A new PB

(I forgot, many of the folks who read these musings and ponderings are not Episcopalian, like me, and don't understand "Episco-Speak". "PB" means the Presiding Bishop--the titular head and major spokesperson for all things Episcopalian. And a new one was elected today.)

It seems to me that this has been a week full of historic moments: taking down the Confederate flag in places you wouldn't have imagined that happening; two Supreme court rulings on health care and same-sex marriage; and now the first Black Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.

Michael Curry is the Bishop of North Carolina, a sprawling diocese that takes up the central part of that state and most of the population centers. He is also the most dynamic and exciting voice in the church. He talks about 'making disciples', something most Episcopal Bishops never utter. He preached at the Diocesan Convention in CT last year and brought the house down!

My own bishop, Ian Douglas, was one of the other three nominees. I would have been happy for him had he been elected, but, in a selfish way, didn't want to lose him. He is a visionary of the 'future church' and has a profound commitment to the church being about "God's mission" rather than the mission of keeping failing churches open. His ideas would have added much to the National Church's agenda, but I'm not so secretly pleased that he'll still be bringing his vision to Connecticut.

At St. Paul's in New Haven, the second of the three congregations I served full-time, one of the members was The Rt. Rev. John Burgess, former Bishop of Massachusetts, and, at the time he was elected, the first Black Diocesan bishop. There had been several African-Americans elected to roles as assisting bishops, but John was the first to be 'in charge' of a diocese of the church.

He was a wonderful and compassionate man. I'm only sorry he didn't live until today so he could have known another barrier had been breached. An African-American Presiding Bishop of a church founded in England and transplanted here and never particularly concerned about attracting minority members. My life in the church has been counter-cultural. The first congregation I served was a historically Black church and the other two were fully integrated and the third included a vibrant Hispanic congregation.

For me, this year has been good: the first Latino Poet Laureate  and the first Black PB!

Even in this time that seems, on the surface, too conservative for my taste, some amazing things are happening to soothe my Left-Wing Soul....

Tend the Fire, Tell the Story, Pass the Wine--chapter 6

6. Is there life after Funerals?

When I retired from full time ministry, I told a couple of the Funeral Directors I worked with that I would be available to do 'trade funerals'. (Two things from that sentence: 'trade funerals' are funerals for people who don't have any connection to a church but think of themselves, however vaguely, as Christians; secondly, what used to be known as 'morticians' prefer to be called 'Funeral Directors'.) In my 35 years as a priest, I've decided most of them deserve that title. They do much more than 'mortuary service'--embalming, dressing, burying people's bodies. The really good Funeral Directors deal with a lot of pain in their work. They 'direct things' for people who, because of grief or shock or guilt, aren't up to 'directing' things for themselves. Death catches people unawares, even when the lead up to the death has been months, if not years, of fear and suffering.

“When people die it is like a bird flying into a window on a chill February morning.” That is a line from a poem I read in college. It was a poem written by a friend of mine about her friend who died in Viet Nam. (Lord, it's been so long ago—that war that formed my generation one way or another—and it is still as new as today for me.) Lila's poem seems universal to me though. She talked about the shock and disbelief that death brings. “When people die it's like bears are loose in the streets, gobbling up the children.” That's why who don't fret about it during most of their lives, want clergy at their funerals. And that's why, people need someone to 'direct' the funerals for them.

Any how, I got a call just over two months after my retirement from Lou, a funeral director in Waterbury, telling me when this particular family with their particular needs came in, he knew I was the only person he would trust to do the service. Well, he had me hooked by appealing to my ego, which, a friend once told me, was 'as large as Montana'. So I said 'yes', then Lou, that sneak, told me it was a service at the funeral home, during the wake, for a 16 year old girl who had been raped and murdered by a friend of hers. That happened at the base of this enormous illuminated cross that soars above I-84 on the way to Waterbury. The cross is in a place called Holy Land. Holy Land was the creation of some overly-zealous Italian guy decades ago. He had the cross erected and then tried to recreate Israel in Connecticut. I've been up there before. The whole thing has fallen into ruins of Israel in the midst of a forest of sorts with paths through it going all the way up to the highest point in the area where the cross stands. A group of Filipino nuns now own the property, but it has become the hangout of teenagers from all over the area.

