David Williams's Blog, page 25

So Help Me God

Mike Pence has always been a bit baffling.  
On the one hand, a deeply conservative Christian, who considers duty and honor and faith central to his existence.  On the other, a supporter of a leader who represents and lives out the precise opposite of every Christian virtue he espouses.   My curiosity in picking up this book at the library:  what did Pence think he was doing?   There's importance to that, to listening to what people believe they are doing as they act.  It gets to motivation, to self-understanding, to the ethos that makes a certain set of decisions possible.
In this book he tells us.  Lord have mercy, does he tell us.  It's over five hundred pages long, with meticulous endnotes.  Every meeting, every person he's interacted with meaningfully, every pet owned, all of it.  It's the whole life, right there.  The acknowledgements section goes on for eight pages.  
Pence and Trump were clearly cut from wildly different cloth.  An example, one that Mr. Pence notes on pages 187-188 of the book, and that hung in my own memory after it happened: He took his daughter to go see Hamilton, right after the election.  The cast, noting his presence, had a cast member read a short statement expressing their anxieties.  As Pence put it, the cast "..hoped we could uphold American values and work for all Americans.  I wasn't offended by anything he said."  Pence publicly described that...and the mixed reception he and his family received...as "what democracy looks like."  Trump, on the other hand, raged about it on Twitter.  Later, Trump grumbled at Pence.  "You took the high road.  I never take the high road."
That dissonance continues throughout the book.  There's little evidence that Pence had significant influence in the administration, other his evident and primary role as a liaison to Christian conservatives and anxious democracies.
Why the support, support that lingers even after a mob instigated by Trump threatened Pence's life?
It seems to boil down to this: What Trump did worked.  Trump instinctively found handholds in the angers and bitternesses of the struggling American working class, and leveraged those resentments to his own benefit.  Trump's force of will, natural charisma and self-confidence parse as authenticity to many, sure.  That this is the modus operandi of every demagogue and charlatan throughout human history...the Neros, the Mussolinis...somehow eludes Pence.  He saw that it worked, and if it works, it must be Providence and part of God's will.  Right?  
Throughout the book, for all of my considerable disagreements with him, Pence comes across as a decent man, a good husband and father, someone who genuinely values country and faith.  At the same time, he remains someone whose partisanship leads him to both excuse and rationalize fundamentally immoral actions.
His anger at the riot on January 6th, his proclamation, "Not here, not in America," those are the selling points of the book, right there on the cover.  That's the entire case for his presidential campaign.  But what does that mean, if you turn right around and raise your hand affirmatively when asked if you'd vote again for the man whose lies were the root cause of that desecration?  How does that show duty to God or country, to truth or patriotism?  
It does not.  It means nothing.
Right there in a nutshell lies the paradox of Mike Pence.

It's Not a Competition

He pulled up next to me, right into my lane, and he was faster.  
At the intersection that releases you from the local Harris Teeter, he'd snaked his way to my side, lanesplitting through the cars behind us.  Me, on my scooter, a 300cc Yamaha.  Practical.  Utilitarian.  Efficient.  Underseat storage filled with groceries.  
He, on a 650cc Suzuki, an SV650S, a lovely and entertaining sporty bike with a rorty V-twin motor.  He'd modded it, clearly, from the rumble that blebbed from his twin aftermarket exhausts.  
I gave him a nod.  He, behind mirrored facemask in a black helmet, close enough to touch, did not respond.  I was on a scooter, after all.
Ah well.
When the light turned green, we pulled out side by side.  Too tight, right next to one another, doing the Ponch and Jon CHiPs thing, which is too close for my comfort.  I goosed my scoot.  Someone had to take position, and I wasn't going to wait for him to pull ahead.   I bolted forward, as a scooter can, little wheels and CVT-maximized torque curve making for a frisky zero to thirty-five push.  For a moment, I was in front.
There was a roar from behind me.  I had dropped a gauntlet.  I, on a mere scooter.  A fraction of a second later, he blasted past to my right, motor wound out and snarling.  It sounded lovely.  
But when he got well ahead of me, there was a pop, a moment of errant combustion.  Smoke, now, coming from his left exhaust.
He slowed, and I passed him, making an effort not to do so overly quickly.
At the next light, I went straight.  He took a right, and stopped for a moment to put his foot down.  Smoke rose in a cloud around him, and he looked around, realizing what he'd done.  A valve blown, most likely.  He rode off, smoke trailing behind him.
O my dude.  So sorry.  It's not a competition.  It really isn't.

