I am lonely and perhaps I feel despair
Let not my ailing heart forget that you hear every prayer
Remind me that no matter what I do or fail to do
There is still hope for me as long as I have faith in You
Let not my eyes be blinded by some folly I commit
But help me to regret my wrongs
Inspire me to put my fears upon a hidden shelf
And in the future never to be sorry for myself
Give me the restful sleep I need before another dawn
And bless me in the morning with the courage to go on.

CUVU

Ceiling Unlimited Visibility Unlimited.

On the Beach

I watched the liesurely but horrific 1959 film On the Beach last night. The movie, starring Gregory Peck, Fred Astair, and Ava Gardner, has the last remaining survivors of a global nuclear holocaust awaiting their certain deaths in Australia as radiation creeps towards them. The government issues everyone in Melbourne poison tablets to kill themselves rather then enduring radiation sickness. Peck as a submarine capitain heads back to the United States with his crew to die as the movie fades to black. It wasn't exactly a feel good movie. However, it seemed to resonate with a certain dignity, with no one rioting or hoarding, and everyone performing their duties as well as they could under the circumstances. In the movie, Fred Astaire as the scientist Julian Osborne says "Who would ever have believed that human beings would be stupid enough to blow themselves off the face of the Earth?" The horror of the movie lies in the knowledge that humans can indeed be that stupid.

The Wicked Witch of the West Exits

Stage left.

And there is no chance that she will be Obama's vice president. Dealing with the psychodrama that is Bill and Hill would try the patience of anyone. It's a burden President Obama can do without.

Mom: A Story

From Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury.

She was a woman with a broom or a dustpan or a washrag or a mixing spoon in her hand. You saw her cutting pie crust in the morning, humming to it, or you saw her setting out the baked pies at noon or taking them in, cool, at dusk. She glided through the halls as steadily as a vacuum machine, seeking, finding, and setting to rights. She made mirrors of every window, to catch the sun. She strolled but twice through any garden, trowel in hand, and the flowers raised their quivering fires upon the warm air in her wake. She touched people like pictures, to set their frames straight.

But, now? . . .

“Grandma,” said everyone. “Great-grandma.”

Now it was as if a huge sum in arithmetic were finally drawing to an end. She had stuffed turkeys, chickens, squabs, gentlemen, and boys. She had washed ceilings, walls, invalids, and children. She had laid linoleum, repaired bicycles and stoked furnaces. Her hands had flown all around about and down, gentling this, holding that, throwing baseballs, swinging bright croquet mallets, seeding black earth, or fixing covers or dumplings, ragouts, and children wildly strewn by slumber. She had pulled down shades, pinched out candles, turned switches, and—grown old. Looking back on 30 billions of things started, carried, finished, and done, it all summed up, totaled out; the last decimal was placed, the final zero swung slowly into line. Now, chalk in hand, she stood back from life a silent hour before reaching for the eraser.

“Let me see now,” said Great-grandma. “Let me see . . .”

With no fuss or further ado, she traveled the house in an ever-circling inventory, reached the stairs at last, and took herself up three flights to her room where, silently, she laid herself out under the snowing-cool sheets of her bed and began to die.

Again the voices: “Grandma! Great-grandma!”

The family surrounded her bed.

“Just let me lie,” she whispered.

Her ailment could not be seen in any microscope; it was a mild but ever-deepening tiredness, a dim weighing of her sparrow body; sleepy, sleepier, sleepiest.

“Great-grandma, now listen—what you’re doing is no better than breaking a lease. This house will fall down without you. You must give us at least a year’s notice!”

Great-grandma opened one eye. Ninety years gazed calmly out at her physicians like a dust ghost from a high cupola window in a fast-emptying house. “Tom? . . .”

The boy was sent, alone, to her whispering bed.

