Rest in Peace

My Uncle Rick died this morning.  He called 911 at 4am, collapsed in the vestibule of his apartment building with blood coming from his mouth, and, in spite of the efforts of paramedics both on site and at the hospital, did not revive.  And like that a life is over.  Those are the facts, and, for the most part, the rest of it is a mystery.

That is not to say that it is a surprise, at least not entirely.  Sadly, we have been saying to each other for years that it would happen thus in the not-too-distant future .  He had COPD.  He hadn't had teeth for decades, having let them rot out of his head during what should have been the prime of adulthood.  He lived in such filth and squalor that no one was shocked that he would, from time to time, get random infections in various body parts.  He would fail to seek treatment for said infections until he could no longer walk or urinate or perform some other vital act.  It was not the first time he had called 911, not the first time for any of it, except it was the first time they couldn't bring him back.  That part, for some reason, feels shocking.  He was 58 years old but had been slowly killing himself through poor hygiene and abusive self-neglect so that he could easily have passed for someone 15-20 years older than that.  Although it's hard to really grasp the reality of it, there were multiple systems on the brink of failing, and it was just a matter of which would give out first.  To be sure, now that at least one of them has, we still aren't sure which.  Preliminarily, they are calling it cardiac arrest, but the pathologist can take his pick and we would just nod our heads.  Yep.  Shoulda seen that coming.  Shocking but not surprising.

And a mystery.  What was he thinking when he decided that he needed to call 911 for himself?  Did something suddenly change, or was it like the frog in the pot who, if put in there while the water is cool will not jump out until it's too late and the water is starting to boil around him?  Did he know he was about to die, or did he figure it would turn out like all the other times: with a hospital stay, someone to bring him food, medical staff to talk to, a few rounds of heavy-duty antibiotics, and maybe even some oxygen?

Even more unfathomable, though, is all the life that went before his death.  How does a person get so broken?  My memories of my uncle from when I was a very young child and he was in his early twenties blessedly color my perception of him in his middle age, or, as it turned out, his late years.  I was, I suspect, the closest thing he ever had to a beloved child.  He was a man who really enjoyed laughter.  He would rub his palms together or cross his arms around himself when he laughed, open-mouthed, revealing his progressively decaying gums.  He wanted to find the humor in any situation, and whether or not any were present, he would supplement with anecdotes from TV shows or movies since, for all we knew, he had few real-life experiences to draw from.  As years passed, his humor became progressively more lewd, obscene, and even offensive at times, completely inappropriate to the family gatherings which came to include his neices' children, but in spite of pleas from others that he censor himself, he seemed unable to distinguish what was appropriate from what was not.  It was, of course, uncomfortable and unpleasant and even disgusting and disturbing, and above all sad that such a genial and human desire should be so perverted from the blessing it could have been into a source of further alienation.

It's a mystery how any aspect of his life got to the state in which it ended.  The great mystery of all of us, I suppose, is how we end up so far from the glory God intends for us, but with some people the distance is so extreme as to be nearly incomprehensible.  I do not mean to say this in judgement, for I too am a fallen and bent person.  But why, by grace, do some of us manage to make a little headway while others fall and fall and fall?  Who or what should have caught him?  Why did none of us have the power to, if not fix, at least somewhat mend him?  At least make him stop killing himself.  

From the unexplained hints I've heard about his past, there were some issues going back to childhood.  I don't know what or how bad.  I know that the parenting he and his siblings received was uneven and sometimes questionable.  But I also know that he belonged to a church, both as a youth and as a prematurely decrepit adult.  I know that while his siblings might have come out with some regrets or some scars, they all managed to find their way, to make friends, get married, have children, hold jobs, brush their teeth, perform basic hygiene, pay for their cars, answer their phones, pick up their mail, wash their clothes and dishes, take out the trash, put sheets on the bed.  They function in society as tolerably well as anyone else.  Why not Rick?

