Let's get one thing straight -- even if it leaves everyone dead
B
logmodel Mudge -- which has a very different meaning than, for example, "supermodel Mudge," as he'd be the first to admit -- has written a great post about how right-wing Christians are putting the country at risk by continuing to demand that the military kick out anyone who is gay. That many of these people are sorely needed specialists in such fields as, oh, say, Arabic language translation makes the practice more than "merely" unjust. It makes it dangerous.
In an unintentionally hilarious example of just how they do, in fact, ask under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Pursue, Don't Harass," there's this excerpt from the MSNBC report: "On Dec. 2, investigators formally interviewed Copas and asked if he understood the military’s policy on homosexuals, if he had any close acquaintances who were gay, and if he was involved in community theater. He answered affirmatively."
Case closed.
The American Taliban, however, isn't really interested in protecting the country. They get as much mileage out of militant Islamists as the neo-cons do, partly because they share much the same approach to faith as the neo-cons do to international threats: the only "constructive" thing they know how to do is hate on people. "Defend the country against terrorism? We don't need brainiac homos translating Farsi, we just need to go into a Muslim country and kick some ass. Protect heterosexual marriage? That's easy: smack down the gays." Every solution to every problem for them involves beating up on somebody or beating them down -- blacks, women, gays, non-Christians, progressive Christians -- sometimes all at once, or by following a tacit hierarchy of hate: gays trump Muslims, who trump women, who trump Jews, who trump blacks...or variations thereof -- and that's about the extent of their "policy."
Like the man said, I too have a dream that one day we'll all be judged only by the content of our characters. But I'm beginning to realize something more clearly: Conservatives created "identity politics" themselves by hating on various groups -- and then they decry its use when those groups have had enough and won't stand for more.
To their credit, I don't think they actually hate the poor, however, unless they also fall into one of the other groups above. Otherwise, they just don't care about them.
Time, instead, for some serious materialism, I think
I
think, after that last, long blog post, I'll take a break here from too much that can inflame the emotions or even excite the intellect. (Not that I've ever managed to do those things effectively before, but I wasn't consciously avoiding it, either.)
So, instead, I plan to post more frequently here, but with far less in the way of emotional impact (for me, at least; you may indeed be moved to tears. Perhaps rage. We'll see.)
For one thing, I've often heard it said that you can't buy happiness, and this is true. I've also experienced buyer's remorse over some purchses. (My brother will be glad to tell you about a bottle of "Sun-In" some summer in...junior high? high school? some time in there...that turned my hair orange.)
But I think I've been far more likely to make a purchase and then be very, very glad I made it. My iPod is a good example of this. Actually, I am now on my second iPod, because I had more than 40GB of music on my hard drive (vast majority from CDs, plus a few things bought online), which wouldn't all fit on my old 'Pod. Then I managed to erase all my music while trying to recover from a PC hard drive crash, and I couldn't even update the 40GB iPod for over a year, which is how long it took me to get around to re-ripping all those CDs. Having done so, it seemed time to give the 40 gigs to Tom and get myself a brand-spanking-new 60GB video iPod. Very little video, but about 48GB of music. Oh, how sweet it is.
A few other things that just spring to mind that, I have to say, I still really like having around:
My space pen Know ye the Fisher space pen? It's great. I have two, each about $15 bucks; one's silver(-colored) and the other is a black matte. The great thing about it is that the ink it's solid until you write with it. I think. Or maybe it's fed to the point with gas pressure that otherwise holds it in unless pressure is being applied to the point? Or the enclosed barrel keeps it from leaking or drying out? Whatever it is, I can put my space pen in my pocket, it barely takes up any room, and it never leaks. And, yes, it can write upside down, underwater, and across grease. Which means David Blaine could write with it on his scalp, I suppose, if he wanted to.
The other space pen I keep in a wallet in my back pocket that holds lined 3x5 cards for notes to myself. And I have another, even slimmer ballpoint that is in fold of the money clip/card case I keep in my front pocket. So, yes, I have 2 or 3 pens on me at all times. Just, you know, in case there a Declaration of Independence or a papal bull or something somebody wants me to sign.
My fountain pens One of my favorites I didn't, in fact, buy -- it belonged to my grandfather, my mom's dad, and my brother found it in a box in a drawer of a writing desk that's now at his house. It's an Esterbrook, brown. Probably from the '50s. I bought another, nearly identical, but in gray, a few years ago. And before I came to possess either of these, I have an Esterbrook "Relief" pen, made in England in the 1920s. The Esterbrooks were never much collected until recently, because they were really just solid, well-produced, affordable pens. Which is why they hold up to this day, and such a great example of good mid-century product design.
