Tag Archives: death

PRECIOUS AND BEAUTIFUL THINGS

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THE PAINFUL REALITY

It was not how I had it planned. It was not the way it was meant to be. I was to be first. When the evil mass took hold of my liver three years before and left me surrounded with doctors and nurses in full-on emergency gear, trying  to keep me alive, I was convinced that this was it. But it was not to be. With their skill, the prayers of the people and the good and gracious hand of our God, I survived. But later, later that same year, the cancer made its presence known in her body. From then it continued its sinister and relentless pincer movement throughout her delicate frame, spreading its tentacles to the most important organs, till there was nothing left that could be done.  The painful reality had to be faced, it was just a matter of time. Despite the treatment, the chemo, the radio, and immunotherapy, this thing inside her was slowly killing her and it would not let go.

HEARING BUT NOT LISTENING
I had three years to prepare for this event, but I wasn’t prepared. Even when the consultant told us it was weeks rather than months, I wanted to scream out in disbelief. Yet she knew and she tried so hard to tell me, to prepare me, to help me see, but I wasn’t listening and I didn’t see. It seemed like the cancer had been kept at bay. Life was as normal, nothing had changed and we could go on like this for years, maybe even decades. Yet she knew, she was right all along and I was wrong.

Nobody had told me about it how it would be or how I would feel. No one had explained to me what bereft actually meant. But, the thing is, they had, in words, in books, in poetry, in songs. It was all there it was just that I hadn’t listened. I couldn’t hear. I even wrote these songs myself. Ten years ago I wrote a song about bereavement through the seasons, but I never knew what it meant until now. I remember reading Bob Dylan’s comments on songs on one of his early album, which were preoccupied with death. He said he was too young to write songs like that, so they must have come from somewhere else.

THE EVENINGS
In the evenings, when we are alone and nothing else was happening, we would read the bible, with a devotional book someone had given her and we would pray together. It was a practice that was fitful at best throughout our married life but became a regular habit in the later years. It made me so happy. Each time I heard her pray, I cried. It was in the evening too, that we talked. We talked about the things we did that day and played the game “ Guess who I saw in town today?”  A song by John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful came to mind. It was written back in the sixties and called “Darlin be home soon”. The recording seemed a bit cheesy, even at the time, but the song got to me then and strangely it came back to me now, with the opening lines “Come, and talk of all the things we did today/Hear, and laugh about our funny little ways..”   It occurred to me too that this was what happened in the garden. It was in the evening of the day that God came and walked and talked with Adam and Eve. It is in the evenings that I feel most bereft.

HOW SHORT HOW SHORT

It all happened so quickly in the end. Sunday, we were sitting out having lunch in the garden. Monday brought an emergency GP appointment and a swift referral to the oncology ward. She was visibly relieved to lie down on that bed and be surrounded with the care she needed.  By the Wednesday evening, I was so exhausted and distracted, she pleaded with me to go home and rest. On the Thursday morning, I was taking notes with her instructions of things to do that day, while she was messaging people with arrangements for a meeting in the following week. It was a busy day, people were coming and going and I had now grasped that time was short. I resolved to be awake when I returned in the evening and to make sure that I packed my bible and the book. When we were alone in the stillness , when the buzz of the ward had quietened down, we could read and pray together, just as we had done before. But it was not to be. By lunchtime she was gone.

THE EMPTY HOUSE
When I opened the door of the empty house for the first time, I was hit with the banal absurdity of it all. What was this place now for? What was the point of it? It was our home, now it wasn’t. It was my “stop all the clocks” moment. There was no need for this anymore. The newly decorated room, the restored windows, the Morris paper, the walnut floor, the Louie Poulsen lighting, the hand-crafted kitchen the carefully selected colours and fabrics, they were all about a place, our home, where friends and family from far and near would be welcomed, to share a meal, a rest for the night or longer. We wanted to be like the Shunamite woman who had a room with a bed, a chair, a table and a lamp for the prophet Elisha when he passed that way. Now it’s purpose has dissolved and I don’t know what to do.

THE OBSERVATION

Too soon, much too soon I read again C S Lewis’ “A Grief Observed”. It was brutal: grief was being like a “rat caught in a trap”, the bereaved were such a problem, maybe “they should be isolated in special colonies like lepers”, God must be a “giant vivisectionist” and worse. But he works his way through all of that in the most astonishing way. He climbs through the self-indulgent grief the self-pity, the flawed images and the house of cards to finally seeing “ I need Christ not something that resembles him” I hope I can get there.

