The Measure You Use This year I’ve made a new friend on Facebook that is a Volunteer Coordinator for Hospice, and therefore is involved professionally with a culture that deals with death as its primary function. She has been instrumental in shaping some of my thoughts on the subject of death recently by challenging some of my pat conclusions and facile notions. I know that a lot of you have turned 40 this year, or have done so recently, or are about to. This is kind of the time that we take stock of the overall direction we’re headed, the things we’ve accomplished thus far, and what will be our lasting legacy. One of the key components to doing that, is to realize that no matter what else happens, this story ends. That is a defining fact of our existence here, regardless of one’s metaphysical outlook on the availability of an afterlife, or lack thereof, everybody goes down to the Big Sleep. So whatever it is you’re going to do, now might be a good time to get down to the business of doing it. I’m no stranger to death, although I know several people in life who are acquainted with it much better than I, to their regret. But there are far more of my friends who have only had glancing interactions with it, from the passing of distant relatives or old high school friends that they had long since fallen out of contact with. It’s a broad spectrum, and our individual responses to it vary greatly of course. I remember my first experience, when my Great Grandmother passed while she was visiting us at our home in Monterey, California. I was 5. I was outside playing in the back yard, and my Mom and Dad came out to tell us that Gram the Great, as we called her, had gone home to God. I had no understanding of what any of that really meant, although I was instantly filled with a kind of numinous awe, and a certainty that my sister’s bed would now be haunted because Gram had been sleeping there during her visit while Laura slept on the futon on the floor in my room. That same vague certainty of her lingering presence haunting that bed in particular stayed with me even into high school, although a dozen years had passed and we’d moved three times by then. Maybe it’s because of the awful prayers I was taught as a kid. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake…” What? What kind of crap is that to teach a kid, I could die in my sleep? I inherited that bed frame once my sister had moved out, and took it because it was better than what I was using, but believe you me I hadn’t forgotten for a second that it had been the particular portal in space and time from whence Gram had exited this mortal coil to whatever may lie beyond. Not being especially superstitious, I easily pushed those preternatural instincts aside and slept easy in the bed, which was really just the same frame by that point, as the mattress had gone on to the great landfill in the sky by then. But there was the occasional uneasy night of slumber, owing to some racial memory encoded in genes passed on to me from tens of thousands years of wondering what was out beyond the fire light in the darkness. CS Lewis said that if you were in a room and told that a hungry tiger was outside the door, you would feel a kind of apprehension specific to the level of danger that represents. But if you were told that there was a malicious ghost outside the door, and you believed it, the kind of feeling that might induce in you would be entirely different. The latter is the kind of fear that we reserve for Death, as a great unknown. Not necessarily for dying in a car accident, or by some disease, which is more like the fear of the Tiger in its practical specificity, but for the approach of our unavoidable demise at some unknown point in the future, which might be minutes or decades away. No way of knowing. If you’re a really practical person, eventually those kinds of fears give way to more realistic concerns. You trade monsters under the bed for cholesterol and blood pressure, serial killers for car accidents, and post-apocalyptic nuclear landscapes for mortgages and lower back pain. The rest of that shit is just not gonna happen. And as we age the practical realities of the concurrent aging of our loved ones creates a kind of schedule of events we will have to deal with. Most likely your grandparents will pass first, then your parents and so on down the line. When my grandfather Bruce passed, it was not really unexpected. He was 97. I had a complicated relationship with Bruce, and had from the very beginning. He was a complex man, who had never had it easy in life. Born in the 20s and raised in the teeth of the Great Depression, he’d been forced to leave home in his teens and bounced around from foster home to home. A ferociously intelligent guy, he was also a veteran of 2 wars and retired as a Bird Colonel from the Army to enter into the world of business. He had 4 kids to support by then, and raised them in the Fear of God and himself, which couldn’t have been easy. He married the hardest working, most gentle and compassionate woman this side of Mother Theresa. She raised their daughter and 3 sons in the reverence of their father, and guarded the empire of his reputation fiercely. She never had an unkind word for anyone, and never tolerated anyone speaking ill of Bruce in the slightest. To this day, all of his kids, my aunt and uncles, have nary a harsh word for him, although he died owing all of them many thousands of dollars each from his numerous failed business initiatives, which he pursued even as his wife was dying in the care of his daughter, having not seen him for months on end. I knew none of the details of his awful