Seven Years Between Haircuts

On May 20 I wrote about a hermeneutical flight of imagination.  I had realized that it was 70 months since Everly's death.  I had realized it had been seven years since Everly's first harsh and nearly deadly dose of chemotherapy, when her hair fell out from the poisonous effects.  Those numbers recollect biblical images of fullness, completion, and specifically the number of years associated with the exile of Israel after Jerusalem was destroyed.  I don't need to repeat everything I said there--you can go back to it.  But in summary, I said that I'm not claiming the verses of ancient texts are directly about me; rather, they interact with my life through imaginative comparisons and reflections.

I've continued to think about whether I should see this period of my life as marked by new beginnings.  Is there something I might learn about my own time and place by thinking about the end of Israel's exile?  "I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?"

One thing that occurred to me back on that day was that maybe the time had come to cut my hair.  Some people know that I started growing it out to its full length when Everly's hair fell out from chemotherapy.  Since 2012, seven years ago, I have had only a few trims when my mom or kids urged me to get the ends cleaned up.  I've not been much of a hair stylist.  I just let it grow as it will, and tried to keep it clean and combed.

I've told that story to many people who might have wondered why the Baptist preacher had such long hair.  I've explained when people inquired about the old man's unusual non-fashionable hair style choice.  I would say, "I started growing it when my wife's hair fell out from chemotherapy.  After she died, I kept it.  So far I haven't thought of a good reason to cut it."  I'm not sure what I thought a good reason would be.  But on that day, I thought maybe a reason with symbolic sense had come to me.

A few days later, I was talking with a friend who told me she had a discipline of "harvesting" her hair.  She grew it out to a full length, then periodically cut it off to send to an organization which used it to provide wigs for cancer patients.  She had done this cycle many times.

I also had sent my hair to a cancer support group once before when I experimented with growing out my hair for few years.  It seemed to be one more reason to add to my hermeneutical reflection about possibly cutting my hair.  I started planning to get a haircut. I even leaked this plan in conversation with a few people.  One person, knowing my mischievous side, suggested that I wait to cut it until I made my out-of-state trip to visit my dad in Texas.  That way, when I returned to North Carolina, I could anticipate getting the "maximum shock value."  I settled on that plan.  Dad was extremely happy to be a partner in getting my long hair cut off, as he was never fond of it.  We took care of it right away after I arrived.

The shock value plan worked.  I've had a great time showing up to my usual activities and encountering people's amazement.  A few have felt the need to tell me I look younger, which is not my goal.  I'm proud of my years achieved.  I'm not surprised that many emphasize that I "look great."  I know that having that long, shaggy mop of hair was in part a way to make myself distasteful to people's expectations, of thumbing my nose at conventionality.  I didn't expect people to like it.  One fellow minister said that if I could get a haircut, it was another sign that "with God all things are possible."  The locally owned pharmacy staff, with whom I've been doing business every month for a decade or more, had to ask my name when I came in to get my refills.  It's been fun to reappear in Durham as a new person.

Aside from the shock value and the fun, getting my hair cut is also for me a symbolic change.  Growing my hair was a sign of solidarity with Everly when her hair fell out, and it continued to be that for the remaining months of her life over the next year.  After she died, keeping the long hair involved shifting from solidarity with her in her living to a symbol of grieving her loss.  From year to year, I did not see a reason to cut it.  Perhaps at some deep level I was wearing my hair like a veil of mourning.  I sometimes entertained that idea, but never formally adopted it as my rationale.  I simply could not bring myself to the point of wanting a change.

In May of this year, as we were approaching what I had come to call my "sad season" between May 24, my wedding anniversary, and July 18, the anniversary of Everly's death, once more the weight of grief pressed upon me.  But under that weight, I found myself in the midst of a complexity of emotional and intellectual ferment.

Intellectually, I had arrived at a moment in my research and writing that had been very slow coming.  About ten years earlier, Willie Jennings and Dan Rhodes had coached me toward developing a book idea based on thematically similar essays I had written.  Dan even helped me create a possible outline and suggested a title I might use.  Yet as he and I talked through the structure of the project, I realized that there were severe gaps that I would have to fill before an outline of the book would make sense to me.

So I started working on those particular tasks.  I wrote and presented papers in the next few years that took important steps toward filling those gaps.  In each case, when I reached the temporary end of an assignment, I realized that I still had more work to do.  My pattern of scholarship over the years would have meant that I would pick up these topics again and complete the research as I prepared to present at an academic conference.  That process was interrupted in 2012 when Everly was diagnosed with cancer.  All of my energy and focus shifted toward supporting her "in sickness or in health."  I stopped writing new essays for a number of years afterward.

Eventually I started to get back on track, but the great breakthrough came about because of the invitation to give lectures at Hong Kong Baptist Theological Seminary last October.  They agreed to my topic for Baptist Heritage Lectures as "Baptist Ecclesiology After Whiteness."  The three lecture topics corresponded to three unfinished gaps in my research and writing.  The gift of a place to stay and focus on writing allowed me to bring all three topics to a satisfying point of development.

Building on that progress, I wrote an essay for a conference in May which further built upon the critical work necessary to write the book I was envisioning.  A month later, on a week-long writing retreat, I put together a full outline of the book, with chapter summaries, a new prologue, and a fleshed out proposal so that colleagues could help me refine it before sending it to a publisher.

Yes, something new is happening in this year of my life.  I am emerging from a season of intense grief toward what my buddy Willie has been pointing me for a couple of years.  He has told me a few times that he is seeing signs that "I'm still living."  In similar tone, Curtis Freeman keeps reminding me that I have important work to do and things to say that he and many more people need to hear. He told me that my presentation in May had him and the entire room "spellbound."  I'll take the complement even if it may be an exaggeration.  And my colleague in organizing, Tim Conder, keeps reminding me that there are things that I need to write that no one else he knows is able to say the way I can say them.  I'm not inclined, at least in my saner moments, to believe with Elijah that I am the only one left to do God's work, but I appreciate Tim's reminder that the distinctive person I am and the life that I have lived entail a message and calling from God that I need to faithfully carry out in my scholarly work.

Part of what is new in my life is also the rising up of joy after a long valley of sorrows.  If any of you followed my blog over the years, you know about the grief I have waded through.  It has not been only grief, but I have sometimes wondered if I would forevermore be known to many of my friends as the sad widowed man.  I wondered for myself whether I would have strength to be more like the visionary and committed servant of God that Everly once chose to share her life with.  Or would I be confined as the broken man who struggles to find the energy to finish out an academic career.  It's an exaggerated contrast, but it isn't lacking in truth.

In May, and June I started writing in this blog about the emotional transformations I was recognizing and working through.  I wrote about friendships, and about taking to heart my responsibility to enrich and expand those relationships with people who care about me.  I wrote about friends who were influencing me, encouraging me, and inspiring me to fulfill what they could see in me, even if I did not always see it for myself.  I'm not going to repeat what I wrote in those posts, but I will reiterate that I'm striving to live not only in the shadow of a great loss, but in the light of a community of friends and the hope of joy in sharing life with them. 

My deepest theological convictions tell me that we are put into this world to play our parts as builders of loving, just community wherever we find ourselves living and working.  We receive the blessing of those who come our way.  We recognize the failures of justice and love and commit ourselves to repair and restore the goodness that ought to be. 

I can't do that if I'm shrunken into myself and pulling away from the liveliness of caring for one another.

A few days ago I was looking through my Facebook account and noticed that it said I am married to Everly.  I guess I never felt the need to change it.  But now it seems as if the symbolic meaning of keeping my hair long aligns with the symbolic meaning of continuing to list myself as married.  My marriage with Everly brought fulfillment, gave us three children, and I believe blessed many other people.  It is okay to acknowledge that our anniversaries ended at 33 years, and the household we built did not continue as long as we had hoped.  I've been saying it for many years--I am widowed.  So I quietly changed it on the worldwide software platform, too.