But just last fall, I also bought a great, blue-with-white-polka-dots pen from Campo Marzio, in Rome.
And I have some others I love that I've bought over the years: a blue Eversharp Skyline. A matte stainless steel pen from Rebecca Moss. A green Namiki Vanishing Point. A Rotring. A green Schaeffer Snorkel.
You get the picture.
So next time, the most logical, favorite thing I could talk about? No, not ink. Stationery! MMMmmm!!
("Yes, he's apparently that shallow. And he's now too old to outgrow it.")
Marilyn A. Baker, September 7, 1940 - June 12, 2006
M
y mother loved animals -- especially dogs and, for some reason, rabbits. Maybe she remembered them from her growing up around the forests of the southeast United States; her father was a forest ranger. Or maybe it had something to do with how rabbits are how children get introduced to the Resurrection, just as Santa Claus is how we introduce them to the Incarnation. Maybe she just thought they were cute.
As a consequence, probably because someone just gave her a cute rabbit figurine at one time, my mother ended up collecting representations of rabbits: naturalistic resin casts, indigenous carvings, kitsch porcelains, stuffed animals, Durer prints...you name it. She eventually had to put a moratorium on any more rabbit gifts, but they still seemed to multiply, just like the originals.
Sometime around March of this year, her granddaughter -- my (then) 17-month-old niece -- discovered that she had bunny rabbits in her backyard. My mom told me that whenever she went out the back door, she'd go off running to look for the "bunnies" wherever she had last seen them -- thinking they might still be there, I guess, waiting to play.
So you can probably imagine just how much more popular Grandma was, therefore, when my niece paid her next visit to my parents' house and suddenly discovered all these bunnies she'd never noticed before. Bunnies everywhere, bunnies she could hold, some she could touch, others she could just look at. On Easter weekend, my parents took her to their church for an Easter egg hunt. (Mom said her granddaughter quickly figured out that the plastic eggs with something inside them were pretty special, and got blasé pretty quickly about the empty eggs she came across.)
There they met a very, very big bunny -- I never heard how that part went over, but judging by the picture Mom sent me, it wasn't too bad an introduction, if a bit tentative.
A
month later, my mom was in the hospital, unable to breathe -- most likely due to a reaction to methotrexate, which she'd just started taking for rheumatoid arthritis a week and a half or so before Easter. On May 11, she and Dad had gone first to her rheumatologist, who refused to consider that she might be having a reaction to her prescription, but admitted she was very ill, so they went a few floors down to her internist's office, and his partner checked her oxygenation levels and put her on oxygen right away, and had his nurse wheel her across to the hospital to admit her. She was in a hospital room for a couple of days, with a nose clip delivering oxygen, but early on Mother's Day, they rushed her down to the ICU to intubate her on a ventilator because she couldn't breathe at all on her own.
She was there, in the ICU, for nearly three weeks and on a ventilator for about two-and-a-half weeks of that. I was with her -- and with my dad, brother, sister-in-law, and niece -- in Tulsa for most of the time she was in ICU and for a few rough-but-still-hopeful days once she got out of the ICU. Once she was back in a normal hospital room and, it seemed, starting to regain her strength and not need as much oxygen, I came back to New York, much as I hated to say goodbye when she was still not out of the hospital.
She had some tough days and some better days once she got out of ICU, but mostly her overall progress seemed to be in the direction of recovery, albeit very slow and painful recovery for her and for my family. However, a week after I returned to New York, she took a turn for the worse, and I flew back to Tulsa when my brother called to tell me that her lungs weren't working again all of a sudden. They weren't sure why, but they had to keep increasing the amount of oxygen, and even then her oxygenation levels were dropping back into dangerous percentages.
I got the next flight to Tulsa. Hoping I wouldn't need it, I packed a suit this time, but I wanted to arrive to find her condition had stabilized and things were looking like they were going to be okay. As I headed toward the front entrance of the airport, I saw my brother come in the door. I think I said something like, "Perfect timing!" since I'd just landed and was just headed out that same door to look for whoever might be picking me up. I'll always remember my brother walking up to me, and looked past him to see his wife, my sister-in-law, a few steps behind him. I turned back to him, and he said, "She's gone, Derek."
He said Mom had died less than an hour before. For some reason, it occurred to me then that my plane had probably just begun its descent into Tulsa.
