Presbytery - Part 2: Death at Presbytery

I wrote in my last blog that I was prepared for all surprises at Presbytery. I packed up my medicine, brought lunch and coffee, remembered my jacket ... but I sit now on the bed at home as my husband scours the Internet for the best deals on plane tickets. He is going to his father's funeral. One cannot protect oneself against all surprises.

Deaths are always a shock, even when they are 'expected.' We knew this day was coming -- knew it better than some who were more affected by it. My father-in-law himself refused to acknowledge that he was dying until the last few days of his life. In the early months of his diagnosis, those around him were praying for healing and 'standing with him in faith.' I looked on it all with stoicism born of having lived with chronic disease for much of my life. "I pray that God will sustain him," I said, because I could not say that I believed he would live.

Perhaps my tone sounded cruel, but if so, it was only reality that bruised and cut. The fantasy in which people recover from terminal cancer and live forever is a lie, and, like all lies, it bursts like a delicate soap bubble against even a tiny blade of grass in the real world.

By the time that my husband and I were leaving for Presbytery, the bubble of illusion that surrounded his father had already been vaporized by the steady march of cancer. My father-in-law was weak and his breathing irregular. We had been told three weeks earlier to expect his passing any time. What do you do when you are waiting for the news that you do not want to hear but know could come at any time? Oddly enough, you go on as if nothing were happening at all. You get up in the morning, eat breakfast, get the kids started on their schoolwork. You practice for the annual talent show and plant sunflowers in the yard. You pack for Presbytery. You do all those things because another unpleasant truth in the real world is that life goes on even when someone is dying. You cannot sit in your house and wait, because life does not wait for such things. And finally, when the end comes, it warrants a couple of days in which people gather to say their goodbyes, and then everyone scatters to pick back up where they left off with living.

All of us are at the same time completely irreplaceable and completely irrelevant. The march of history thunders on with us or without us, and yet each person occupies a unique time and place. Each life is like the sun--so crucial, so bright and blazing up close, but lost amid billions of other stars if we could step back a few thousand light years to view the whole Milky Way.

As for myself, at the moment that one little star blinked out forever, I was at Presbytery. My phone emitted a tiny cheep, and a text popped up to the screen. "Dad is in a coma." A few hours later in our hotel room, my husband received the shock that we had expected ever since the cancer diagnosis more than a year before: his father had died.

We looked at each other across the hotel room as the kids dashed about in their swimsuits, excited about the promised swim in the indoor pool. We had barely arrived, but we thought about packing up and heading home ... to do what? The funeral would not be held for at least three days.

There was no family to see back in Schenectady, and our pastor was here in Massachusetts, presumably at a hotel somewhere down the street.

And so my husband took the children swimming. We ate dinner. We snuggled on the oversized blue chair in our hotel room and talked in low voices about our thoughts on death and dying, while the children watched a movie in the next room.

We stayed at Presbytery.


To be continued.