Of News and Forgetting

Every day, something new.   It's our expectation.  It's how "news" works.

That process has accelerated, as our hyperkinetic twenty four hour newsday has expanded into the pure instant of distributed media.  It's not "daily news."  It's the news of the hour, the news of the minute, the news of the moment.  It is news broken into quanta, the smallest possible unit of newness, every hot-take and provocation given just the same value as an epochal event.

Last year, there was a hurricane that destroyed large portions of an entire region of Florida.  There was a fire in Hawaii that killed hundreds, and seared a whole town from the world. There was a president who lied about losing an election, then instigated a riot in an effort to overthrow the republic.  Those events are still happening.  

But they're not fresh, not now, not trending.  Not new.

Twenty thousand dead as floods sweep them away.  It will be forgotten next week.  The skies, filled with smoke from a burning world.  The wind changes, and we no longer care.  We doomscroll endlessly through the now, the moment, trapped in a cycle of illusory, anxious urgency.

News has become the agent of our collective forgetting, an erasure, the Heraclitan fires of the commodified moment burning away every trace of the real.

Of Memories and Blessings

"May their memory be for a blessing."  That phrase, in some form or another, has been spoken or written a great deal lately in my life.  First, with the unexpectedly abrupt passing of my mother-in-law after a lethal reaction to a new chemo drug.  Then, again, with the expected death of my Dad after the long slog through congestive heart failure.

It's a lovely, gentle Jewish condolence, one rooted in the traditions and mourning rituals of my wife's people.  I find it comforting, but at times I will wrestle with it a little bit.  That wrestling rises from my compulsive overthinking of every danged thing, a sure sign that I was double-predestined to be Presbyterian.

I love the blessing part, and receive the simple kindness of those words with gratitude.  I do quail a bit at the "memory" part of the equation.  

Memory?  Memory is so fleeting, so malleable, so flawed.  Mine in particular is not to be trusted with the task of carrying any soul besides my own.  I can barely remember what I did yesterday.  I'll put an entire week of work into a sermon, and preach it with passion, and then the next week a kind parishioner will say, "Oh, I really loved what you said in your sermon on Sunday."  I'll smile and thank them, and ask them to tell me what it was that they liked, because in that moment, I don't have a clue what it was I said.  Not just specific words.  The whole thing.  

Memory?  Must it fall to my memory?

Do I remember my mother-in-law's voice?  I do, but it's an echo, faint and tinny and distant.  It feels less real than those voices of the deceased that we can't bring ourselves to delete from our voicemails.  If I ask my memory of Dad a question, does it answer?  Is it him, or is it just a simulacrum, a golem knit together from the fragments churning about in my meat-based motherboard?  My memory seems so inadequate.  So unreliable.

C.S. Lewis wrestled mightily with this in A Grief Observed, as he struggled to cope with the loss of his wife:

Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes—like the smallflakes that come when it is going to snow all night—little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections,are settling down on the image of her. The real shapewill be quite hidden in the end. Ten minutes—tenseconds—of the real H. would correct all this. Andyet, even if those ten seconds were allowed me, onesecond later the little flakes would begin to fallagain. The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone.What pitiable cant to say, ‘She will live forever inmy memory!’ Live? That is exactly what she won’tdo.