By all accounts, except for his inexplicable failure to take care of himself and to sustain relationships with real people, he was an intelligent person.  His genetics certainly argued for him being brilliant, if eccentric.  He almost finished college, but his failure to seal the deal was probably not so much a function of lack of ability as it was refusal to play by the rules.  Having been born of the same line of academic skill, he used to ask me, when I was pretty well established as the valedictorian of my high school class, if I understood the chemical reactions described in my honors chemistry homework.  When I said I did, he argued that I did not need to finish the homework then, since the point of the work should have been for me to learn, and if that was already accomplished, why waste my time?  When he took up a theology interest after joining a church, he was, by his account, which I believe, able to argue really difficult points with his pastor based on some pretty wide-ranging concepts.  I'm sure his pastor loved that, particularly coupled with the decomposing mouth and the perpetual stench.  And yet his involvement with the church did not translate into an increased responsibility or a reasonable grounding into a community or even a basic sense of acceptable behavior in a human relationship.  The Bible was there; the church was there; the life path never veered. 

The only explanation that makes sense, and yet doesn't make sense, is that he had some sort of, for lack of a better term, mental illness.  Simply put, he was just made that way.  He was generous and thoughtful with his gifts: my hardback copies of the poetry volumes of Shel Silverstein are from him many many years ago.  He not only appreciated that author's wit and talent, but also that I, in particular, would also appreciate them.  He continued, even after I was grown up and moved on and saw him twice a year, if that, to never fail in his gifts to me: always books, always something I found fascinating.  Although his presence in my life and our family life dwindled to almost nothing, he always gave my children, whom he barely knew, very thoughtful gifts as well.  He loaned me DVDs and books that he thought I would enjoy or that we had briefly discussed at our last encounter.  I truly believe that he was endowed by his creator with a heart to give and share, to discuss and ponder and appreciate, to be connected to the people he loved.  But the best explanation I can come up with for why he lived and died as he did is that he was created that way too.  Some weakness, some brokenness, was too integral a part of his soul for any of his good qualities or any of his good relationships to pull him up out of the murk into which he sank progressively farther and farther as time went on.  His mother, my grandmother, seems to have some personality disorder issues which intensified as she aged, and maybe so did he.  We wondered at one time whether he had multiple personality disorder as well.  Those are the only answers we could come up with.  And yet they are not answers.  Why him?  Why not others?  If the rest of us are saved from those same genes and some of the same background by some act of powerful grace, why wasn't he?

I'm usually not as comforted as a life-long member of the church should be at the suggestion that the deceased is now in a better place, but in the case of Uncle Rick, I feel pretty sure that's true.  He was not all that good at life on this earth.  He was about to lose the night job he had held for years, and even he must have surely felt, as we all did, that he had been lucky to have that job and was not likely going to find another.  He had a habit of alienating, if not outright disgusting, the people with whom he might have had relationships.  What joy was there here for him?  What purpose?  What hope?  I feel fairly certain that death probably is the greatest peace and assurance he has ever known.  I feel equally certain that if there is a heaven, he will go there.  The last shall be first, the prodigal son will be welcomed home, the lost sheep will be found.  He has long been awaited with tenderness.

The middle of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

"It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine.)"  --REM

Although our weather hasn't been reflecting it much, the school year is almost over.  Tuesday was Gretchen's last day of PDO.  Most of the time she was in PDO I had a class at church, so her being in PDO was really more about her than about me having free time.  I was, however, looking forward to a few weeks of having a couple of hours a week to myself.  Once the church class ended, though, I had to go to physical therapy.  So I ended up with a grand total of one three-hour stretch of free time: the last day.

That day Doug had to go into work really early, so there was no way for me to go to the masters' swim that morning.  Instead, I went right from dropping Gretchen off to the pool.  I flipped through my little book of swim workouts and found one I liked that was 3250m.  Not being a stunningly quick swimmer, this workout took me about 80 minutes.  Add in the time to get there and change, then to shower and change again afterwards, and I only had time to make a quick stop at Lowes before going back to pick up Gretchen.  Partway through my two-mile swim I realized that I was spending my last free day just swimming.  For a few seconds I grumbled internally.  I swim a couple of times a week.  I shouldn't spend my one little piece of luxury time getting my workout in!  I should be....  And that's where the grumble stopped.  Honestly, what would I rather be doing than swimming two miles?  I am not one for shopping or manicures or any other form of expensive hedonism.  So what if swimming is ordinary and could be considered hard work?  That does not make it not worth doing.  It doesn't even make it something one cannot do with gratitude and joy.  It turned out to be a really good swim.  Maybe the fact that I chose to spend my last day doing something I do all the time anyway means that my all the time is well spent.

