thirteen years

photo by Baldassarre

Fall is when the only things you know

because I've named them

begin to end.

-- Maggie Smith, "First Fall"*

Death, of course, is not a failure.

-- Atul Gawande, Being Mortal**

Thirteen years ago this month I made my first visits in the role of a chaplain.

My teacher, boss, trainer gave me eight patients in home care. Because I didn't know better, I visited all eight of them every week. After a few weeks of holy terror my ministry became a routine, predictable service from month to month. I went to their homes, heard their stories, checked in with the daughter or son or spouse or whoever was watching the journey. Each client took their place in the picaresque course of my life, each forming a chapter, a diversion, postponement and prolongation of my own strand of mortality. My road was wider because of them. With growing confidence I settled into the driver's seat. But something was missing.

Remarkable that it took six months for one of them to die. Two of them in fact, on the same day -- April 5, shortly before my birthday.

I had a case study due that afternoon, and in the morning I sat down for the first time to write of death. I had learned and owned the template, and I knew how to identify the issues and knock out the document in an hour or two. I wrote for twenty minutes, and then stopped; and to my great surprise, I wept. I'm not a weepy guy, and I hadn't seen it coming, but there it was. I don't say that I cried, or blubbered. I say that, in a formal and retro way, I wept. My eyes filled, my breathing became heavy, and wet blobs rolled down my face. I couldn't say why. I couldn't think.

So I pulled myself together, wiped my face, focussed on the screen, and spilled my thoughts once again into the template. And I stopped again, and wept.

And so it went. Write and weep, weep and write.

I was not collapsing: hadn't really thought I would, but you can't know until it happens, can you? Instead there was this strangely formal leakage.

Manuel had come as a young man from Cuba, and lived on people skills that did not require an education; had driven a taxi, had been a doorman. My teacher said Manuel was "seductive," and now he was reckoning with the fruits of his charm. He had womanized, and his wife had left him. Now his daughter was his caregiver, and before daughter and God he felt the guilt. He learned to talk to his daughter, but not to God. "I don't know how to pray," he said, with terror in his eyes. So I modeled simplicity with him -- you don't have to be fancy, I said, or use big words; just say what is on your heart. As I was leaving for what I did not know was the last time, he said "God bless you." And then he said "I love you." He was, after all, seductive.

Millicent was gentle and appreciative. She was fading out, more transparent every time I saw her. Her skin looked like tracing paper. I arranged for the priest to see her, and she couldn't remember he had come. The last time I saw her, she looked at her hand and said "There's nothing left." And I said, "But your heart is beating." She looked at me and said "Do you want to feel my heart beating?" Of course I said yes. She took my hand and placed it under her own, on the bones of her rib cage, and I could in fact still feel the beating of her heart.

Manuel and Millicent had opened doors and let me into their stories. Now those doors were shut, and the stories were perfect. They had reached full cadence and there was no part left for me, not a note. My teacher said they had canonized me. I was weeping, and the grief was sweet to me.

*Good Bones (North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2017), p. 4.

**Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014), p. 7.

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