“Tom,” she said, faintly, far away, “in the Southern Seas there’s a day in each man’s life when he knows it’s time to shake hands with all his friends and say good-by and sail away, and he does, and it’s natural—it’s just his time. That’s how it is today. I’m so like you sometimes, sitting through Saturday matinees until nine at night when we send you dad to bring you home. Tom, when the time comes that the same cowboys are shooting the same Indians on the same mountaintop, then it’s best to fold back the seat and head for the door, with no regrets and no walking backward up the aisle. So, I’m leaving while I’m happy and still entertained.”

Douglas was summoned next to her side.

“Grandma, who’ll shingle the roof next spring?”

Every April, as far back as there were calendars, you thought you heard woodpeckers tapping the housetop. But no, it was Great-grandma singing, pounding nails, replacing shingles, high in the sky!
“Douglas,” she whispered, “don’t ever let anyone do the shingles unless it’s fun for them. Look around come April, and say, “Who’d like to fix the roof?’ And whichever face lights up is the face you want, Douglas. Because up there on the roof you can see the whole town going toward the country going toward the edge of the earth and the river shining.”

Her voice sank to a soft flutter.

Douglas was crying.

She roused herself again. “Now, why are you doing that?”

“Because,” he said, “you won’t be here tomorrow.”

She turned a small hand mirror from herself to the boy. He looked at her face and himself in the mirror, and then again at her face as she said, “Tomorrow morning I’ll get up at seven and wash behind my ears; I’ll run to church with Charlie Woodman; I’ll picnic at Electric Park; I’ll swim, run barefoot, fall out of trees, chew spearmint gum . . .Douglas, Douglas, for shame! You cut your fingernails, don’t you?”

“Yes’m.”

“Well, consider then, boy. Any man saves fingernail clippings is a fool. You ever see a snake bother to keep his peeled skin? That’s about all you got here today in this bed is fingernails and snakeskin. One good breath would send me up in flakes. Important thing is not the me that’s lying here, but the me that’s sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that’s downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count.”
“I’m not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family. I’ll be around a long time. A thousand years from now a whole township of my offspring will be biting sour apples in the gumwood shade. That’s my answer to anyone asks big questions! Quick now, send me the rest!”
The entire family approached, like people seeing someone off at the rail station.

“Well,” said Great-grandma, “there I am. I’m not humble, so it’s nice seeing you standing by my bed. Now next week there’s late gardening and closet cleaning and clothes buying for the children to do. And since that part of me which is called, for convenience, Great-grandma, won’t be here to step it along, those other parts of me called Uncle Bert and Leo and Tom and Douglas, and all the other names, will have to take over.”

“Yes, Grandma.”

“I don’t want anyone saying any thing sweet about me tomorrow; I said it all in my time and my pride. I’ve tasted every victual and danced every dance; now there’s one last tart I haven’t bit on, one tune I haven’t whistled. But I’m not afraid. I’m truly curious. So don’t you worry about me. Now, all of you go, and let me find my sleep . . .”

Somewhere a door closed quietly.

“That’s better.” Alone, she snuggled down through the warm snowbank of linen and wool, sheet and cover; and the colors of the patchwood quilt were bright as the circus banners of old time.

A long time back, she thought, I dreamed a dream, and was enjoying it so much when someone waked me and that was the day when I was born. And now? Now, let me see . . .

She cast her mind back. Where was I? Ninety years . . . how to take up the thread and the pattern of that lost dream again? She put out a small hand. There . . . yes, that was it.

She smiled. Deeper in the warm snow hill she turned her head upon her pillow. That was better. Now, yes, now she saw it shaping in her mind quietly, and with a serenity like a sea moving along an endless and self-refreshing shore. Now she let the old dream touch and lift her from the snow and drift her above the scarce-remembered bed.

Downstairs, she thought, they are polishing the silver, and rummaging through the cellar, and dusting in the halls. She could hear them living all through the house.

“It’s all right,” whispered Great-grandma, as the dream floated her. “Like everything else in life, it’s fitting.”

And the sea moved her back down the shore.