This last day of PDO got me thinking about all this second coming hype.  Let me first say that I think the guy who claims to know that Jesus is coming tomorrow at 6pm has some sort of self-aggrandizement psychosis.  I do not believe that the Bible was inspired in such a way that someone can use it to mathematically figure out the second coming.  Firstly, there are all the issues of translation, not to mention that it wasn't written in the scientific age when "truth" had the same meaning.  More importantly, though, Jesus pretty clearly says that God's timing is a mystery even to Jesus, and we non-God types should not to attempt to figure such things out.  So, no, I don't think there's much credence to the May 21, 2011 claim.  If Jesus does come tomorrow, I'm calling it a funny coincidence.

But since this prediction has, for some reason, gotten enough hype to be in my consciousness most of the time, and since I had the last day mentality going with PDO, I've been thinking about how I would spend this week if I truly believed everything was coming to an end on Saturday.  I came to the conclusion that there isn't much I would do differently, even if I believed it was my last week on earth.  Maybe I would have left the tar in my daughter's jacket on Monday morning, but I would have still met with my covenant group on Monday afternoon.  With whom would I rather spend my time?  I would still have swum two miles on Tuesday morning even if there was no triathlon in my future.  There isn't really one now, come to think of it.  It is just a joy to use my body, to be in water, to swim.  I would still have worked on my garden Tuesday afternoon because the world is beautiful and fertile and it's a blessing to contribute to that.  I would still have made risotto primavera for dinner because rice and vegetables taste good and  make me feel good.  I would still have gone to band rehearsal to make music one last time.  And so forth.  I would still have biked to ballet class and the bread store on Wednesday, even in the rain, because it made me feel alive.  I would still have celebrated Adam's seventh birthday on Thursday, even if there wasn't going to be an eighth, because he is a wonderful kid and those seven years are worth celebrating.  I would still have gone to his baseball game even if it doesn't matter if he learns to be a competant first-baseman.  I would still have served my sister and niece lunch and dinner.  What else of more worth would I do?  If this was the last Friday of my life, I would still have woken up at 5am this morning so that I could bike to the river to run.  Maybe I would have biked and run farther, come to think of it.   

I've been finding it easy to get that used-up, underfilled feeling lately.  I do and do and give and help and clean and cook, and to what end?  For what return?  Little praise or appreciation comes my way.  No money or recognition.  No conclusion or resolution or time off.  (Come to think of it, the second-coming might be a nice change of pace....)  Not even enough sleep.  And nothing I do stays done: it all must be done again tomorrow, if not sooner.  And while all of this will probably still be true on Monday morning when I am still here, still in the routine of do and do and give and help and clean and cook, there is great encouragement in the thought that even if I believed Jesus was coming tomorrow, I would still have wanted to do the things I did today.

I don't really blame people who, misled by the hoopla, blew off work and threw a wild party on their supposed last day on earth.  (Well, I blame them for being ignorant and gullible and probably for continuing to be such on May 22 and beyond.)  But I can't be too upset by it because how unbelievably blessed are those of us who, on their last week on earth, would choose to do pretty much what they always do with the people they see every week?  For the beauty of that realization, I'm glad the world is ending again in December of 2012.

For the Hope that is in me

Today I was, in real life, asked to give an accounting for the hope that is in me.  Is a person ever fully prepared for that?  I'm not sure I was, but I stood there and looked in the face of the questioner and made a start.  It would be easy, at least in some ways, to say that I just believe in Jesus and be done with it, but this was a genuine asking, someone looking for a real-life blood and guts kind of answer.