As that concept had me wrapped up in a triple tiger suplex, I found myself slipping out of that hold.  Two thoughts fluttered down like butterfly seraphs and settled in my thinking.

My memory of those who have died is not the memory of them.  The memory of them is their completeness, known utterly to the God that sang them into being.  It is God's memory upon which I rest, because there, not a single aspect of their person is lost.  

Note that I say, "their person," because the "Physicist and a Funeral" understanding of material continuance is such a cold comfort, a fundamental category error that fails to grasp what it is we grieve.  Of course the component atoms still float about, as our flesh dissipates into the dust from which it came.  That crass materiality is not what we mourn.  It is their anima, their psyche, their "Thou," their soul.  That's the absence that yawns in us, and why one seeks the comfort of a faith that points us beyond the fabric of our time and space.

The second thought was different, but related.  

It is not my faulty and sputtering memory that holds the ones I love.  It is my life itself.  I in my wholeness am the memory of those who have died.  I could not be who I am had they not been, after all.  I would not exist as I do, both physically and personally.  I would not be in my kitchen now, as the human being that I have become, had they not existed.  They are necessary for this moment to be what it is.  

The closer we are to someone, the more true that becomes.  It's a truth that goes deeper than our capacity to fully engage with it.  That memory rests in God's knowledge of us, not our own fumbling and limited self-understanding.

May that memory, as they say, be for a blessing.

A Harvest of Delight

Two or three times a day, they'll walk by the front of my house.  Different groups, but also the same.
A dad, his tiny daughter on his shoulders.  A mother and grandmother, three kids bundled into a wagon.  A mom, her little boy relaxed in a small folding stroller.
And when they pass the plot of sunflowers I've planted for years by the sidewalk, they'll stop.  It's a riot of life at this point in the season, dozens and dozens of flowers catching the light of our yellow star, perched above a dense thicket of stalks and tall grasses.  
Words will be exchanged, as the sun-golden blossoms peer down at them.  The children get out of strollers, or come down from shoulders.  The adults will point.  The little ones will look up.  From my window, I see them talking.
Grownups and small ones, talking and smiling, marveling at the absurdity of these impossible flowers, flowers taller than Mommy, taller than Daddy, beaming down in anthropomorphic beneficence.
I grow sunflowers for many reasons.  They're a beacon for pollinators, bright as a mountaintop signal fire, summoning and feeding the insects that will then collaterally pollinate my crop veggies.  They're perfect natural birdfeeders, drawing flickers and goldfinches.  They seedsave so very easily.
But perhaps my favorite part of growing them is that simple harvest of delight, those little faces looking up in wonder, the older faces looking down in pleasure at the joy of their children.
What better crop could one ask from a garden?

How One Is Doing

"So, how are you doing," I asked, as Mom and I drove to have dinner with my son and daughter-in-law.   It can be a little hard to tell with Mom, who tends to view everything as positively as possible, who'll answer the phone cheerily almost under any circumstance, who sees the good in nearly everything, in an Eric Idle Bright-Side-of-Life sort of way.

"You know the Aztecs?  How they'd cut out someone's still beating heart?  I'm doing like that," she replied, matter of factly, while still humming and bopping along to the classic 50's playlist I'd spooled up for our ride.

After fifty five years with Dad, and after being with him all the way through the hourglass-trickle of congestive heart failure, of course that's how she feels.  He was so present.  Every few minutes, Dad calling her to get him something, or to come see a thing, or to come hear a thing.  Dad, the social extrovert, with Mom his only audience.  Dad, who doted on her, who told her he loved her every single day.  Dad, who would flirt with her some evenings when I was taking a care shift, embers of a playful eroticism between them still glowing in his fading flesh, the sort of banter that would have mortally embarrassed me as a fifteen year old.  He was still that young man in there, and still...as he would say over and over...smitten with her.  "I remember," he would say, "that time she took my arm, and she looked up at me, and Oh  That look she gave me!  Oh, she got me."  He never stopped being smitten with her.