(An aside of import before more about Phoebe's wake. Lou, the guy who called me, is someone I've worked with a lot over the last two decades. His funeral home is well known and respected in the area and though it is 'an Italian funeral home', ethnicity being still important around Waterbury, many Episcopalians use it. One of my favorite people at St. John's was Nancy. She was a Warden, a remarkably active member, a generous and gentle woman and a dear friend. She used to make me egg salad and tuna salad sandwiches when I would go to her house for lunch. Some of the best of both I've ever eaten...that was Nancy's gift, to give only the best.

Lou was the funeral director who got the 'call' to collect Nancy's body from the hospital when she died. Her son and I were in her room when she passed through that wondrous and terrifying door to what ever comes next. She would be moved to the mortuary in the hospital, where Lou would pick up her body. But he came to the room instead and sat by her bed and wept, holding her dead hand. From that moment on I would trust him—as brusque and 'God Father Italian' as he appeared. “Hey, Father,” he would say over the phone when he called about a funeral, “I got one for you....” But I knew this: whoever cried at Nancy's deathbed was a friend of mine.)

So, when Lou called I would have agreed to do the service even if he hadn't massaged my ego. 'Death', after all, is what priests' DO. In my years since ordination I have officiated at well over half a thousand funerals. And sat by that many and more death beds. And been with many hundreds of families as one of the ones they loved was reaching out for the doorknob of that wondrous and terrifying door—the door all of us will open and enter sooner or later. God bless us. Really, God bless us....

*

There is an ancient Roman priest in Waterbury who is legend among the Funeral Directors of the city. One of them told me Fr. Spinelli performed over 200 funerals a year. In his 80's himself, he buried more people in a year than I buried in a decade. In my 35 years as a priest I've done over 500 funerals. Some of them were for people I never really knew who had families and friends who mourned them in ways I never experienced. And then there were several hundred who were members of my parish and friends of mine. And I tried to 'perform' (a terrible description of what I do at funerals, but not inaccurate) each one with the same focus and commitment as any other.

Funerals are vital and holy moments. Whenever we brush up against death, things get sacred in a hurry. Not nearly enough attention is paid, in my mind, to the importance of funerals in the training of priests. There is really nothing else, for a priest, besides the weekly observances of the breaking of bread for the community, that equals the obligation and opportunity of presiding at funerals.

We are rubbed raw with emotion when people die. (“When people die it's like a man man is in charge of the power plant: Light/Dark/Light/Dark.... When people die.”) There is no other moment when it is so profoundly necessary for a priest to be present. Not to 'clear things up' or say something meaningful, but simply to sit by the bed of the dying or hold the hands of the living and shake your head slowly when asked 'the meaning' of it all. That's what people need in a time of seeming meaninglessness—someone to agree that is so, just so the mourning folks don't think they are crazy.

*

Unusually enough, Phoebe's funeral wasn't the worst one I ever attended. In fact, if such a thing is possible, the wake of that 16 year old child—victim of a boy she considered a 'friend'--was less troubling than many. Her paternal grandfather took the microphone and invited people to come up and tell “Phoebe stories”. And people did—former teachers, red-eyed friends, members of the family—and the stories somehow took much of the pain and shock and horror of her death out of the room. There was also a screen that was full of slides of her—it was a power point, I think, and in the pictures Phoebe was full of life. Since she had been cremated, there was no coffin to draw attention to the reality of her death. I suppose Ibsen was right, there is no suffering that cannot be borne if we put it in a story and tell the story to each other.

The worst funeral I ever participated in was the service for Joan, a beautiful woman of 40-something in the first parish I served. Joan suffered from bone cancer—not a way I'd pick to die—and she did suffer from it. In the last days even the sheet on her hospital bed brought her pain. I knew dead was near so I visited her every morning for the last week or so. The last morning I broke one of the few rules I have about what I do. I didn't go to the nurses' station to check on her condition but simply walked into her private room. The fact that the door was closed didn't surprise me since Joan had complained about the constant and sometimes disturbing sounds of the wing.