I won't say that I failed to give an accurate accounting.  I said some true things: that what looks to others to be something profound and unwavering and focused is, internally, a constant seeking and questioning and, frankly, failing to live up to expectations.  And if what this person wants is to have what I have, she may already be there.  The next step is just to keep showing up and showing up and showing up and showing up.  It is the kind of devotion that was the content of the sermon.  For once a sermon meant to hit the heart, to spur us to action, the type of sermon that usually reveals to me my inadequacy actually showed me that, hey, I'm doing it.  Endurance I got.  Persistance and stubbornness, check.  The tedious, the mundane, the repetitive: yup.  Devotion just may be one of my gifts.  I'm there, man, and I mean literally, almost every day of the week.  Sometimes twice.  And that, blessedly, is where today's conversation started.  It started with me taking credit for something.

My friend asked me about running.  I ran 38 minutes this morning and said so.  Last year I ran a marathon, but I'm proud of that 38 minutes.  Running after a long long injury, one that still hurts some and still swells and turns purple, is a good indicator of devotion.  Particularly when one wakes up and hears the wind howling and the rain falling.  There's a good example of putting in the time and training even when you don't really feel like it.  Of course, once I was doing it, I was greatful, and there's a lesson there too, but I'll leave that for another day.  Having just sat next to me through the sermon, the friend said, "Well that is your passion, right?  Running? The thing you are devoted to? Or is it?"  I said that, yes, it's one of the things, and that devotion must be one of my most valuable strengths.  She asked were I get my devotion.  After thinking a moment, I credited my mom.  She and I are devoted to different things, but I am certain that I learned from her the "just keep going" ethic.  She will care for people until she drops, literally.  She never begs off of anything: work, childcare, hosting a meal, tailoring a whole show-choir's worth of costumes.  So I guess I believe that you can learn devotion by example.  I smiled inside to think that maybe my kids will catch devotion from me.  Maybe they will not think I am just crazy, or maybe they will think I am crazy but also will learn how to be crazy about their own things.  Maybe the daily repetitive work of sticking to it, whatever it is, really does witness to the world around me.

The friend asked, then, what it is I am devoted to.  It's a fair question since it was asked in the sermon.  I was ready for that one.  I am devoted to running, to music (to a lesser extent,) to my church, and to getting my family through every day.  I should have added in reading.  I probably also should have added in that I have some friends for whom I would drop everything.  I am devoted to loving my kids and my friends.  Add those things up, and there you have pretty much every minute of every day.  Seriously.  I don't leave room for anything else.

"You grew up in this church, didn't you?" asked my friend.  I told her I had.  "I think that makes a difference," she said.  We talked about her early church experiences and her mom's faith, and then there it was: the demand for an accounting of the hope that is in me, even if not in those words exactly.  Although in my own head, I am failing to live up to the demands of Christ, although I know of myself that I have a good deal of unworthiness, to someone who is seeking, someone who is paying attention, I am focused and full of faith.  I am the one of whom the question "How do you do that?" is asked.  It is the moment any disciple should live for, is it not?

I assured her, out of a need not to misrepresent myself, that I'm not by any means as certain as I look.  That's a long conversation.  So I will send this friend some of the things I have written about faith and faithlessness, about walking the walk (or stumbling the walk) in the face of doubt, about keeping at it day after day in a number of little ways if not in the grand gesture.  But right on the spot, in a matter of minutes, while my children were probably anxiously wondering why I was not picking them up from Sunday school, I was able to point to something concrete that helps me, that would help her.  I said, "Well, I'm in a covenant group...."

For me, that was the truth.  I'm just as flawed as the next person, truly.  I'm flawed in ways I won't post on the internet, but you can trust me that some of the flaws are big.  But because I am tenacious if nothing else, I don't just give up and let the flaws be the only things that define me.  Love, if you can find a way to do it, is worth the effort.  One of the ways I keep going is by leaning on and loving people who look to me to be doing even better than I am.  I am not unaware of the lovely irony there: you could become cynical in the sudden knowledge that probably everyone who looks faithful is also unfaithful.  I could be shocked to realize that I could be for someone else the inspiration that others are for me.  Or I could see that as Jesus, through the body of a friend, taking my hand during church (as did someone I love and admire after today's sermon) and saying, "See?  Keep going.  Hope."


"Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.  And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved."
Acts 2: 46-47

Simple

Today I feel like writing more about me.  Of course.  Sigh.  The trouble with my writing, or one of the troubles, is that I get caught in an endless loop.  I tell people I'm not doing it because I have nothing to write about.  They, being friends all of them, say that of course this is not true, and they are right.  I don't know much about much, but I do know about being me.  I could write about being me every day.  To tell the truth, being me feels like a hard job most of the time and only getting harder.  That's interesting--to me.  But does it contribute to the wider world?  Hard to say.  I will confess that I like reading about other people much the way I like seeing their living rooms and kitchens, just to see what it's like to live somewhere else, and, often, to see what I can do better.  Somehow details about others' lives turn out being about me too (how self-centered can I be?), so maybe my writing about me turns out to be about others for them (if I ever let other people read what I write, but that's another topic.)  I hope so.  May God's grace make it so sometimes because I don't have much else right now.  Maybe I'll grow out of this phase that's been going on for 36 years.  Maybe.

My goal for this week, and for the last few weeks, although I hadn't moved toward the goal at all until two nights ago, was to get better at prayer.  Some weeks ago I had checked out a book titled, simply, Prayer by Richard Foster.  While reading chapter one, it occurred to me that my prayer life has many of the same troubles as my writing life.  I don't want it to be all about me, but if I take me out, there isn't much substance there, just some well-wishes, really.  Not really a relationship.  No depth.  And then there are plenty of things about me that I don't want to either write or tell God about.  Of course, if there is a God and God is who we think God is, God already knows.  And then there is the concern that I'm just so darn not good at it.  My attention wanders.  I don't know what to say.  I fall asleep.  I just stop and stare blankly at whatever is before me.  Who am I to be writing or talking to God?  There are so many people who are so much better it almost seems silly to put myself out there at all.

The book starts out by giving permission for all of those things to be true.  It says to start out with Simple Prayer, in which all of those problems are OK, maybe even good.  For example, it may be good to be bad at prayer: "Our problem is that we assume prayer is something to master the way we master algebra or auto-mechanics.  That puts us in the 'on-top' position, where we are competent and in control.  But when praying, we come 'underneath,' where we calmly and deliberately surrender control and become incompetent" (Foster 7-8.)  Oh boy.  That hits the mark.  I do not like to be underneath, to be clearly and humbly incompetent, and I never have.  How ironic that in thinking myself too lowly to pray or write, that the thing that is shutting me off is out-of-control pride.  Foster says it's OK to have some selfishness mixed in with the altruism when it comes to prayer.  As Foster explains, you can see it like a child talking to parents.  Just because my children have crazy and selfish and confusing requests, how much better to have them tell me than to have them be afraid to tell me.  Foster says that prayer begins wherever we are because wherever we are is the only place God can meet us.  Simple and obvious.  He writes, "We must never believe the lie that says that the details of our lives are not the proper content of prayer" (Foster 12).  He makes sense, and I think, as I read about simple prayer, I can do that.  To make matters better, we believe, and scripture promises, that God's grace makes even a lousy prayer holy.  Even the worst prayer is still prayer.

When I sit down to write something and find the same old inhibitions haunting me--I have nothing to say worthy of being read, it's all about me, this may not be any good, etc.--I wonder if maybe I should give myself permission to continue on with my simple writing, as Foster gives permission for simple prayer.  To just write from where I am with the stuff I have and allow it to be shoddy or laughably bad or ignorant or boring.  What, after all, do I have to lose?  Pride perhaps, but I'll admit here that pride isn't serving me very well.  I am risking the low opinion of others, which is very scary to me, but the opinion of others is not something I can ever control.  Their opinions are their problems, not mine.  They can stop reading at any time.  I may suck at writing and have only drivel to contribute, but for some reason I am drawn to it.  I feel little tugs.  I feel better while I'm writing.  Maybe it's worth being mediocre and self-centered and vulnerable.  Maybe good will come of it.  Maybe it's OK to be simple.  The alternative, it appears, is to be nothing, and there doesn't seem to be nearly as much room for redemption (or blind luck or grace or whatever we want to call it) in doing nothing.

"'Tis a gift to be simple. 'Tis a gift to be free. 'Tis a gift to come down where you ought to be."  --Shaker hymn