Of course Mom feels the emptiness, and grieves way down deep.  Doing things, she says, is hard.  She just doesn't feel like doing much of anything, which is why I'm trying as best I can to manage all of the things that must happen following Dad's death.

I still wonder at my own grief.  Over the last few days, it's shifted.  It's more of a heaviness now, and doing things has become harder.  It's harder to concentrate myself, to focus energies.  Motivation is difficult, and requires much more intention.  Get up.  Go do that thing.  C'mon.  Do it.  I manage to get it done, but everything feels like a bit more effort.  "A mild situational depression," I'd say.  It's not overwhelming. I know what heavier, deeper depression feels like.  This isn't that.  It isn't that peculiar energy, that anxious paralysis, that fatigue that traps you in a paradoxically restless inertia, a shimmering listlessness.

I'm still showering.  Still changing clothes.  I'm still able to tend to the house. 

I can still write.  I can still work.  How am I doing?  I am still "doing."

Rache and I talked about that last night, about work and grieving and doing.  "We should be able to take time away when we're grieving," she said.  "Not just a few days, but weeks.  Why shouldn't we be able to do that?"

It's a valid thing, and a cultural failing.  But my work differs a smidge from much of the labor most do in the world.   Pastoring a small church is a different animal, unlike not only secular work, but also unlike work in a larger church.  There are fewer organizational requirements.  It's complex, sure, but it's organic complexity rather than institutional complexity.  To effectively pastor a small church, that community can't your job.  It's your community.  It's your place of strength and support, where you're not the "boss" or "above," but right there in it.  You aren't your role.  You're you.  

Small church not the place you go to be the font of all wisdom, the Guru di tutti Gurus.  It must be the place where you are fed, where you feel supported, where you hear the voices of brothers and sisters who labor alongside you.  Not beneath you, or subordinate to you, but with you.

Yesterday when I arrived at church, our bustling Little Free Pantry was about to receive a delivery, a large contribution of food from the lovely souls at the local Buddhist temple.  Eight hundred pounds of food, delivered by monks and laity, and it all needed to be moved from the backs of their 'utes into our storage area.  

What I found myself doing was carrying thirty pound bags of carrots and onions and taters, boxes of cans, alongside Presbyterian elders and earnest Buddhists, helping set a table for those who might not otherwise know where their next meal is coming from.  

It felt good, to be doing that.