Recently I was looking at some photographs in a blank greeting card display.  One of the photographs showed a trail through a plush woodland, thick with green undergrowth.  The picture showed the trail bending as it appeared more narrow, extending farther into the distance.  Around the bend, no one can yet see.  I can't be sure what is ahead, but I do believe this is a season of new things.  I've cut my hair after seven years (for now).  I'm opening my daily routines and my heart to build loving friendships here and now.  I'm in the midst of compiling many years of work into a book.  I'm looking ahead to see what might be next.  "From this time forward I will make you hear new things, hidden things that you have not known."  I hope y'all will walk with me.

The Language of Grief and Loss, and Living in the Afterloss

I learned a new word from an old friend:  "the afterloss."  It's what he calls the new stage of life we enter after a loss, an era of grief and change.  I'll say more about it later in this post.  I've been doing some grief work lately--it's that time of year for me between my wedding anniversary and the anniversary of Everly's death.  In the process I've been thinking about some of the language we use to describe our loss and grieving, and maybe stretching and extending it to help me understand my own situation at this time.

The imagery of a "broken heart" is powerful to describe some of the struggle of dealing with loss through death or broken relationships. The heaviness in one’s body, the dark cloud invading one’s thinking, and the erratic welling up of tears all give the sense of something broken. Difficulty thinking about what comes next and the inability to focus on plans or complex tasks are all features of grieving that imply brokenness in my experience.

Of course, figurative language of this sort has its limits. Literal breaking usually applies to solid, rigid items or to machines or processing mechanisms of some sort. While the image of breaking does fit well enough with what loss and grief are like, it also seems that mixing the metaphors is common and helpful.

Grief as a "wound" is another image. This language makes a more direct connection to the organic, fleshy nature of our humanity and its bodily experience of grief.  In this case, rather than breaking, the image of ripping flesh, or a deep cut into our bodies speaks vividly about the pain and trauma of loss and grief. A loved one’s death, or events or conversation which change or end a beloved relationship, can feel traumatic as if tearing open a wound in one’s body.  In the same imagery, we often think of the healing process as stitching a wound and forming scars on our hearts.

I want to riff on what may be another aspect of this image of a wound. Beyond the initial ripping or cutting, there is often also a slow, subsequent, repeated tearing that extends our woundedness.

Very common for people who suffer loss is the experience of turning to speak to the loved one who is not there anymore. Or it may be the thought that constantly pops up, “I need to talk to her about this,” followed by the remembrance that it will not be possible.

The constant little tearing may occur when the grieving person remembers plans already made. There may have been a trip planned, tickets for a concert, dinner plans, a party, a hike, or some other outing. But these will not happen.

Longer term plans also rip the wound a little more. For me, Everly’s untimely death meant she would not be present for our children’s future graduations, and even more painful, their potential marriages or birth of children. In all losses, people lose not only concrete plans, but also imagined futures.  These are dreams of a joyful future which have not always even been expressed.  Perhaps buried in one's hopes are dreams of times spent in travel, in couple time not available during the hectic middle years of life, or seasons with family or friends who have been out of reach in the midst of one’s work life.

My friend Benjamin Allen, whose website and Facebook sites both are about grief and healing in the afterloss, insists above all that we not try to think of grief as a finite process. To be in grief, especially but not only after a death, is to enter a life era that he calls “afterloss.” In this era, we learn and adapt to a new stage of relationship in which who or what we have lost is still present to us and in us, but in new ways. At least this is how I’ve interpreted what he is saying. I walked with him for a short time through the horrific tragedy of loss from illness that eventually took the lives of his wife and two children. I was very young still--in my mid twenties. It was difficult for me to comprehend the depth of his pain. I remember times that I said awkward things to him out of the pat answers I had overheard while growing up, dumb cliches that it took me many more years to unlearn.

This stage of living in grief while also healing brings many complications. It's the era in which those smaller, later ripping events revive and repeat grief.  My greatest loss, the death of Everly, means that all of my remaining years include her presence in making me who I am and in shaping my dreams. Her absence and losing her affect my work and my relationships, and in a way the pain of her loss is mixed with all the other losses, small or large, that follow.

The painful failure I went through in my mid-thirties as I saw a church breaking apart around me and myself impotent to make a difference also lives with me.  In that time, I lost the naïveté that told me I could be a leader whom people would enthusiastically follow because of my "brilliance," my skill in speech and writing, and my sincerity in presenting my vision.  Naïveté both overstated my talent and understated the struggle that we have in our communities when we try to see truth together in the midst of our divisions. That loss makes me less sanguine about leading change, less confident in my gifts, and rightly less messianic in my self-estimation.

The variety of losses one endures are intertwined. Thus each little tear of the heart intersects the ones that preceded it.  All my memories of leadership failure are linked with the ways that Everly held me up when I was stumbling and helped me see when I was blind.

Part of the afterloss, for instance in my era of widowhood, is recognizing what is lost and stays lost. I do not have the same yokefellow that Everly was to hold me up when I stumble. I don’t mean that there is no one. Many friends have been present to keep me from staying on the ground when I fall. My adult children have had to learn that their daddy needs them in ways they previously did not have to face. 

Besides help when I stumble, it is also clear how deep the loss of Everly's discerning eyes and insights is for me.  I am constantly reminded how I miss those gifts, and that I do not have a clear way to replace them.

In the almost six years since I have been without her, I have faced numerous difficult life decisions. I usually feel that I am walking blind. I do my best to call on people who know me and care for me and believe in me for guidance and help.  They do help.  And I habitually work through comparisons of options to try to weigh what is best.  But I have yet to press forward into such important decisions without finding myself surprised, even disappointed or shocked, perhaps misled by my self-focus or by my rosy-glasses vision.  I have convinced myself that I have a glimpse of what may come next, only to find out I am blind to what probably should have been obvious.  These new losses are among the continuing tears at the wounds of the heart.  At this point in my life, at my low points, it sometimes seems the best description is that I have become an old fool.

Now let me qualify that. I'm just sharing a feeling I have had, but not the general stance toward the world in which I live.  Most of the time I feel highly competent and able to offer a great deal to my family, my friends, and the world. So I’m not saying that I don’t ever believe in myself. I’m not asking for people to call me up to remind me how much of a blessing I have been to them. I fully believe that it is true that my life blesses others and is fulfilling for me; therefore, I press on toward the high calling, to take hold of that for which I was taken hold of. So no need to get worried about Mikey today.

However, in the afterloss, I would say it’s pretty much expected that low times will come. I reckon that's true even for people who have never endured a great loss, but in a different way.  And it seems to me that in the struggle to restore some equilibrium, to find some new path, and to fill in some of the holes in one’s life, the era of grieving can often seem to be repeating what already happened. New losses overlay the old ones. To revert to the wound metaphor, old scars reopen, and pain returns to the very place where it was most intense.

I’ve had almost six years of widowhood. Throughout my life, I’ve known many women and men whose widow years have meant they stayed alone until they died.  My dear grandma lived 29 years after the death of my granddaddy. She moved around to stay with family members, mainly her two daughters and her sister. That meant she lived in our home part of each year the entire time that I was growing up. I was a kid and never gave much thought to what her loneliness might have been like. Now I wonder more. I was her darling, and we often sat and talked while she rocked in her rocking chair.

She found a way to share her life with others that gave her a level of satisfaction that I never really questioned. Partly, it seems that her generational outlook of being a mother who cared for a household found some fulfillment in still using those gifts and that calling toward her children and grandchildren even after her beloved husband had died too young.  She cooked and cleaned and cared for us, and she also spent her time reading, traveling, and doing what she wanted to in her "retirement."  I don't recall her talking about wondering what comes next.  Now I wonder what she would have said had I asked those kinds of questions.