THE PRECIOUS AND BEAUTIFUL THINGS
I love the proverb in the Book of Proverbs 24:3+4 partly because of its architectural reference. It goes: “By wisdom a house is built/By understanding it is established/By knowledge the rooms are filled with precious and beautiful things”. Together we built the house, she filled it with precious and beautiful things and the precious and beautiful things were people. My task is to cherish these precious and beautiful things.

Indignity in Death

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I didn’t need to see the picture. I saw it in my mind the solitary figure, decked in black, sitting in the ancient chapel, masked and distanced and silenced as she watched the physical remains of her husband of seven decades, being lowered into a hole in the ground beneath the stone floor. Somehow it was a picture like no other, which epitomises the dreadful end of an era.

My concerns were not for her. Even in this enforced humiliation she retained her dignity. I have no doubt that her spirit would rise above all that. Nor were my concerns for the thousands of others who have had to face the same indignity in the loss of those they loved, over the past year, including some who are close friends. My concerns were for the ones who devised the plan and wilfully manipulated a compliant population in adopting, almost without question, the foolishness of the charade.

I would not like to have been Boris Johnstone or his advisors or the other leaders falling in his train, watching on their screens, following the spectacle, aware of their role in forcing the sovereign, who had seen out thirteen prime ministers, to endure this pitiful spectacle. I wonder if the cruelty of it even crossed their minds or if they ever felt any shame. I suspect not, but it was a shameful thing that they had done.

The triple lock, enforced mask wearing, distancing and the banning of singing at services of all kinds strangles the very life from such occasions and in the face of death makes it especially bitter. It could only be the coldness and cruellest of hearts not to see what this means for a grieving relative. That moment in time, that would never be recovered or retrieved: when they most needed their close family to be close, when they needed that comforting arm around them, when they needed to see that reassuring sympathetic and familiar face, when they so needed to be reminded of the truth that death is not the end and be able to sing, with the congregation, the songs of faith.  That moment senselessly and cruelly taken from them.

The government should have gone the whole hog, banned all funerals, instructed local authorities to dispose of the dead as they saw fit and put out a nice thing on zoom.

Maybe they don’t feel any shame, but I do.

“You don’t need to die alone”

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It’s another stunningly beautiful day, a clear blue sky and the river widening and lazily heading seaward. It is a day to cheer the spirits, but it is clouded with a heavy weight of sadness hearing this morning of the passing of Dominic Smart, one of the most significant and principled theologians in Scotland this century. I couldn’t say that I knew him well, we corresponded from time to time, but I often devoured what he wrote in books and especially in letters to his own congregation in Aberdeen. I was always often deeply, moved, challenged and lifted when I had the opportunity of hearing him preach. He had a special gift of bringing the timeless message of the Bible into the here and now and he, more than any other, saw the significance of Post Modernism and the loss of the meta narrative.

The special memory that I have and the one that I will hold on to, was when he took the funeral service of his brother in law after his tragic death some seven years ago. I had never heard the gospel message explained/proclaimed/commended so clearly, so tenderly, so passionately, so winsomely before. It was, of course, a tribute but it seemed like a sermon and I thought, as I mentioned to him afterwards, if he was only to preach one sermon, that would be it. It could only be the most indifferent, the most stubborn, and the most icy heart that would not be melted by the grace and love and beauty of Jesus present throughout the whole service.

The fact that this message came out of a very dark and bitterly sad situation, with no attempt to sweeten the pill or cover over the pain but bluntly and courageously facing the un-adulterated truth  straight on, with a steady eye, was, in itself, remarkable, and demonstrated amazing and, no doubt, costly courage. 

The words meant so much and I recall them as clear as day: in the Good News contrasting with the bad news and its hopeless message –“try harder….to a bird with broken wings – flap harder” , the throwaway line “This Jesus, who forgives sinners rather than feebly turning a blind eye” the laying bare of the shallowness of our understanding of what goes on in someone’s mind, when the family were encouraging him to believe it was getting better and he knew it wasn’t –  “he was right all along – and we were wrong”,  and the tender love and comfort in the lines..” and when there was no hope, still underneath him were the everlasting arms”.  At the end of the sermon was the final gentle but firm appeal “It took them some time to find the body but he didn’t die alone and you don’t need to die alone”.

I was moved afterwards to take the words from Deuteronomy and write a song. You can hear it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4FXdR6-D98&feature=youtube_gdata