upbringing as a child, nor any of the complexities of his relationship with his kids. I just knew he was mean. He hit me in the eye pitching a baseball when I was visiting him as a 5 year old and found my crying to be an annoyance, and my shiner to be humorous. He spilled hot coffee on me when I was riding in the front seat with him on a trip and forced me to get into the back seat until I could get myself under control. He always kicked us off the TV when he got home so he could watch Hawaii Five-O and drink a beer. We could go outside, or we could shut the hell up. By the time I was in my teens I was pretty ambivalent toward him, if not actually hostile. My mom, the feminist, was deeply offended by his imperious chauvinism, and constantly held him up as a cautionary tale on how not to live life. After Grandma passed, we were witness to him marrying two subsequent women, essentially care takers, who were substantially younger than him. They decimated his antiques and numerous family heirlooms, stole from him and occasionally beat him. When he was finally too old to stop us, we moved him and his 3rd wife, 54 years his junior, almost forcibly up to our area so that we could keep an eye out, and spend the remaining days of his life in some kind of relationship with him. He made it about 3 more years before the end came to find him. His 97th birthday was a pretty impressive shindig. It is literally the only time in my life that I have been in the same room with my entire extended family on my Dad’s side. We had a ball, renting out a hall and hotel rooms. His irreverent sons bought him illegal cigars and Playboy magazines, there was great food and professional photography. He lapsed into a coma 2 days later. By then, everyone had made it back to the various parts of the country they called home; California, Colorado, Washington, Arizona, and North Carolina. So when the call came in, I was the guy left to deal. It struck me as an unpleasant irony. Out of everyone, my Mom and I probably had the hardest feelings toward Bruce. We’d been the ones to move him up to Oregon, wrangling a kicking and biting mule into the harness to be drug flailing and screaming most of the way. And now I was the one headed to the ICU. When I got there, I found his wife in a heap of tears. She was a virtual stranger to me, more a relationship of familial obligation than any real affection. And finding myself asked to comfort someone I barely knew over the unsurprising fact of the passing of someone I didn’t especially like, I approached with a fair amount of stoicism. All those packaged platitudes at the ready, and being inundated with more medical information than I could process. Eventually, she asked me to pray for Bruce. I’ve always worn the mantle of counselor, since I was in elementary and Jr. High. I have no idea how I came to find myself in the role, but it’s very natural for me. So I’ve spent many an hour on the phone and in person, listening, counseling, and praying with lost, hurting people. I’m alright with that. But being asked to pray for the recovery of Bruce hit me pretty hard where I live. The idea of interceding for him put a bitter taste in my mouth. But I always toe the line, so I stepped into his room, leaving my wife and his out in the waiting area with the Doctor. When I saw what a frail bundle of bones was laying in that bed, it gave me pause. Looking at him there, it was hard to remember what it was that I was so angry with him about. How someone so small and powerless could ever had held such sway in my life. It was then that I saw that regardless of what he’d done in life, whether he’d ever succeeded in business, whether he was loved, respected or just feared, this was his end. Regardless of how hard his life had been, or whatever excuse there was for him to behave the way he had, this was his end. And I heard a very small voice in me, one that seems quite loud when I shut up for a minute, telling me something I needed to hear. I like to think of it as the voice of Grace. It lets me know when it’s time to shut up, when it’s time to apologize, and when I’m being a dick. I think my life would be a lot better if I listened to it more often, but I heard it quite clearly in the silence of that room, with only his monitors and labored breathing. It said not to pray for him to recover, but to say goodbye instead. So I did. I said goodbye to Bruce. I said goodbye to hard feelings and bitterness, and the drama that I’d been rehearsing and rehashing all of my days. Because Grace told me that whatever fate I imagined him deserving, he was meeting it. And whatever mercy he deserved for his awful upbringing, and whatever judgment he deserved for his actions were none of my business. He owed God one death, and he was delivering on that. And I thought of words dear to me, “For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” I decided that I would let him go with a sincere wish that he be found in Mercy’s light, just as I know I will surely need to be. And how, brother. Bruce passed two hours later, and I’ve never felt another moment of disapprobation or negativity toward him. I read somewhere that holding onto offense and anger against another is like drinking poison and then waiting for the other person to die. That sounds about right to me. Forgiveness if for the living, and it benefits the wounded as much as the offender, more perhaps. Whatever fate there is to meet, each of us will find it in our time . “Blessed are the merciful, for they will find mercy.”
Posted on: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 03:20:02 +0000
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