In my years of a widow's grief, I find myself regularly wondering and questioning what comes next. That’s what got me started writing again last week, as a beloved colleague and I were discussing her own search for direction in the next season in her life.  Every once in a while I think I may have uncovered a treasure what will fill some of the space that grief and loss have opened up. I think that maybe I have discovered a salve that will help scars continue to heal.  I think I may be looking down a path that could calm my restlessness and make me feel more at home.  So far, it’s mostly still more stumbling, a glimpse of beauty that remains just out of reach. The beauty is real. The treasure is priceless. The path was a possibility. Yet I had expectations that were too great for what could happen.

I’m probably describing what the current cultural memes call first world problems. I do remind myself that a steady job, caring friends and colleagues, healthy and happy children, opportunities to study and write—all of these are graces far and above what one person should expect.  Knowing and affirming that truth of grace abundant does not, however, take away the longing that is part of what living in grief and loss carries with it. 

Some might say that the longing itself is what I should set aside.  I'm not sure I can agree, nor that I think it is possible.  I do recognize the danger of lustful cravings, and I don't think that is what I am describing here.  I believe, and hope I am right, that what I'm calling longing is an embedded passion within humanity to be in relationship, to love one another, to find fulfillment in the beauty and richness of creation, and to rest in the divine presence.  It is the notion that we have been made with purpose and meaning that calls out to us and presses us forward. 

At the same time that I embrace the longing as part of what urges me on toward being what I am made to be, I also acknowledge and affirm the Apostle Paul's claim that he has learned to be content in whatever circumstances he finds himself.  I am moderately good at living that way, but maybe not as good as Grandma was.  Somewhere in between longing and contentment--that has to be where I strive to live.  I don't want to settle for less than the good that awaits me, nor to be grasping after what I do not need.

In her novel Lila, Marilynne Robinson narrates the inner thoughts of the title character as she tries to reconcile her fears with the possibility of two people caring for one another, with these words, "It felt very good to have him walking beside her--good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without, but you need it anyway; that you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it."  That's a good description of the slow and partial healing that accompanies the ongoing tearing of our hearts in the afterloss.  To close out this ramble of more words than I intended, I thank you for your time spent reflecting with me.  Let’s all of us keep walking forward together, thankful for every companion who is willing to join us on the journey, learning not to miss the goodness that their lives bring to us. 

Hermeneutics, Imagination, Grief, and Change

I was late to Sunday School yesterday.  I had gotten up plenty early, and I was about to finish getting dressed for church.  Then I looked at some photos from six years ago, when our five Broadways went on a family cruise together.  I read some words I wrote in 2014 about how I was not looking forward to the next two months of memories.  In those moments a shadow descended on me, my mind started racing, tears welled up, my body shook, and I was suddenly caught up in the grief of Everly's absence again.

Let me quickly finish this part of the story. I did some thinking, some reading, some crying, and then I debated what to do next.  One impulse when sad is to stay alone and deal with it without having to explain oneself to anyone else.  Another is to turn to people who care for you.  I decided on the latter, since I expected to see the loving eyes of some of my best friends in Sunday School when I arrived.  Just last Sunday, another member of the class was sharing with us about her intermittent and surprising intrusions of grief over the loss of her mother.  I knew that going to my people was better, so I went to be in the company of wounded healers, even if I was 15 minutes late.  It was the right choice, and I got the loving care we hope anyone would receive.

You won't be surprised to know that with me there is a longer story to tell.  So we've had the summary of events, and now the more detailed analysis.

On Saturday morning, I was dressing to go out to one of the big festivals Durham throws each year.  I put on a shirt, one of my usual guayaberas, and stepped away from the closet only to realize that the date was May 18.  For those who used to read my blog when I was writing more often, you may remember that I call every 18th of the month an "Everly Day," because she died on July 18, 2013.  It's one of my ways of honoring the blessing of her life with me for 30+ years.  Most months on the 18th I take some time for remembering.  And when I remember while getting dressed, I almost always wear a purple shirt for Everly Day.  So I changed shirts and got a purple guayabera before heading out.

Another thing I usually do on the 18th, is count the passage of time.  We are approaching six years since her death on that July 18th.  Being in a math family, I seldom settle for just one way of counting.  This month was five years and ten months, and it was also 70 months.  Now for those of you who, like me, have lived your lives immersed in the texts and symbols of the Bible, it is probably no surprise to you where my mind immediately jumped.  No matter how much sophisticated theoretical work I do on biblical hermeneutics, that still does not keep me from imagining relationships of numbers and symbols and language that is not directly part of what Dr. McClendon would call "the plain sense" of scripture.  Seventy months made me think of seventy years, the rounded-off figure in scripture to represent the length of the exile.  Seventy, a multiple of seven but ten times over, conveys a message of completion as well as of long duration.  Above all, the seventy year mark in this instance represents an end to a period of suffering, despair, and seemingly endless waiting.

I recognize that seventy years is not the same as seventy months.  I recognize that my 70 months is not somehow predicted or conjured in the biblical text.  But what did happen in the aftermath of noticing the similarity of number still seems to me to be worthy of the scriptural imagination.  From that recognition, I was propelled into a reflection on the passage of time in my life by analogy to the longer passage of time in the life of Israel.  What did the 70 years mean for God's people so many centuries ago?  Were there ways that their recorded experience might shed light on my situation, 70 months after the devastating loss of my beloved?

The numerical similarity had occurred to me on Saturday, but with the coming of a wave of grief on Sunday morning, I turned back to that thought and opened my Bible to the Prophet Isaiah, starting in the 40th chapter, and began to read about that prophet's theological reflections on the end of the exile, the end of the 70 years of waiting.  I read quickly through four or five chapters, not stopping very long at any text, and letting it wash over me.  Then I realized that if I were going to make it to Sunday School, I had better finish getting dressed and get in the car to head over to the church.

The verses were very familiar.  The prophet's words of comfort offer a message from the infinite and unchanging God that resonates in the Bible reader's ears.  The first of the Servant Songs describes the humility and compassion of the people that God is calling to serve in the world.  When I reached the 43rd chapter, I was brought to a text I read with Everly often during her suffering toward death.  It speaks of God's presence in the most dangerous and fearful situations.  It proclaims God's concern for humanity in creation, a precious relationship, in which God has known and given us our names even before we have known ourselves.  And of course, as I have written before, John Claypool's reflections on the the end of chapter 40 spoke with power into my life during days of most intense grief years ago.  God will hold us up through the most difficult times, so that we can walk and not faint, taking one more step in the strength of knowing that God will never leave us to suffer alone.

And what I had already begun to think on Saturday when I first connected the number seventy between my life and the scriptural allusion, also was there.

Sing to the Lord a new song!

I will turn the darkness before them into light,
  the rough places into level ground.
These are the things I will do,
  and I will not forsake them.

Do not remember the former things,
  or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
  now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
  and rivers in the desert.

From this time forward I will make you hear new things,
  hidden things that you have not known.
They are created now, not long ago;
  before today you have never heard of them,
  so that you could not say, "I already knew them."

Again, to be clear, I am not advocating a type of interpretation which personalizes the prophetic oracles as if they are not linked to the history of Israel and the coming of the Messiah, revealing the meaning of history and the nature of the One in whom history resides and finds its meaning and purpose.  These verses are not about me.  The exile is not a convenient turn of events meant to make me feel better or even to rethink my life.  On the other hand, the pattern of divine work and character that the prophet speaks of has ongoing relevance for persons and communities who seek to turn to God for guidance and insight on the meaning and purpose of their personal and collective lives, even in our day.

Thus, the coinciding of the number 70 in the biblical story and my personal story becomes a seed of potentiality as I reflect on this season of my life in the aftermath of my greatest grief.  Has a time of pilgrimage through wilderness reached a point of fullness? Are there signs in my work, my ministry, my family life, my friendships, my study, and all aspects of my existence that point to the possibility of something new?  Should there be some things that I set aside in these days?  Should there be readiness to take a decisive turn toward something new and unexpected, something not even created before now?  What is the new song that I should sing to the Lord?  What darkness will be lifted, and where will light begin to shine?  I can't say that I know answers, but these questions continue to fill in the gaps of restlessness, and sometimes discontent, that arise in the life I'm now living.