O
ur last in-person conversation had been a bit fraught with tensions, as she was suffering from a steroid-induced psychosis. She'd been on heavy doses of prednisone for three weeks by that point, and the hospital staff said it was very common. Also common, unfortunately, is that people in a kind of hypomania like that will often take it out on those most familiar to them (i.e., family and friends). Which she did, but we rationalized that, as long as we were there to play the bad cop, the doctors and nurses could do their jobs more easily to get her weaned off the steroids and well enough to go home. Which was all she wanted to do, she kept saying: to go home, see her dogs and her granddaughter. However, she was too weak at that point even to sit up for longer than 10 minutes, and so there was no way to get her home and in the house, let alone have her take even the most basic care of herself once there.
So she was going in and out of confused or angry moments and lucid conversations the day I was heading back to New York, but the last thing we said to each other in person was "I love you" and "I love you, too." And the night before she died -- although none of us, including her, had any idea that that was what it was -- we talked on the phone. She was on an oxygen mask; she'd been having some problems getting enough oxygen into her system, for some reason (the first signs that her lungs were worsening, we realized later), whereas just a few days before she'd been doing pretty well on just 28 percent oxygen delivered through a nose cannula. But despite the mask muffling her words, we were able to have a brief conversation. She wanted to know if Tom had made it back okay from India and asked about his trip.
Our last words then, too, were "I love you" and "I love you, too." Not that either one of us needed to hear that to know it -- we'd told each other that so many times, and meant it, I never would have had a doubt even if she'd been at the worst stage of her steroid psychosis a week before. But I'm still glad we said it. I didn't get to hug her goodbye, and I could have really used that -- but then, almost no one does get to do that with the people they love and lose, because we never really know that this time, it's actually the final goodbye.
T
he second thing my brother told me at the airport was that, according to Dad, upon her death Mom had wanted her body "donated to science." We weren't even sure what that meant, but it didn't surprise us in the least. It was exactly like her. But in order to make such a donation of a body or tissues, one needs to make arrangements ahead of time with a medical school and the hospital staff needs to know, because certain things are done at the moment of death for such donations. Additionally, the hospital staff said that, because she had rheumatoid arthritis, none of her tissues could be safely used in organ transplants and, because she'd been on oxygen for so long, even her eyes couldn't be donated. So, unfortunately, that was one wish we weren't able to fulfill for her.
Not two minutes after my brother told me she had died, Tom called my cellphone while we were in the short-term parking lot of the airport, and I told him. He'd been in meetings somewhere all day, and I hadn't had a way to find him and tell him before I'd left that afternoon, so I'd just left messages on his phones. Once I told him, he immediately ordered tickets to get to Tulsa the next day, and later that night, after we'd talked again, he sent out e-mails to my friends, church and colleagues to let them know what had happened.
My brother, sister-in-law, and I went to the hospital and the room where she'd died. The irony, among many sick ironies, is that her room was on the the physical therapy floor, because they wanted to get her strength back so she could, in fact, go home. While not unheard of, I'm sure, I imagine the physical therapy ward sees fewer deaths than most of the wings of that hospital. My dad, his sister, and some other family friends (I forget now who) were there, as was one of the ministers from my parents' church.
The minister related a true story involving a track meet and a girl who'd barely finished the last lap, or didn't, or something, as a metaphor for what Mom had just been through. It didn't actually make any sense to me, but at that moment, basically nothing did.
Then he led us in a prayer. We told him we'd be by the church the next day to discuss the memorial service arrangements, and then he left. After he left, I read Psalm 121 from my prayer book, because on one day a few weeks earlier, when Mom had been extubated from the ventilator (but was then reintubated less than a day later), I had read that to her and she said it was her mother's favorite psalm. So I read it again now in a different hospital room and feeling very different from that earlier moment when we'd had so much hope.
I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come?
My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot be moved and he who watches over you will not fall asleep.
Behold, he who keeps watch over Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep;
The Lord himself watches over you; the Lord is your shade at your right hand,
So that the sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.
The Lord shall preserve you from all evil; it is he who shall keep you safe.
The Lord shall watch over your going out and your coming in, from this time forth for evermore.
I also read the commendatory prayer, which at other times I've thought is one of the most beautiful and moving prayers in the entire Book of Common Prayer. At that moment, it was the only one I could read that made any sense to me:
Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant Marilyn. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive her into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. Amen.
May her soul and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.
We each said a few tearful words to a body we recognized, but the person was clearly no longer there. Then we gathered up the few things she'd had with her in the hospital, including the beautiful flowers Tom had sent which had arrived just that morning. (Since she hadn't really been able talk with the oxygen mask on full force at that point, there was a note beside the flowers that she had written in a very shaky penmanship, asking a nurse or aide to read the card to find out who they were from.)