Grief and Loss

I am not, I remind myself repeatedly, on familiar ground now.
I've lost dear friends, sure, and as a pastor have walked many folks through the process of grieving a loved one.
But I haven't ever lost a parent.  That doesn't happen all that often in life.  I understand grieving such a loss in the abstract, and I've seen it through the eyes of others.  I've never been there myself, up until this moment.
People extend condolences, and ask me how I'm doing.  I am, as best I can tell, fine.  A little more scattered than usual, sure.  There's so much to do that has to be figured out.  But otherwise?  Functioning within what passes for my normal parameters.  
There've been moments of unexpected sorrow, sure.  Like driving back from picking up takeout Chinese, and Goodnight My Someone from The Music Man comes up on my playlist, Shirley Jones soprano filling the car.  Suddenly I'm back by the bedside on the day Dad died, watching Mom hold his cool hand and stroke his room-temperature forehead, listening to her tell him how wonderful their life together was.  It was so impossibly sweet, so tender, so intimate.
The throat closes, the chest tightens, the eyes brim and overflow, and I let that roll as long as it feels like going.
I had many moments like that when Dad was in the long decline of congestive heart failure, after watching him struggle for oxygen, when death seemed close and pain was present.  Find a quiet place, and let it out.  Being both male and introverted, I grieve alone, like a wounded animal seeks the safety of the shadows.  It's just where it feels right, and that's fine. 
Yet there are other things I don't feel.  "I'm sorry for your loss," someone will kindly say, and I appreciate the sentiment.  But I don't feel it.  I feel no loss.  Perhaps I will, at some point, a great wave of unfillable emptiness.  Rache feels that with her mom, a "hole in the world," as Amanda Held Opelt described it in her lovely book on grief and the absence of a loved one.
Dad just doesn't feel gone.  He's not physically present, of course, not as he was.  He is most certainly dead.  The ineffable processes of life that animated his material being are no longer active.  I will not speak with him again, not share some triumph or struggle, not listen to one of his old familiar stories.  I will miss that.  I do miss that.  I sat with his corpse for hours, absorbed the reality of it, the finality of it.  He is outside of the time and space that I currently inhabit.  
Yet still, he doesn't feel gone.
I'm too Augustinian, I suppose.  My view of life and the soul and God, too close to my ancient North African brother in the faith.  How can anything that God made and loved be truly lost?  How can I, who am connected to my Creator through that same love, be apart from anything else the Maker has made?  I'm at the point in my life where that's not a theological postulation or a convenient abstraction.  That faith is just part of who I am.  That circle remains unbroken, as sure as the gold band around my ring finger.
One could, I suppose, pick at that thought, in the same way one could argue that my wedding band is mostly just the empty space between Au atoms.  But what would be the purpose of that?  Realism?  The willful pursuit of despair isn't realism.  It's just neurotic.
I mean, how could I exist, if Dad had not existed?  He doesn't simply live on in my notoriously unreliable memory.   He lives on in my body, the meat and bone reality of it, of my unique, deeply complex admixture of his deoxyribonucleic particularity and Mom's.  It goes deeper, not just the flesh of me, but the way that I think and act, nature nurture-shaped by a lifetime of knowing him.  It goes past me, into my sons, into their faces, into their minds, into the warm music of their voices.  There he is, intermingled with so much.
If Dad was really gone from being, none of those things would be.  He is forever a part of my little corner of creation.
Not lost.  Just...completed.

The Names We Are Given

Funny, the titles we take on.

For the last twenty months, I'd been all in caring for Dad. I'd tested him for COVID, conferred with doctors, rushed him to the hospital. I'd sat in emergency rooms, conferred with doctors. I’ve managed home aide schedules and long term health insurance billing. I'd been a conduit of information to family and friends. I'd facilitated outings and visits. I'd cooked and organized and transported, bathed and cleaned up after toileting accidents, all of it, front of mind. The unifying label for all of that, as least as it’s now defined in our culture: Caregiver.

But as of pretty much exactly one week ago, I am no longer that.

I mean, sure, I’m caring for Mom, but that seems to mostly involve negotiating the byzantine American governmental and corporate death bureaucracies and making arrangements, so I’m more her Personal Executive Concierge.

Caregiving is for the time being is not an active label, no longer something that directly defines my day to day actions. That's done, or rather, that time is complete. That propensity is always going to be a part of my identity, and there are other seasons where I’ll take it on again.

All of us have elements of our identities that we consider definitional, which is an overly fancy way of saying that they shape our understanding of ourselves. We are a student. We are a teacher. We are a long haul trucker or an electrician or a contractor. We are an actor, or a writer, or a gardener. We’re a wife or a husband.

Those roles become like our names, something that defines us not just for others, but for ourselves. They are the word for who we are.

Names and meaning have wandered a bit from that way of defining us in the modern era. Generally speaking, we don’t tend much to the meaning of the name we’ve been given, or to our family names. That our last name might be Smith or Fisher, Gardener or Farmer, Carpenter or Taylor, Weaver or Wheeler? That doesn’t mean that’s what we do, not anymore. It’s less a definition and just a sound in our ears now. My wife’s family name, for example, rises from the book of Exodus. Mosheh, which means “From the Water,” the name given to that little Jewish baby found in a river. Outside of that blessedly short season when swim-team was seemingly all we did all the time, it doesn’t meaningfully define my family.