This month of May marks seven years since Everly emerged from near death caused by her first dose of chemotherapy.  She began to articulate to us the new vision she had of the life ahead of her.  Seventy months have passed since her death.  Soon that anniversary of six years will come.  None of these are magic numbers.  There are no rules for grief and its duration, no time limits that can be set and enforced.  We have no capacity to know what the future brings, nor to be sure what choices we must make in each moment.  Yet this imaginitive foray into the grand narrative of scripture as a way to recognize the continuing work of God will, I believe, bear fruit for my journey in this world.  May God go with me and with you in each step, that we may walk and not faint.

In Honor of Stella Goldston and Grady "E.P." Goldston

At Shaw University Divinity School, for the entire time I have been on faculty (almost 19 years), there has been one glue that has held all things together.  That is our administrative assistant/registrar/student counselor/information center/receptionist/faculty support staff Stella Goldston.  Before Shaw Divinity became only the third ATS accredited theological school in North Carolina, following only Duke Divinity and Southeastern Theological Seminary, Stella was already carrying a load of duties to support the faculty and students in their education.  Since that time, we have seen five deans come and go.  Stella has learned how to work with each one to accomplish his goals and keep the program steadily moving.

Last Wednesday, September 19, 2018, Stella's husband "E.P." died after they had shared 50 years of marriage.

Just over five years ago when Everly died and I became a widow, I'm sure that for some moment I felt I was the only person who has endured such a devastating loss.  Part of the awakening of my humanity that I underwent during that period of Everly's illness and dying involved becoming deeply aware of the struggles that my students and colleagues, my fellow church members and friends, and people all around me were also enduring.  Previously such things had seemed so distant, so irrelevant, to the life I was living.  It is a sad thing to realize about oneself, having already reached one's mid-fifties in age.  Let's be satisfied to say that I have grown somewhat beyond that now.

A result is that the stories of others' lives, whether fictional stories of lives in books and media or lives of the flesh and blood people around me, take me to a place of memory and empathy.  I've been struggling with my schedule this week, preparing to leave for Hong Kong tomorrow, and having so many details to tie up.  Unable to make the trip to Sanford for the funeral, I found myself suddenly overwhelmed by the thought of Stella Goldston's loss.

I had met "E.P." briefly on occasions when he had driven Stella to work from their remote home near Pittsboro, NC.  His health had been declining in recent years, and we had feared for his life at times before.  Yet he continued to be blessed with more days, and Stella showed great devotion to support him and care for him in the ups and downs of his physical condition.  She has had to take more days away from the office in recent months, and the entire ordeal of their lives as they passed the end of their seventh decade has been a struggle.  Yet Stella remains an encourager of the faculty and students.  She offers her assistance quickly and without reservation.  She lifts our spirits and keeps us together.  She is a committed servant leader in our community.

Therefore today, in honor of Stella and of her marriage, and in memory of her beloved husband "E.P.", I will repeat the words I overheard that swept me into the moment of empathy and memory.  Hearing them helped me realize my debt of gratitude for Stella's life and my care for the depth of loss she now faces.  Perhaps with a bit of self-centeredness, I also confess that these words reminded me of how much loss I feel that Everly is not able to share the joy of this trip to Hong Kong with me.  Thank God for the Psalms.

From Psalm 22:14-15

I am poured out like water,
  and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax;
  it is melted within my breast;
my mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
  and my tongue sticks to my jaws;
you lay me in the dust of death.

Staying still in the devastation of this moment is a way of recognizing and honoring the value of a person's life and of a loving, caring relationship.  And so we sit in the condition of being poured out, out of joint, melted, and dried up.  Grateful--yet overwhelmed by the loss.

May God, the Source of All Goodness, bless Stella and her family in this time of grief and loss.  May the Eternal Son receive "E.P." in loving embrace and joyful celebration of a life well lived and a wife well loved.  May the Holy Spirit of God surround, accompany, fill, uphold, and lead Stella Goldston in the coming season of her life.  And may we, the ones with whom "E.P." shared his beloved Stella, be to her a shield and staff through her time of grief.  Amen.

**************
For those who would like to show support for Stella Goldston in this time of grief and loss through concrete and monetary support, let me offer the following opportunity.
https://www.gofundme.com/stella-goldston-fund

When Words Fail

This sermon was first preached at Shaw University Divinity School Chapel Service on February 18, 2017

1 Corinthians 3:1-23

            I think that most of you would understand what I mean if I said, “It’s been one of those weeks.”  You can probably identify with having that feeling at some point in the recent past.  In the midst of living life, sometimes we prepare our best work, we pray our most beautiful and confident prayers, we express ourselves in conversation as clearly as we can, but nothing turns out as we expected.  We are hurt, people don’t understand, friends are angry, God is distant.  I’m not good at hiding it.  Students see me walk into class and ask if I’m okay.  Co-workers pull me aside to ask what’s wrong.  It was one of those weeks.   

I have made a career out of using words: reading, speaking, and writing.  I read news, commentary, essays, and books a large part of every day of my life.  I listen to preachers in church; I listen to radio news in the car.  I write short, clever comments on what is happening in the world.  I write longer reflections on social issues and the church.  I do my thinking with my fingertips on a keyboard.  I must have written tens of thousands of words as I have struggled to live with the illness and death of my beloved wife. Sometimes what I write is simple and straightforward.  Sometimes it is complex argumentation.

            There are plenty of times when I can’t seem to get started.  Occasionally I begin, only to find myself headed down a road to nowhere, making me have to start over.  On some subjects, I have stored away many long and complicated sentences and paragraphs in the recesses of my memory, ready for me to pull them out on a moment’s notice to clarify a question or drive home a point.

            There is joy in crafting words.  Constructing a strong first sentence or a challenging final sentence in an argument can satisfy a thirsty soul.  Framing a vivid metaphor or a lyrical turn of phrase can give life to a project.  Employing the rhetorical skills passed down by a lively intellectual tradition of preaching can lift an entire room of spirits together, or stir them to anger, or challenge them to action.

            I’m not the greatest wordsmith by any means.  Too many of my sentences meander toward obscurity.  Too often I make an argumentative leap that leaves out important intermediary steps, forcing the listener or reader to wonder why I suddenly changed the subject without clear warning.  We all can look beyond our own achievements toward the oratorical craft of another preacher we admire for her or his depth of understanding, precision of vocabulary, and skill of delivery.  We find ourselves returning to certain writers whose ability to articulate and inspire on the printed page or on the pixilated screen leaves us wanting more.

            So for me, and perhaps for many of you, life unfolds in a proliferation of words.  It’s more than words, but it still is a flood of words.  A few weeks ago, I sat down in a hotel room in New Orleans where I was attending the Society of Christian Ethics.  I had been reading books and essays, contemplating an essay on the topic of reparations in theological education.  Over a period of a couple of days, broken up by conference events, meals, and a small amount of sleep, I wrote over thirty-two pages on the topic, and still felt I had not quite covered all that I should say.  I’m not really trying to brag here.  It’s simply an illustration of how my writing often gets done.  I was only able to do that because of habits coming from so many years of devotion to and immersion in speaking and writing.  It’s far from clear yet whether all those words will make much of a difference in the world.

I doubt that my three kids believe it, but there was a time in my life when I was known as a person of few words.  My wife, who could outtalk me any day, used to laugh at me for the way I had something to say about almost any subject, even those I knew little or nothing about.  She would tease me about being a “know-it-all.”  That’s probably not so hard for my colleagues to believe.  While I slip into the quiet mode still some of the time, mostly nowadays I produce and spout and swim in a sea of words.  I have come to trust in the power of words, especially when combined with the power of communities organized for strategic action. 

A little over a year ago, our community organizing group, Durham CAN, was struggling to see words turned to action on affordable housing in Durham.  The City Council, leaders of the County Commissioners, and of course the Durham Housing Authority all were on record supporting affordable housing.  It’s hard not to think that more affordable housing is a good idea.  But liking the idea and making change happen are different things.  We applied the power of words by creating and conducting a Downtown Durham Subsidy Tour. 

