This week's sermon

WHEN PEOPLE DIE

Intellectually, we all know that we will someday die.

          But I don’t think we know that emotionally.

          Sometimes, I feel eternal, though I know that’s self-delusion.

          So, when someone we admire or love dies, it digs a crater in our hearts and mind.

          When my mother died, on the way from the service to the cemetery, my father said to the mortician who was driving us, “With my wife dead, I have nothing to live for.”

          I was about to ask, “how about living for me?”

          But the driver said the perfect response, “You can’t imagine how many people have said that to me.”

          Death is universal and so is grieving.

          My father lived 12 more years and he did, indeed, lose interest in life. He paid very little attention to his grandchildren when they came to be.

          When I moved him to CT, I discovered all my mother’s clothes were still in his house.

          Most people survive from the loss of loved one. But it takes time and effort.

          I was with him in the hospital the day he died. We had had the most cogent conversation we’d had in several years. After an hour by his bed, I said, “OK, Dad, I’m going home now.”

          And he replied, “so am I”.

          If he had been a parishioner, I would have sat down and held his hand. But he was my father and I assumed he’d slipped back into his dementia.

          By the time I got home, 15 minutes later, the Hospital had already called.

          I turned around and went back to sit by his deathbed.

          The nurse’s aide who had been shaving him when he died, told me he sat up, nearly making her cut him, and said, “I gotta get out of here!”

          Not bad last words.

          I have a poem to share, written by a college classmate of mine. She wrote it for a friend who had died in Viet Nam.

          I was the editor of the student magazine and published it.

          I think it is full of truth.

WHEN PEOPLE DIE

          When people die

          It’s like a bird flying into a window

                   On the coldest morning of the year.

          When people die

          It’s like the bear’s have escaped from the zoo

                   And are eating children on the street.

          When people die

          It’s like a maniac has taken over the power station

                   And the lights go off and on and off

                   And on and off.

          When people die.

 

Now, some other folks have some things to share….