Jesus explores naming and identity in the sixteenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, and the meaning of the names and the labels that can be applied to define our expectations of others and ourselves.

Who is the Son of Man, Jesus asks his disciples, illuminating a title that occurs thirty times in the Gospels and Epistles. It’s a challenging question, and an equally challenging title. In the Greek used in Matthew, that title is ho huios tou anthropou, a Greek translation of the Hebrew phrase ben adam.

We tend to associate the title with power and glory, which is kinda peculiar, because it means exactly the opposite. A ben adam is nothing more and nothing less than a human being, which is mostly how that term was understood. The prophet Ezekiel, for instance, uses that term ninety three times, and it always just means “human being.” That’s certainly a compliment, generally speaking, even given the rather deep flaws we human beings carry within us. In Yiddish and in the German from which that language was derived, being a human being is being a “mensch,” which is a way of saying a person is a good egg, that they really are who they are, that they are genuine and trustworthy.

Where it’s used in Matthew and elsewhere in the Gospels, Son of Man means something a little different. Not “a human being,” but “The Human Being.   “Who do people think is The Human Being,” Jesus asks, and the disciples reply with a series of answers that would have been common in first century Judah and Galilee.


“And who am I,” he asks, laying that question out on the table.

It’s Simon, son of Jonah, who answers: “You are the Meschiach, the Christ, the Anointed one. You are Son of the living God.” He is commended for his successful answer, and Jesus calls him Rock, or Petros, the foundation on which the church will stand. Again, a name with meaning, a name that speaks to the role and place of a person, that defines their place in the world.

What is it that defines us? What is our true name, the name that isn’t either a fleeting thing or an empty sound?

One of the great strengths of faith is that the claims of faith over us aren’t simply for a single season. When we take on the title “disciple” or “Christian” or “follower of Jesus, and understand our every action as being defined by the teachings of the Nazarene, that form of self understanding doesn’t change season to season. Whether we are son or father, mother or daughter, that commitment remains. If we are studying, working, or in a season of rest, that commitment remains. We remain committed to his path of grace and mercy, or love that transcends every season, to a Name that is Above All other Names.

When the world shakes and shifts, and we find ourselves suddenly in a different place than we were, with former roles and relationships changed or gone, we can easily lose our sense of who we are. We can lose all sense of purpose, or all sense of who we are. That can leave us struggling, constantly seeking something that gives life meaning, chasing after one chimera after another.

Being grounded in our True Name means that we remain on solid ground throughout all of the shifts and storms of life. It also lets us hold on to that which has come before, to find that unbreakable connection between who we have been and who we were, to see our whole self as part of something that both defines us and remains forever beyond us.

Whoever we might be right now, that commitment shapes and holds us fast.

A Peculiar Day

Sunday was a peculiar day.

Dad had died in the morning, passing as peacefully as one might have hoped.  He was at home, in bed, asleep, surrounded by familiar things.  Still and all, sitting with the cooling corpse of your husband of fifty five years, or your beloved father?  It's both peculiarly calm and charged with intensity, the eyewall of a storm.  The process of dying has passed.  The bureaucratic process of dying in this culture and the reality of a life without a loved one awaits.  But in that moment, you sit with cold flesh that just the day before told you that it loved you, that heard your voice, and all is still.

Mom talked to him, and kissed him, and held his hand.  I watched him, trying to take in the few moments we would have with the body that mortality had flensed of his personhood.  Time passed, as we waited for a medical professional to come and confirm what touch and sight made obvious.

There was a knock at the door, and the nurse arrived from hospice, a genial Nigerian.  I welcomed her back to the bedroom, and she listened for a heartbeat.  "He's really quite dead," I said, and she nodded.  Official time of death, Twelve Ten on August 20, 2023, although he'd been dead for two hours. 