It sounds absurd now to say so, but the next thing we did was go out for Mexican food. To her favorite restaurant, to be sure, but even at the time, it felt a little weird.
T
he next day, my father, brother and I met with the one of the directors at a funeral home near their house, owned by someone they'd known for many decades at their church. It was not a happy occasion, certainly, but it probably was one of the less emotionally troubled meetings that funeral director had to deal with all week. For one thing, my mother was not highly sentimental, at least not in conventional ways. About people and her dogs, she could be very attached, but all our choices at the funeral home at least were very easy. When it came time for the the sensitive issue of the "price list," we just looked at it and knew that we'd need nothing on it except cremation and, maybe, a guest book for the memorial service.
No special urns. We didn't need any limousines, ushers from the funeral home, and certainly not a Thomas Kinkade Memorial Portfolio, or whatever it was. Some people do need and want those things, and I understand that. Mom wouldn't have, however, and so neither did we.
The next stop was planning her memorial service, which was far more emotional for us, but still and all pretty simple. For example, she had loved Christmas all her life, and for years had told people that she wanted the second verse of Away in a Manger sung at her funeral, because for her, it summed up the Christian faith so simply, yet so completely. She told people this for years, and they'd nod and probably think she was a bit nuts, but harmless. Finally, one day someone who knew that hymn well looked at her and said, "You mean, 'The cattle are lowing...'? That verse?"
"Oh!" she said. "I mean the third verse, don't I?"
She told that joke on herself for years, so we've known, for decades, that we were singing the whole thing, just to be sure we got in the manger, the lowing cows, and the prayer that occurs in the last verse.
We chose two other hymns she loved, plus asked that the organist play There Is a Balm in Gilead right before the service, as it had had special meaning for her mother, and thus for her and all of us. Then we selected some appropriate readings (she was pretty conversant with the Bible, but I don't know if she had many "favorite" verses; or perhaps, she'd have too many for us to choose). Two things we knew right off the bat: When the minister started asking which epistle lesson we might use, Dad said "Nothing from Paul." Not that she didn't read Paul or listen to his letters being read, but his misogyny always annoyed my mother and we figured, at the very least, we didn't have to invite Paul to her funeral.
When the minister near the end of our meeting started to suggest some recorded bagpipe music, my brother started shaking his head emphatically before it was completely out of the the man's mouth. "She hated the bagpipe," my brother said, laughing. "The only thing worse than a recorded bagpipe would be to have an actual bagpiper." Which, as a Presbyterian, is almost as big a heresy as using the salad fork throughout the main course is for Episcopalians, but there you have it. Her secret is out.
M
om had died on Monday, June 12. The funeral was to be the following Friday, June 16. Many family members would be driving and flying in from out of town, and there were also a large number of friends arriving from out of town who are really family, too, so it made sense to hold it as late in the week as possible.
The funeral was, strictly speaking, a memorial service, because her ashes would not be present at the church during it. They're to be inurned in the new columbarium at John Knox Church sometime in the near future. But the morning of the funeral, we went by the funeral home to get any flowers from there that had been delivered to the funeral home. There were a few, along with a box containing her ashes. I asked them just to keep those for awhile longer, until Dad would be able to get them. I think they're at his house now. For awhile, we even entertained the notion of putting her ashes, pre-inurnment, on a shelf alongside those of Shadow, Burk, Sugar, and Ivy -- dogs my parents or brother and sister-in-law had had. We figured she'd consider there to be no higher honor than to have her ashes kept alongside a few of her favorite canine critters.
W
e'd asked the funeral home to suggest that people make a donation to the Heifer Project in lieu of flowers. That word didn't really get conveyed, but several people did so, anyway. As it was, there were still many, many flowers, which were really beautiful. There were already a lot at Dad's and also at my brother and sister-in-law's, and when we got to the church that morning, there were probably another 20 arrangements on tables in the narthex. We were asked to gather the family about 20 minutes prior to the service in the church's "living room," which is just a nice room with sofas and easy chairs for small meetings and gatherings. There were easily 40 people in that room -- and we're not actually that big a family, if you just define family by the immediate relatives of the deceased. Which, as a family, we really never have, so it was good we had a huge contingent in there together.
We didn't really have any idea how many other people would show up at the service, however. The church had received many calls during the week, asking for details, so they had printed up 350 service leaflets, just to be on the safe side.