We held a public teaching session about the millions of dollars in subsidies that had gone into various commercially profitable projects.  These were tax incentives and public-private partnerships amounting to tens of millions of dollars from which private developers and businesses would benefit greatly at taxpayers’ expense.  A tiny fraction of those subsidy amounts would be enough to get Durham moving toward more affordable housing.  So we took citizens all over downtown and hung up signs on various buildings, detailing the subsidies that went to private developers and businesses.  Those spoken and written words made a difference.  Television and newspaper reporters’ words made a difference.  Targeted, strategic words made a difference, and progress quickly got underway on three different projects for affordable housing.

A public event like that or a powerful sermon or a groundbreaking book can demonstrate to us the power and importance of words for human society.  The Apostle Paul was clearly a man of words.  He was a speechmaker, a preacher, and a teacher who could adapt his style to the particular audience he was addressing.  In the opening three chapters of 1 Corinthians he discusses this aspect of his ministry extensively.  He reminds his readers of the good times they have had in the past teaching and learning about the gospel of Jesus Christ.  He points out how people started out not knowing much, and that God is able to use foolish people to shame the wise.  He insists that the wisdom of the world may, in fact, not be worth much at times. 

He is setting them up.  All these words, all the things he calls to their remembrance, suddenly are challenged in this third chapter.  He says he wishes he could use some of his big words with them, but he says he has to use words more suited to infants than to adults.  Apparently they are stuck in the age of eating baby food.  They may have picked up some fancy words to use, but they have missed the point of what they have learned.  They might know how to pronounce propitiation or concupiscence, but they haven’t let their training transform them adequately toward God’s purpose for them.  They are dividing into camps and sects, picking and choosing among their teachers to create factions.  Some want to claim Apollos, some Cephas, and some Paul.  He gets no satisfaction that some claim to side with him because he wants them to recognize that all the teachers are contributing to the one unified message and calling God has for them.

We’ve seen it happen.  Someone says, “Reverend Smith never would have done things that way.”  One whispers, “Deacon Johnson never tried anything like that.”  Another complains, “Sister Jones always knew the right thing to do.”  Soon it breaks out into conflict in the committee and board meetings.  Then small groups form in the parking lot to continue the criticisms and complaints.  Church conferences heat up with angry words.  People begin to impugn one another’s integrity and doubt the truth of one another’s words.

We take up sides.  We resist leaders trying to make a difference.  We shut out innovative ideas.  Churches too often work against our own best interests and our best opportunities for ministry.

Paul argues in our text today that all the teachers the Corinthians have had were building on a single foundation.  That foundation is Jesus Christ.  All the teaching and preaching had pointed back to this reference point—the ways and words of Jesus Christ are the basis for all that the Corinthians or any other churches must build.  Yet for all the words that Paul has loved sharing and has depended on to accomplish his work of building up the church, it seems that little growth in grace and discipleship have occurred.  Words have failed.  The people in the church have not remembered what they learned, nor have they remembered who they are.

Paul doesn’t give up.  He starts again to build his case with persuasive words.  Now he tells them that they are a temple.  The second-person pronoun in these verses is a plural.  It’s hard to tell in English.  We use the same second-person pronoun for singular or plural.  “Y-o-u” can mean one person, and the same word “y-o-u” can mean a group of people.  In the South, we know how to translate it differently than the English Bible usually does.  Paul, in this case is saying “Y’all.”  Y’all are a temple.  This is not the same way he uses “temple” elsewhere to refer to a human body.  In our text today, the temple is the community of faith envisioned as forming a structure together.  It’s similar to Peter’s image of a building made of living stones.  But the Corinthian church people have broken up the building.  It’s cracked, and there are big gaps, broken down walls, and fallen roof timbers.  For all the teaching, they have failed to become united as God’s building, the family of faith, the body of Christ.

Paul quotes from Job to remind them that just because a person can make a lofty and wordy speech does not mean one has displayed true wisdom.  They may be twisting their words to manipulate a situation, to try to prove themselves superior, to try to put someone else down.  God knows the difference, and Paul says he can tell the difference, too.  Words are failing the Corinthian Christians because they are willing to use them as weapons.  They are abusing the power of words to benefit their particular faction or camp, and the temple they are supposed to be building is falling into ruin.

Words fail us when we use them against one another.  Words as weapons tear down.  They deny the purpose of human living:  to love one another.  Words that shade the truth in order to try to win are failing words.  Words that construct alternative facts for the purpose of verbal battle succeed only in crushing truth beneath our feet.  Words fail in politics and in church when they become our sledgehammers and crowbars to destroy what God wants us to build up.  We may end up like so much of the world around us by choosing up sides and despising anyone who disagrees.  Paul was a couple of millennia too early, but I’m sure if he had been writing today, the people he was criticizing would be calling one another Nazis, fascists, and communists.  He tells them not to boast about human leaders—if they are good leaders, then what each of them gives you is good for all of you.

I’ll have to leave this 1 Corinthians text to talk about other times that words fail.  Here, Paul spoke to the misuse of words to divide, mislead, and destroy.  But sometimes words fail for other reasons.  For instance, sometimes words fail because they choke in our throats and drown in our tears.  I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had words fail me in this way.  Sometimes a hurt is so intense, the mind seems lost in a fog.  Words spoken seem pointless.  Things I’ve been able to say before no longer make sense.  I was so sure I understood a situation, but now to have even thought those thoughts seems utterly stupid.  Or I had thought I knew the direction my life would go, only to find out it will be impossible for those things to ever happen.  In these moments words fail us.  We try and fumble about to describe what we are going through, but with little success. 

In those moments of pain and struggle, words can fail another way, too.  For those of us reacting to someone else’s pain, we may become like Job’s so-called friends and start tossing words about in harmful ways.  If I approach someone going through the hellish pain of losing a loved one, and I offer platitudes about their loved one being in a better place, or say it’s all going to be all right, or claim everything happens for a reason, my words are likely to become instruments of greater pain.  The compulsion to provide a solution to other people’s pain is really about my own discomfort.  If I can sum up the problem with shallow theological-sounding clichés, I may assume my job is done.  I’ve figured it out for them, and now they will be fine.  What’s needed in times of pain, grief, and loss is fewer words, more presence, and humble service.  Don’t make words fail by forcing your pile of happy, crappy, empty theological banalities on someone in deep pain.  They are struggling to put words to their situation, and they don’t need useless and hurtful words to fill that void.

When words fail us in the depth of pain, we can be thankful that we are not left alone.  In his letter to the Romans, Paul describes the situation when our hurt and longing may be too deep for words.  In that crisis, God has not abandoned us, even if words have.  Paul says the Spirit cries out for us when we cannot handle it ourselves.  We may not know what the meaning of our situation is.  We may feel only loss and emptiness, loneliness that looks to be endless.  But God is present in the midst of our struggle. Remember this is the same God incarnate who saw his friends sleep when he needed their prayers, saw them run away when he was arrested, and ultimately cried out in the anguish of abandonment when hanging by nails from a wooden implement of state-sponsored torture.  In the depth of suffering, God knows the wordless void, enters it with us, and initiates the crying out and healing that will restore us.

Here in 1 Corinthians 3, Paul reminds us that when words fail, whether it is through our arrogance and divisiveness or through our hurt and emptiness, we still have a place to stand.  There is one foundation.  That is the foundation of Jesus Christ.  He is the firm foundation.  He has come for us and never deserted us.  We belong to him, as siblings, as joint-heirs, and members of one body, as living stones in a temple not made by hands.  To belong to Christ is to have our lives surrounded by and embedded in God.  You belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

To know Christ is to walk in his way.  In word and deed, we take up his path.  He calls us to follow him.  He says to choose the narrow way that leads to life.  He reminds us that it is not merely following a road he walked, but that he himself is the road, the gate, the life we must live.  He is the Word, the logos, the dabar, the essence of both God and humanity, in whom we live and move and have our being.  So words may fail, but the Word of God, our Savior, the True Human and exemplar for our lives, will never fail.  Thanks be to God.