The nurse made the call to the funeral home, the same one we'd used for my grandparents O so many years ago.  Information was confirmed.  Names and birthdates and addresses, and the plan was made to pick up the body.  "Sometime in the next two hours," we were told, and that was fine.  The nurse took her leave.  Mom sat with him and kissed him some more, and whispered things in his ear.  Mom and I talked theology for a while, about where Dad was now, not the meat of him, but the geist, the essence, the person, the soul.  Then she wandered off to call a dear friend, and I took her place.

He was so still.  My mind refused to see the stillness.  How could a person be so still?  For a moment or three, it looked like his chest was moving, rising and falling.  Looking closer, my vision swam, my brain struggling to create the illusion of breath.  I touched the body, and it was not actually moving.  And the hand was cold.  And the eyes were closed.  The breath was just as gone as it had been an hour before.  It was just a mild hallucination.  Or perhaps he was settling a little, as the hours passed.

After a time, another knock, and it was the funeral home arriving to take away the body.  Two men, both genial, and we chatted and joked with them as they went about their work.  Getting a human body out of the back bedroom of an early 1960s rambler isn't the easiest thing.  

They wrapped his body in a "bindling sheet," as Buster Scruggs sang it, which isn't a real word but sounds like it should be, and carried him to the waiting stretcher.  They laid him flat, and rigor mortis seemed already to be setting in, his head refusing to settle, his neck stiff, almost like he was trying to rise.  But he was not.  Mom kissed him.  I kissed him.  They covered him up, and were loading him into a minivan as my daughter-in-law arrived.  She hugged Mom for a a while.

Lunch was at a welcoming little family Egyptian restaurant nearby, where I'd taken Mom and Dad a few times as the pandemic waned.  We ate falafel and pita and grape leaves, and talked together.  Then a day of calls to family and friends, organizing and prepping, after which Mom packed a little bag to come spend a few days over at my house. 

When evening came, I asked Mom what she'd like to do.  Watch a movie, perhaps?  

"Read to me from one of your books," she said.  

So I did, reading her short stories from my short story collection as she curled under a hand-woven blanket on our living room sofa, until it was clear she'd fallen asleep.

It was so...calm.  Peculiar.

The Call About Dad

The call came at quarter past ten, as I stood in the sanctuary of my little church, preparing for our ten thirty service. It was Mom. She was flustered, in a panic. Dad wasn’t breathing. Fidele, their home aide for the morning, couldn’t find a pulse. She didn’t know what to do, and I could hear Fidele trying to settle her down, try to get her to sit.

For the previous two weeks, Dad had declined. Exhaustion came with even the slightest effort, as his advanced terminal congestive heart failure and failing kidneys crumbled out from under him. He had become bedridden, unable to rise on his own, unable to do much but sleep. He grew less and less coherent as his oxygen levels varied, one foot out of the world.

I told Mom to wait for me. He was likely dead, but I would be there as soon as I could to be sure, or so I said. We were already in hospice care. There was no rush. There was nothing to do. Just sit with him for a while, I said.

Generally speaking, there are only a few circumstances in which I would bail on worship minutes before it was due to start. This was one of them. Hymns would be sung. Prayers would be said. Worship would happen. I received the good words and support of church folk as I bustled out, suited up, breathed deep, and hopped on my scooter for the forty five minute ride to the house where I grew up. Don’t rush, I reminded myself. I found myself muttering blessings to the slower moving cars that prevented me from pressing too hard.

Thanks for slowing me down a little, I’d say, and I’d mean it.

When I arrived, I got out of my gear and made my way to my parents’ room. There he was. He was dead. There was no breath in him. I kissed his forehead, to be sure, and it was cool beneath my lips.

Dad had a remarkable life, eighty four years of adventure and music, tennis and travel, the majority of it side by side with the love of his life. He was, as he said often over the last few months, entirely satisfied with how he had lived. “Very few people get to do as much as I did,” he would say, and he was right.

Oh, Dad.