We, the family, had to delay entering the nave ourselves, as a long line of people were still entering the church at two p.m.. Apparently, sometime right before we went in with the ministers, the ushers ran out of service leaflets. I like that.
I
didn't get a good chance to look at the crowd, but I could tell, walking past everyone down the aisle, that the church was packed. The first several pews had been set aside for the family, so we went all the way down to the front -- which would normally be a very un-Presbyterian thing to do, I remember thinking.
T
he assistant minister, who had been in mom's hospital room with us after she'd died and who met with us the next day in the church office, wrote up a wonderful tribute to Mom that was inserted into all the service leaflets. As tough as it can be to capture someone well in a just a few paragraphs, I think he did. Here's what he wrote:
Marilyn Baker joined John Knox Presbyterian Church along with her husband, Gary, on June 23, 1965. For more than forty years, Marilyn was a devoted member of this congregation and involved herself in a wide variety of its ministries. For instance, Marilyn served as a deacon, elder, Sunday school teacher, youth sponsor, Stephen minister, member of the Prayer Chain, and was a member of the Pastor Nominating Committee that called the Reverend Dr. Richard Evans to John Knox Presbyterian Church. Marilyn also valued social justice ministries and was responsible for beginning Project Merry Christmas at JKPC and regularly supported the Heifer Project. Her concern for God's children outside of John Knox Presbyterian Church led her into classrooms where she spent more than twenty years of her life as a teacher.
In today's service of worship, we have used three hymns that Marilyn loved. They are not ordinarily a part of services like this one, but they possess a wonderful and hopeful theology that is worth explaining. Marilyn believed verse 3 of Away in a Manger summarized the Christian faith. When you sing that hymn today, notice its prayer-like quality. We do pray that Jesus will stay close by us throughout our lives and that He will fit us for life in God's kingdom. That is our hope. The hymn, Eternal Father, Strong to Save, is better known as the Navy Hymn. That said, the references to those who face the danger of chaotic and threatening seas brings to mind Jesus' disciples who depended on Him to calm the seas and save their lives. At times like this, we may feel threatened and terrified, too. This hymn ends with a beautiful and repeated prayer that God will save us from all of the perils we face wherever we happen to be. That same hymn also has the value of reminding us to pray for the members of our armed forces who are in harm's way and suffer to secure our right and freedom to worship.
We hope that you will take to heart this quotation that meant a great deal to Marilyn: "'We are not human beings having spiritual experiences -- we are spiritual beings having human experiences."
The call to worship was a responsorial reading of Psalm 121 -- given how I'd read it to her in the ICU, how I'd read it again in her hospital room after she'd died, and how we'd used it here for the call to worship, I will always and forever associate that psalm with my mother. It's a good one. And at least it isn't, say, Psalm 137, instead.
Following the opening prayer, we sang This is My Father's World. I knew she loved that one, because it has a strong environmental theme to it and reminded her as well, I'm sure, of her own father and his forests. When I was in elementary school and taking piano lessons, she'd wanted me to see if it was possible to play a kind of medley on the piano of that hymn with the John Denver song Whose Garden Was This? It was beyond my abilities and probably still would be, but the envrionmental message was not lost on me, even then.
This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears All nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres. This is my Father’s world: I rest me in the thought Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas; His hand the wonders wrought.
This is my Father’s world. O let me ne’er forget That though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet. This is my Father’s world: the battle is not done: Jesus Who died shall be satisfied, And earth and Heav’n be one.
Then followed a Prayer of Confession. An Assurance of Pardon. The Gloria Patri. The Old Testament lesson (Isaiah 40:28-31), the Epistle lesson (Revelation 21:1-4,22-25). Then we we sang the hymn: Eternal Father, Strong to Save. Who knows why Mom loved this one, except that she did. She lived in a landlocked state, but grew up near the coast, in North Carolina, so maybe it reminded her of the ocean. It was sung at the funeral of Franklin Roosevelt at Hyde Park, and was played by the Navy Band as JFK's body was carried up the steps of the U.S. Capitol. And it was sung at Marilyn Baker's funeral, too. One of my brother's and my oldest friends who was there is an officer and a lawyer in the Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps. I'm sure she thought of him, too, whenever she sang it.
Eternal Father, strong to save, Whose arm has bound the restless wave, Who bid the mighty ocean deep Its own appointed limits keep: O hear us when we cry to thee For those in peril on the sea.
O Savior, whose almighty word The wind and waves submissive heard, Who walked upon the foaming deep, And calm amid its rage did sleep: O hear us when we cry to thee For those in peril on the sea.