This Season Without Mom

I am back in the swing of the end of the academic semester, in between the family gatherings of Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.  It was our first family gathering since Mom's funeral on February 20.  It's no surprise that grief is unpredictable, and this season has certainly been that way.

I traveled to San Antonio for the annual circus of academic religious and textual studies known as the AAR/SBL Annual Meeting, to which are attached dozens of other related groups focused around faith traditions, studies of a particular scholar's work, topical interests, schools, publishers, and most any kind of individuation of religious studies one might imagine.  I attended Mennonite and Baptist professors' gatherings as well as a research institute focused on trends in talking about God.  I went to a workshop on teaching, a panel on a new book, and an alumni gathering.  I hung out with friends, did lots of walking, and considered doing many more things than I had time to do.

Dad met me in San Antonio on Monday after visiting with his sister Mary McCombs, who also lives there.  My time was so short in town, I was not able to arrange to see friends living in San Antonio, to my disappointment.  Dad and I rested one night at his house in Salado, empty of its familiar central presence of Hugh Delle.  We left on Tuesday morning to make the two-day drive to Black Mountain.  Lydia's new job kept her at work through Wednesday and required her to check in and work on Friday, so she was not able to make the NC trip this year.  She went to be with Everly's family, Marie, Ruth, John, and Kenny, in Austin.  Michael and David would make the drive down from Ann Arbor on Thursday.  Jerene's chaplaincy job had her working at the hospital on Thanksgiving Day, so we all were converging to have our big meal on Friday.

The first long day's drive brought us into Tuscaloosa, AL, pretty late in the evening.  It was a day of plenty of conversations.  Without Hugh Delle, no one led us in a singalong.  No one insisted we play any road games together.  We just kept pressing forward to get the miles behind us.  The second shorter day included more conversations about how we were making it in these days without Mom around.  Dad is doing his best to reactivate some professional work and relationships.  While Mom's health was declining, he had little time between their medical appointments and her need for his support at home.  His focus around her care was a development that came gradually and without any regrets.  Of course, it was sad for him and all of us to see her growing weaker and needing more assistance to get through the days.  Now that she is free from those troubles, Dad has had some time to readjust and think about what he should do with his life.  I'm very impressed with the initiatives he is taking to do good in the world and become more active again.  We also discussed what I might hope to do in the coming years.  Thankful not to face much traffic, we arrived to clouds of smoke in the mountains of NC as the sun was setting.

For at least six or seven years, holiday gatherings have shifted from Mom's frenzied work to make everything happen to Mike and Jerene sharing in the cooking.  It used to be that Everly and Jim would take responsibility for the clean-up, and of course that Everly had us all organized in advance to enjoy our time together.  Now, without Everly and Hugh Delle, it was a more sedate group.  The majority has shifted toward the quieter personalities:  Jim, W.D., Mike, David, Michael, and Naomi.  When I am one of the most gregarious people in a group, then you know it's a pretty calm gathering.

Being a little brother seems to never get out of one's system.  So even at 58 and 61, I constantly find ways to pester or tease my big sister when the family is together.  Sometimes, I have to admit, I've gotten too carried away.  Moreover, with Hugh Delle in the house, it seems like I would feel even more permission to pick at Jerene and wait for Mom's reprimand.  I say this because one of the ways I felt Mom's absence this Thanksgiving was in a need to police myself and try harder to get along.  It struck me as somehow backward--it seems like I should have felt that way in Mom's presence out of respect for her.  Family dynamics are confusing and somehow not very transparent to us who are in the midst of them.

We talked about Mom, and of course Everly, throughout our time together.  There was not any clear moment of focus on Mom's absence.  Maybe it was most like being a collection of beads with no connecting thread.  Mom was a thread that held us together.  Now we were trying to figure out how to be together without her.  Nobody had any fights that I observed.  We all did the kinds of things we usually do, with less of the steering, coordinating, planning talk that Mom would bring. 

Just now it came to mind how whenever we would sit down to eat, within a few minutes Hugh Delle would turn the conversation by asking, "What should we have for dinner?", or lunch, or breakfast, or whatever the next meal would be.  Nobody was really pressing those kinds of questions.  With some effort, we agreed at one point to watch a movie together.  We shared meals.  Some went on walks while others napped.  The younger generation went out to meet friends.  The old fogeys sat around and talked, read, or watched TV.  Dad and I watched a very disappointing Baylor football game.

There were some poignant moments, but mostly these were private to each person.  Having been through such intense grief from Everly's death and absence, I wondered if that was going to repeat itself.  But grief is unpredictable, and it was much lower key for these days.  We made it through.  We loved each other.  We reenacted our family traditions. 

And now we are back to work.  For those of us in academic life, it's the high pressure time of wrapping up a semester.  Naomi will finish her dual masters degrees in social work and public health.  I will grade another batch of student work.  And all of us will think ahead about regathering for Christmas, with Lydia joining us.  It is also Advent, a season of waiting through trials.  We all have our trials.  Dad is shouldering his with courage.  He was raised well, and he learned through many years of marriage, pastoring, and organizational leadership.  He's doing all he can to make the world he touches better for the many souls God loves.  And so, we wait.

Mom's Death and What Is Lost with Her

I've written a few things about Mom over the past three months--mostly short comments on facebook.   For those of you who remember my outpouring of pain and suffering in dealing with the death of Everly, you might notice a difference in my grieving this time.  Some of you remember that the family has endured a series of losses, beginning with the long illnesses of Herbie (Everly's dad) and Everly, Everly's death in July 2013, Herbie's death in May 2014, Aunt Dot's death in June 2015, and Hugh Delle's death on February 15 this year.  Each death, each relationship, has it's own weight on our family members' capacity to cope.

I was not surprised by the incapacitating grief that overcame me when Everly died.  I was a little surprised by the different kind of grieving I've had since my mother died.  People's experiences of loss don't come in a standardized schedule.  As a child and a very young man, my grandparents' deaths happened at the stage of life in which it was not unexpected.  Through the sadness of losing them I somehow made sense of their deaths.  But there was a turning point in my psyche with Everly's death, a different understanding of what a human life is and what anyone can expect from living in the world.  Dealing with loss moved from the margins to the center.

I go to this effort to write and post about grief, as I have said before, because many of you have told me that you appreciate thinking through these things with me.  Some of you say it helps you grapple with the confusion of grief and loss in your own lives.  So what follows is some storytelling about the past few years with Mom, with particular attention to her declining health.  More than any other reason, I write about this to help myself gain insight into how to live through loss and grief as a follower of Jesus.

Hugh Delle and I were privileged in the past few years to be together more than we had been since I left home for college.  Everly and I moved in to W. D.'s and Hugh Delle's home in 2010 to share life on a daily basis.  During that time, we developed everyday household routines as well as working through big decisions and life changes.  It was planned to be a short stay while Everly and I worked out housing, but it dragged out longer because the real estate market made it hard to sell our house in Durham.  By the time that finally happened, we were seven months into cancer treatments, and buying a house did not seem like a wise next step.  Mom and Dad welcomed us to stay, and we continued in our habits of living in one house that branched off into two wings, each with our private retreats when needed.  The common space for meals and conversations was a blessing to us all.  After Everly's death, I continued living with Mom and Dad for another year while I sought the direction for the next steps of my life.

Going through so much together built a mature kind of intimacy of mother-son relationship.  Growing closer, we knew much more about one another's lives than before.  Closeness brings blessings and warmth.  It also can give opportunity for disagreement or conflict.  We had our share of both, but I guess even the disagreements and conflict are a kind of blessing.