O Holy Spirit, who did brood Upon the chaos wild and rude, and made its angry tumult cease, and gave, for fierce confusion, peace: O hear us when we cry to thee For those in peril on the sea.
O Trinity of love and power, All travelers guard in danger's hour; From rock and tempest, fire and foe, Protect them wheresoe'er they go: Thus evermore shall rise to thee Glad praise from air and land and sea.
Dr. Evans read the Gospel lesson, and then preached the sermon, which was really a eulogy. He and Mom had known each other for 30 years or more. He retired several years ago, had had some health problems with his throat in recent years, and hadn't preached but one other time in the past two years. But he agreed to preach at her memorial service, and God bless him for doing so. He took as his text the 25th chapter of the book of Matthew and... well, I can't describe his sermon nearly as well as he can preach it, and I can only ask you to listen to this. It isn't too long (17 minutes) and if you are at all still interested by this point (and weren't there to hear it in person yourself), this sermon was, I think, among the finest things anyone could say about my mom, and many, many people said many fine things about her, both during her life and after it.
At one point in the sermon, Dr. Evans also mentions me, my brother, my sister-in-law, and my niece. He didn't mention Tom, which my dad would have preferred as well, but Tom and I were both fine with that. Dr. Evans hadn't even known about Tom until a day or two before, and still didn't know, or wouldn't have remembered, his name. And to be honest, it was already enough emotional drama that week to "come out" finally to my extended family and friends -- all of whom were very nice to Tom and seemed to like meeting him, I should say -- in addition to the obvious drama involved in a family death and a funeral, so I really wasn't up for yet another, wider opportunity to be out, loud and proud that day, all things considered.
Following the sermon, we said the Apostles' Creed, we closed with prayers of thanksgiving, supplication, intercession, and the Lord's Prayer, and we then, as advertised, sang all three verses of Away in a Manger.
Away in a manger, no crib for his bed, the little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head. The stars in the sky looked down where he lay, the little Lord Jesus, asleep on the hay.
The cattle are lowing, the poor baby wakes, but little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes; I love thee, Lord Jesus, look down from the sky and stay by my side until morning is nigh.
Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask thee to stay close by me forever, and love me, I pray; bless all the dear children in thy tender care, and fit us for heaven to live with thee there.
I couldn't really get all the way through the last verse, and I don't think I was the only one, but I made sure I sang "the cattle are lowing," at least, with gusto.
The organ postlude began with Amazing Grace -- with bagpipes blissfully absent, and the family walked out while everyone stood. We left immediately, because everyone was invited to my brother and sister-in-law's house for a reception afterward, and a ton of people showed up. Fifty? Seventy-five, or more? I didn't try to count, but it was It was really a wonderful party, everyone said, and it was too bad my mom wasn't there to enjoy it. However, more important to me was seeing just so many of the really wonderful, funny, occasionally warped, and caring people my mom had known and befriended and loved in her life, all together. That was, in its way, the greatest eulogy of them all.
O
ne thing that hurts is knowing that my niece won't remember her Grandmother Baker. So I want everyone who can, either in writing or in person, to share with her as she's growing up everything they can remember about Marilyn Baker. Not only the stuff of eulogies and sermons, but also the mundane, day-to-day memories. So that someday, when someones asks her, my niece can say, "I don't remember my Grandmother Baker, but I wish I did, because she sounds like she was an amazing lady."
A
t some point in the week, I'd said to my dad that I thought the very thing that had made Mom's death so tough to handle is the same thing that will get us through our grief and on with our lives, which is that we've always been a close family. And I had to keep reminding myself that, as awful as we were feeling that she was gone, what is the only other alternative in such a situation? To feel nothing -- or to feel only regret, or guilt, or anger? So I'll take feeling awful if the reason for feeling that way is because of how much I'll miss Mom.
Because my dad and brother both agreed I should take it, I have her Bible, in which, on the endpapers, she had copied verses and quotes from people that had struck her as important. She has quotes from Anne Lamott, the Psalms, Menno Simons, John Calvin, Isaiah, and many others. Among her quotes on one of the last pages, she'd also written Tom's name, with the last name hyphenated -- apparently as a way of making sure she'd learn how to pronounce it correctly. When I saw it I realized that she'd probably written it there two weeks after September 11th, which was when I told her and Dad about Tom and, by extension, about me. I'm sure that did drive her to her Bible that day for some courage and support, but once she met Tom and they grew to know each other more and more over the last several years, she soon found she loved him very much.
On the title page of the Bible, she'd written another quote, this from Barbara Cawthorne Crafton, a writer and Episcopal priest to whose writing I'd introduced her a few years earlier. I knew Barbara Crafton slightly a few years ago when she worked for the Seaman's Church Institute in Manhattan, and so it was always a pleasure for me to give Mom one of her latest books for Mothers' Day or birthdays. Here's the quote Mom had copied into her Bible:
It will matter that we're gone if it mattered that we were here.
-- Barbara Cawthorne Crafton
I'm sure she knows it now, but I'd still like to be able to tell her: It certainly does -- because it definitely did.
O
n the day after the funeral, we went over to my dad's to help him start to move stuff back into the kitchen. Sometime in early March, they'd moved everything in the cabinets and drawers into either my old bedroom, or the family room, or the dining room -- wherever it could be put, so that they could have the kitchen ripped out and a whole new kitchen put in: new floor, new cabinets, new appliances, all of it. The not-very-funny irony to this is that it really was my mom's idea and desire for a new kitchen. My dad admits that, if it had been only his decision, it probably wouldn't have even occurred to him to put in a new kichen, even though the old electric stove never got hot enough to make even basic things like popcorn. It's just a shame that she never got to see or use this kitchen, but Dad can already cook, and said he might take some cooking classes even, because the worst thing would be to put in this completely new kitchen and then never use it for more than microwave dinners.
However, the kitchen is still not completely finished as of this writing, four months later, although nearly so. And on this particular Saturday, in mid-June, the cabinets and drawers at least could be used, so we helped Dad move things back into the kitchen and make any decisions of "keep it or pitch it," since they'd been waiting until the new stuff was installed to make such decisions.
My niece helped all day long, too. Every two minutes, if not more frequently, she'd yell, "Papaw! Papaw!" And Dad would have to go find her -- because apparently whatever it was that was so important, she wasn't going to come looking for him -- to see what she wanted to show him. Whatever it would be -- a book, a spoon, his cane, whatever she had gotten her hands on since he'd last been to see what she had for him -- she'd hold it up for him to take, and he would.
It was actually kind of helpful, for me at least, to be there at the house and doing something to help get it back to normal in terms of all the stuff that had been moved out to these other rooms. And while there were certainly more than enough moments when my eyes would tear up if I ran across something with some memories or if some other bitter irony hit me, it helped just to be there at the house. There was all her stuff, her desk, her books, all of it, but she wasn't there, and that made it easier for me, I found, to acknowledge that she was, in fact, gone.
In some ways, I can see why parents who have lost a child sometimes keep their room exactly as it was. It may not be so much because they can't bear to let go, but that, rather, seeing the things of the person without the person among them might help some people acknowledge they're gone. "Letting go" is such an inaccurate expression -- except in instances where people actually can't mentally accept that the person is, in fact, gone. But for most people, I don't think "letting go" is the right expression at all. You can never let go of something that you didn't possess, and possession is a poor substitute for real love in any relationship, especially with those closest to us.
You'll notice I'm doing my best here to avoid quoting any proverb that uses the expression "set it free; if it comes back to you...."
T
he next day, Sunday, was Fathers' Day.
Tom had to fly back to New York (I was leaving the next day myself), so I took him to the airport. The rest of us had originally planned that we would each go to our own churches that morning -- me to the Episcopal church downtown, my brother, sister-in-law and niece to their church downtown, Dad to John Knox -- having spent quite a bit of time and emotion with each other for the past five weeks. However, my brother had seen the sign-up sheet for chancel flowers at John Knox on Friday, and observed my Mom and Dad were coincidentally signed up to give the flowers for that very Sunday -- probably in honor of fathers in our family or fathers everywhere. So, given the emotional weight such a notice in the bulletin could have carried, my brother and sister-in-law had decided instead to take my niece to church to sit with my dad, and so I decided to join them, too. And, having decided so, it made all the sense in the world to us that morning, since it was, in fact, Fathers' Day.
As it turned out, the service leaflets for that Sunday had been done on Friday, and realizing that they had more than enough flowers from the memorial service, the church staff had kept the flowers from Friday to use on Sunday, which was nice. The flowers from Friday in the narthex were all still there, too. We wanted the church to distribute the cut flowers to shut-ins and any parishioners in the hospital or in nursing homes, but we took those with roots home with us afterward, so that my brother could replant them in his yard, which I'll enjoy thinking about when I picture his house from now on.
T
he strangest things have meaning when you're emotionally exhausted, I guess. And I was, as I'm sure we all were.