While Everly was so sick, Hugh Delle played down her own health issues, always claiming that "everything is fine."  Yet it was not fine, and long hospital stays, times of being near death, and the ever-present yet hidden matter of her chronic heart failure made it impossible for the rest of us to ignore her tenuous condition.  One of the pitfalls of living with one's parents is that too often adult child and aging parent revert to patterns of relationship that hark back to the child's adolescence.  In my own way, I sometimes reacted resentfully or critically toward Mom, especially about her health.  It frustrated me that she could not openly accept that her shortness of breath represented an underlying health issue to confront directly.  I could confess a whole range of my shortcomings of kindness in communicating with her, but let it suffice to say that our closeness included both harmonious times and painful times.  I suspect that is true for many of us.

After I moved back to Durham in August 2014, our time together was drastically cut back.  I had hoped to be able to continue a cycle of long stays in Texas with Mom and Dad, but as my faculty responsibilities returned to normal and my community involvement increased, I found it harder than I had expected to get away for more than a couple of weeks at a time.  Consequently, each visit met me with evidence of advancing health issues and change, and not much time to try to deal with the newness.  Mom became less able to do the things she wanted to do.  We would discuss options for making things better, and we added some support and help. 

For the most part, she continued to treat symptoms as passing acute illness rather than declining abilities.  In retrospect, I can't be sure whether her approach of proceeding as if things are fine while continuing to seek medical answers led to any different results than if she had done as I imagined her doing and aggressively pursued solutions to her heart failure.  As her heart grew progressively weaker, it may not have mattered whether she had been more aggressively attentive to that problem.  So probably part of the disagreement we had was about how to handle the grief of her decline. 

She preferred not to accept the idea that she was in rapid decline and hope that things would reverse and improve.  That's not such a bad approach, in that she could without much effort keep herself in a fairly happy condition at least part of each day.  Maybe she saw my perspective of admitting the progress of the chronic condition and dealing with it "head on" as a form of giving up hope.  I can't begrudge her her own way of facing challenges, of dealing with the grief of her declining health.

One result of her way of facing down the struggle was that most of us did not see the rapid decline she was in for the last eight months.  Only W. D. and Lydia were very aware of it.  After graduating form Baylor, Lydia had moved in the room where Everly and I had lived.  She was job hunting, and interviews were slow to get started.  She was glad to be able to offer some care for her grandparents, and she became increasingly concerned for the advancing pain and weakness Hugh Delle was displaying.  Remotely, the rest of us did not get the full impact of the night and day pain and struggle she was having.  Hugh Delle could usually muster up her happy and hopeful self for a phone call.  Sometimes she let us in on the harder parts of her life.

When the doctors began to tell Mom, at the beginning of 2016, that her heart condition was so far advanced that she should not expect it to improve, the seriousness of the condition became clear to all of us.  Jerene made the first trip down to see her.  At the end of a hospital stay for tests and decisions about next steps, it became clear that all the interventions that the doctors had considered were too risky for Hugh Delle's weakened condition.  They thought she probably had a limited time for her heart to continue working.  Already heart monitors revealed that her heart had brought her near death, and sometime in the next few weeks or months it would finally give out.

As we made the decision to bring her home and begin hospice care, I was able to go and stay for a while, with the cooperation of my employer and students.  I went back to teaching my North Carolina classes from Texas for an indefinite time.  Mom was glad to have her two kids home, and we helped organize her medications and treatments with the expectation that she and Dad would continue the routines with assistance from the hospice team and their fellow church members.  Almost as soon as we would make decisions and get the house in order, Mom's situation would change.  Spending many hours sleeping, she would sometimes become alert and join us for meals, only to get fatigued and go back to sleeping soon after.  Every few days, the obvious changes made clear to us that she was growing weaker and losing ground.

Eventually, she became confined to bed.  She did not have the strength or muscle control to help us get her up and move her around.  She stopped wanting to eat.  She was less and less able to communicate.  Her niece and nephew, Pat and Tim, both came to stay and help care for her.  All of my children made their way to Texas to be with their MeeMaw.  They sang to her, sat with her, talked with her, did everything they could, as she held on for her last days.  She lived to see her 86th birthday.  She was no longer very communicative, and she was not really eating.  The best we could do was touch her mouth with a little bit of cake and icing.  We read the scriptures, sang to her, and prayed with her.  On her last Sunday, we shared communion around her bed and offered prayers.  The next day, she died, surrounded by us.

I was very worried about Dad and Jerene.  I knew how I had fallen apart with Everly's death, and I felt some kind of responsibility to try to hold them up in the immediate crisis of Mom's death.  So I was feeling the emotions of losing Mom very differently than I had expected.  Grief is a strange thing.  It is not well scripted, although liturgical and poetic scripting can be a great help in uncovering thoughts and feelings that are hiding just below the level of consciousness.  The funeral service, planned by Hugh Delle, was filled with beautiful tributes and familiar songs.  Mom was beloved, and many people came from near and far to honor her life.  That day was an emotional day for me, and the structured events served me well in drawing out my pain and ministering to me.

On Easter weekend, March 27, I was surprised by grief.  If you go through our family's photo collection, you would find that year after year, there are family pictures taken at church on Easter Sunday.  For many years, David, Naomi, and Lydia are wearing outfits sent to them by Hugh Delle.  Easters were family days.  Even if we could not regularly spend them with Hugh Delle and W. D., there was a kind of presence of the whole family.  As I walked into church on Easter Sunday I felt overwhelmed by the loss of my mother and my children's loss of their mother.  It was a very tearful weekend for me.

I was feeling a new kind of loss for the first time on that day.  It has recurred on most Sundays since that day.  I was trying to explain it this week to Ruth, Everly's sister, and to a friend and fellow minister.  The experience of no longer having my mother living in this world with me seems to have opened up a space of loneliness that I did not know before.  For a long time, when I went to church or to a restaurant or some other place familiar to me because of being there with Everly in the past, it was as if Everly's palpable absence was my companion.  Her absence somehow took on a kind of presence through memory and familiarity of her having been there so many times by my side. 

Yes, that is a form of loneliness, but in recent weeks the loneliness has changed.  I found myself in the foyer of the church wondering whether I would have anyone to sit by.  Now inside, of course, were pews full of people.  I know most of them and would, as an act of fellowship or ministry, gladly sit on any pew with any person.  There is a kind of joy and purposeful satisfaction in doing that.  But it was not that kind of question my mind was pressing on me.  The question came from a lack, an empty place, a need.  I was feeling the need to sit with someone to whom I am already beloved, someone whose presence already speaks to me of their care for me.  My first thought was to look and see if Willie and Joanne Jennings were at the service.  Because they were out of town  that day, I found myself looked around for others. 

The point is that with Mom's death, I am finding myself again in a new place in the world.  Even living far away from her for most of my adult life, there lurked in my consciousness her presence to me at all times.  The one who had nurtured me, believed in me, prayed for me, and done all that she could to seek the best for me is no longer in the land of the living.  Where does that leave me?  Without Mom, I am alone in a new way in the world.  She had borne on her tired shoulders all of the burden of Everly's struggle with cancer and our family's grief at her loss.  And now she who held us up is also gone, leaving me alone in a new way.  Of course I am not absolutely alone.  I have my family and friends.  My church and coworkers look out for me.  God has never deserted me.  Even so, God's presence mediated through my mother's love has been muted by her absence.  I will need to recognize new habits and different relationships in which God's love will be manifest in my life.  It took some time for that to soak in, and I'm just now figuring out how to describe it.

Jordan's Stormy Banks

(I am reposting this from Everly Broadway's CaringBridge site.)

When I was still a pre-teen (I'm not sure when, but I think in Portland, Texas, around 1969 or so), I remember not the time but the experience of hearing the hymn "On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand and Cast a Wishful Eye."  I think it was the boisterous melody and rhythm that caught my attention, along with the lyrics which I could easily understand.  I also remember some kind of visual of a storm over a body of water, dark and menacing.  There were no music videos in those days, so I must have been looking at some sort of children's hymnal with illustrations.  Maybe I was at a children's choir rehearsal or "Intermediate Training Union" (you Baptists may remember that terminology).  I remember deciding to learn that song, and I still have an echo of that memory each time I hear or sing it today.