Later that Sunday, after we'd eaten dinner over at my brother and sister-in-law's, I went outside with my niece. She'd been a very good girl all week, especially when you consider just how many new and different people were around. Not to mention how everything going on around her that week had upset her normal schedule which -- when you're 20 months old -- can be pretty traumatic itself.
It had been a warm, sunny day, and coming up on the longest day of the year, so that the sun had started its descent, but wouldn't be down for another hour or so. Soon my niece would be going in to bed and I'd be following my dad home, since I wanted to stay at my parents' house for my last night in town.
We walked outside and my niece very carefully closed the door behind us, as she's learned to do. She can barely reach the doorknob, but can just enough to get the door to shut if she doesn't have to pull it too hard. She had just closed the gate that leads from the deck to the backyard, too (because it was open, and obviously needed to be closed, okay?), when I pointed out to the yard and very quietly told her to look, there was a bunny rabbit.
It was maybe 15 or 20 feet from us. I expected my niece to run as fast as she could out into the yard to catch it, but she didn't. She looked at the rabbit, she looked at me, and then she sat down on the step leading out to the yard to watch the bunny rabbit. I sat down next to her. For over five minutes -- an eternity for her, at this age, to be quiet and still -- the two of us sat there watching the rabbit watch us.
Then she got up, and I thought that surely then she'd be running to catch it, but she just walked, very slowly, toward it. I expected it to turn tail and run, but for the longest time, it didn't; it just watched each step she took, getting closer and closer. She was probably within five feet of the rabbit when it very calmly hopped another 10 feet away, toward to the back of the yard, but still within very close range. Then it stopped and watched her continue to make her way toward it.
This kept up for several more minutes that early evening after a warm June day in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The backyard was a mottle of sunlight and shadow from the big oak and sycamore branches overhead, and the rabbit would move in and out of the light as it hopped a few feet along toward the back fence every few moments.
I stood back to avoid spooking the rabbit. But my niece continued to follow her bunny rabbit slowly through the yard, and it watched her progress, moving a little further along each time and then stopping again, waiting for her to almost catch up before it hopped ahead and led her further on.
Epilogue
T
hree weeks after my mom died, Tom and I were in Vermont for the week with friends. I've spent the last seven Fourths of July with this same group of people, and it made for a very relaxing, recuperative time for all of us, I think. Two of the other couples are now married and have three kids between them -- all within a year or less of my niece's age -- so it was a very different vibe than our younger vacations. It's nice, though, to get older and go through the years with friends you keep year after year.
We were having a wonderful vacation, having arrived on the Saturday before the Fourth, but on Monday morning as the sun streamed in our room, I woke up crying and immediately remembered why. I'd just had a very emotional dream and, even in remembering it on waking, it still hit me hard. In fact, it still does to an extent when I think back on it.
In the dream, we were on a wide, open plain. I'm not sure who all was there with me, although I know my immediate family was there, I think Tom, maybe friends or others. There were several of us together, and we were standing on the top of a rounded hill that overlooked the rest of the plain. From our spot, we could see hundreds of thousands of people in a huge migration, all headed toward the east (or, at least, off to my right). People were joining different streams headed in that general direction, and some groups left one stream of people to join another, and some lines of people converged and others separated, but all were heading east.
We were going to be joining these hundreds of thousands of people, and we were up on the hill saying our goodbyes. Apparently, I and maybe some other people were leaving to join one of the groups headed toward wherever everyone was going, and others on the hill, singly or in small groups, would be joining other, larger groups of these pilgrims. I remember distinctly that my mom would be heading off with a separate group of people, and I vaguely recall someone in the background, taller than the rest of us, who seemed to be waiting patiently for everyone to say our goodbyes so he could take Mom to join the group of people with whom she would be traveling.
So we were hugging each other and saying our goodbyes, and I hugged my mom, and my dad, and the other people who would be going off to their own groups of people headed eastward. It was emotional, but the mood was also bright, as if we were all finally getting underway, and in the bustle of getting on the road, everyone was excited. But I remember feeling a strong sense -- as if I knew, or maybe we all knew -- that I wouldn't be seeing my mom again as soon as I would see the other people. She was eager to get going along with everyone else, but we hugged each other again tightly and said goodbye, and then she left on her way, and the rest of us went on ours.
And that's when I woke up that morning crying, immediately surprised at the force a dream like this could have for me -- and still surprised at the effect it continues to have. They weren't entirely sorrowful tears -- they couldn't be, not with the meaning behind such obvious and sentimental symbolism -- but they were very hard tears, nonetheless.
Goodbyes hurt like that sometimes, even when you know you'll see each other again someday.