Recently, reading from Henri Nouwen's In Memoriam, I was reminded of that hymn again.  The short book begins by telling of the warm reunion with his mother when she was terminally ill, and the blessing and joy of being together.  He was reminded of the many ways in which her faith and faithfulness had anchored him and held their family together.  But after their initial time of gathering, he describes a dramatic change that happened in his mother.  She became less able to communicate.  She had moments of obvious struggle.  She seemed no longer at peace, but often disturbed, fearful.  She seemed to him to be in a fight against whatever evil, temptations, and doubts that she had suffered during her life.  He interpreted these days as a final battle as she prepared for the end of her life, a storm through which she was having to pass.

Part of what Nouwen was realizing was that his mother, who had often been for him a tower of strength, was a human being, a woman, who had her own struggles.  She was not just the one who helped the other family members with their struggles.  And he saw this working itself out in her last days of life.  His reflections, of course, put my mind into searching through Everly's days of dealing with cancer and its deadly outcome.

I thought through her last days.  From March to July 2013, there were many ups and downs with treatment and constant pain.  She was committed to do all that she could to keep living with us, and for the most part she pressed through whatever came, asking for help that she needed from us.  There were times when she became discouraged by the pain, but we kept seeking answers and trying to find a way to getting better.  Our family trip in May was for her a great triumph and celebration.  There was only a short time remaining, but none of us knew that.  We kept looking at houses in Austin, hiring inspectors, thinking about how to fit all five of us in a house together, and even negotiating a contract.  At the same time, the cancer was doing its own work.  When our house-buying plan collided with the tumors' deadly growth, the time was nigh.  The doctors diagnosed the situation, and we learned there were no more medical solutions available.  We made the transition to hospice, and Everly lived less than one more week.

During that week, she did not have the same kind of struggle that Nouwen saw in his mother.  She was very vocal with her fear initially that she would be deserting us when we need her.  But her trusted friends shouldered their priestly role in granting her absolution, reassuring her that she had done all that she could do and all that God would expect of her.  They told her they would make sure her children never went hungry or had no place to lay their heads.  And she received this grace and began to rest.

If she had the kind of struggle about which Nouwen writes, it was during her first month after the diagnosis in 2012.  Already very sick, and considered potentially beyond help from medical intervention, she entered the hospital and received her first dose of chemotherapy.  Anyone who was following her story through this illness remembers that the first treatment almost killed her.  In that first crisis, she fell deeper and deeper into a stupor.  Her body became weak.  She could not eat and had to be fed through a tube.  She slept constantly, and emerged to waking dreams and hallucinations.  She sometimes awoke with fearful concern about some matter from work or from our family life, needing to give one of us instructions on what we needed to take care of, urgently.  Sometimes these troubled conversations dealt with some relationship or other matter about which she believed she had done wrong and things needed to be set right.  I know I was not the only bedside companion who served as her minister in that time of trouble.  Perhaps, during that time, it was the stormy Jordan she saw before her, and she felt her need to face the dangers head on and get herself ready for that crossing.

She came out of that initial sojourn in the wilderness with a new outlook on her life.  She took on the disciplines needed to regain her strength and to resist deterioration.  She talked of the peace she had made with her career and her previous years of hard work toward a powerful mission.  She considered what she wanted her remaining years to count for.  And through many ups and downs, she made them count as much as possible toward the goals of taking care of her family and reminding us of the beautiful life we had shared and would keep on sharing.

I don't mean that her 15 months, minus that first month-plus of hospitalization, were constant sunshine.  Everly certainly had fears and worries.  She was a worrier, but not to despair.  And she did not handle pain well.  Many of you have heard her say honestly, "I'm a wimp."  She did not like to get stuck for an intravenous tube.  She did not like any treatment that made her burn, or get chills, or get poked or prodded.  But that part of her life was not so different from before we had to face cancer.  Of course, every time we had to get a new CT Scan and reevaluate her progress, there was anxiety.  When the news was not as good as we hoped, there was disappointment and concern.  I'm not trying to sugar coat things, but I think it is accurate to say that Everly did not face that kind of struggle against her potential dying as a constant overwhelming problem after the beginning.  She was not resigned to die, but she was not terrified by it either.  When she looked back at her experience of making it through those terrible days in 2012, she would tell us stories and share insights as one who had been through a great ordeal.  She spoke as one who knew something beyond what most anyone had known, having approached the brink of death, looked into it, turned back from it, and rededicated herself to a life worth living.  I think you will forgive me if at times I sound like I'm writing hagiography, but what I want to say is that she had faced something, had passed through the valley of the shadow of death, and she did not need to repeat those experiences and lessons again.  She already had learned that even there, God is with her.

So as I look at her last days in July 2013, I don't see intense dread.  She became upset sometimes as she dealt with losing control over her body, growing too weak, too tired, too foggy-brained to act independently.  But these were flashes and passing moments.  It was difficult to speak, but she would suddenly enter a conversation with perception, instructions, and even jokes.  It was hard to swallow well, and she would cough as one who felt she would choke, then rest again.  Mostly, she was at peace with her children and all of us who cared for her around her.

I think we saw more of this struggle toward the end in the prolonged illness of Everly's father, Herbie.  His struggle was longer and painful in a different way.  He observed himself slipping into dementia and losing the strength from his athletic body.  He was exhausted but could not sleep peacefully.  The waking dreams were deep struggles for him.  I am not talking about his character or trying to say Everly did better.  I am merely describing a difference in the progression of mind and body.  Herbie's illness incited his brain in different ways than Everly's, stirring partial memories and robbing him of awareness of the loving people around him.  He feared being left alone and called out for Marie, his wife, at all hours.  He found himself running a race or fighting an enemy when he was simply in bed with family standing by.  He had fought so many battles, solved so many complex problems, trained his body and worked hard for so many years.  As that slipped away from him, he continued to fight and run.

What Nouwen learned, and what we learned from Everly and Herbie, is that our loved ones struggle.  Even when they have hidden it from us so well, they have had their struggles throughout their lives.  Some of those struggles come back to them as they take account of their lives and look ahead to what may remain.  Herbie was grateful for such a rich life, for the devotion and love of his marriage, for three talented and intelligent children, and for so many friends and young people with whom he had shared that life.  He hated to see that go, and the progress of his disease elicited his will to fight.  But some joys persisted through it all:  especially loving to be with Marie and eating ice cream.  Everly's illness took a different path.  But with both of them, we could honor their struggles and rejoice with their joys.

Herbie had been very clear about his approaching death while he was still able to communicate, before the strokes took his clear speech away.  He had had a good life, and he was ready to die.  It hurt him deeply that Everly's life would be cut short, while he might live on after having already lived a full life.  Like any parent, he would rather have taken her place so that she could live on.  Long before he died, he had "cast a wishful eye to Canaan's fair and happy land."  And as we numbered Everly's last days, she also faced with a willing heart that she was "bound for the Promised Land."

I think that in writing about this, both Nouwen and I are striving to be honest, to tell the truth.  Dying often is not, as many of us hope and imagine, an easy slipping away.  It is not only having family together and saying good-bye.  It is also a struggle to let go of the only good that we have known and to face the ways that we did not live in every way as we had aspired.  I can't think of any more appropriate way of handling our grief over Everly than being honest about our living and being honest about our dying.  We get so focused on our own experience of our loved one's death, and that is to be expected.  What Nouwen did, and what I have tried to do here, is also to collect and put together the clues we have of what our loved one went through.  We can't say we know it with certainty, especially those periods when they were not able to speak to us about it.  But we can take what they did say, and what their convictions have been, to see through a glass darkly, until that time that we see face to face in "one eternal day where God the Son forever reigns and scatters night away."

No chilling winds or poisonous breath
Can reach that healthful shore.
Sickness and sorrow, pain and death,
Are felt and feared no more.