So I walked in to find her naked on her bed, her feet tied together with gauze and her arms straight down at her sides. She was being prepared to go to the morgue in the basement. The nurse who was washing her turned to see me, shocked at first but recognizing me, she simply said, “less than an hour ago. She's finally at peace.”

I had to agree that Joan's face was uncreased by pain for the first time in a year. She looked serene and lovely. Finally at peace, indeed.

Joan's funeral was one of the “mixed funerals” I had at St. James in Charleston. Sometimes the deceased was the Episcopalian and the family were black Baptist or AME or something more fundamentalist than that. Joan had joined the Episcopal Church while in college to escape the harshness of her family's faith. But they insisted that the funeral should be in the funeral home and their 'preacher' would help me. I knew Joan wouldn't have wanted that but I was young them and not bold enough to stand up for the dead against the wishes of the grieving family.

The funeral director was a Baptist but he well understood the Episcopal Church's ways. So, just before the service he closed the coffin and helped two of the women from the church put the pall on. I had been talking with Preacher Jones for 10 minutes before that, agreeing that he could speak for a while and I would do the burial office from the Prayer Book. “And Preacher Jones,” I said in my harshest whisper, “the coffin remains closed....” (I had been to family funerals of some of the other members of St. James and seen how a closed coffin would be opened to let the congregation have one more look at the dead.) Preacher Jones, a retired coal miner with several fingertips missing, hadn't been within spitting distance of any seminary of any kind and didn't know the Episcopal practice any more than he knew how to speak Hindi. I was going to stay in control of the service.

“Yes sir, Father,” he told me, “just the way you want it....”

After the solemn, lovely tones of the liturgy and readings, Preacher Jones got up to begin his sermon. He started out softly, reminding people of 'Otto, the Orkin Man'--a popular ad campaign for a company who specialized in pest control...mostly termites. He was using Paul's image of the earthly body and the heavenly body--'tabernacles' in his King James language. He said that Joan's earthly tabernacle had been ravaged and that the doctors and treatments were like Otto's work on our houses when they were infested by termites. But her heavenly tabernacle would be perfect and in need of no cancer control. It was an interesting metaphor and I was thinking about how that was closer than I could come to describing the bodies we supposedly will have in the Kingdom. I drifted off a moment in the image and was propelled by to full alertness when I heard him say, in one of those low, rolling voices Black preachers are so good at: “I believe there are some here who have not had the privilege of viewing Sister Joan's earthly tabernacle one last time....”

I rose and touched his arm. “Preacher Jones,” I whispered, “don't go there....”

But by that time several people were moving down the aisle toward the coffin. Jumping away from me like a much younger man than he was, he snatched the pall and pulled it from Joan's coffin. The two ladies from St. James practically dived forward to grab it before it hit the floor. I couldn't get to him because was already surrounded by weeping and wailing mourners. The decent good order the BCP had brought to the room was gone, replaced by a frenzy of what posed as grief but seemed to me to be pure dramatics.

The funeral director was pushing forward to try to restore things to some sense of decency but Preacher Jones was pulling on the locked lid, jarring the casket around. Evan, the funeral director, looked at me with horror—he told me later that Joan's funeral convinced him that the Episcopal practice was, after all, the best way. I nodded to him and he opened the casket with the tool he used before Preacher Jones and the surge of people could knock it from its stand.

What happened then was a tempest of despair. One woman was actually keening and a large transvestite (I knew she was because her name was Robert) actually lifted Joan's body up and held her for a while, sobbing all the time. The storm stopped almost as suddenly as it began. Evan straightened Joan's clothing as best he could in a room full of people, quietly closed and secured the lid and with the help of the stricken women from St. James, restored the pall to its place.

Preacher Jones was worn out by then and after getting some “Amens” from the congregation, went back to his seat. I finished the service though tears of rage and failure. I had let Joan down at the end. She would have been horrified at such goings on. And I led her coffin to the waiting hearse, Even apologizing to me each step of the way.

After they shut the door on Joan's coffin, Preacher Jones stretched out his hand to me. “I can't go to the grave,” he said, “I'm sure you can handle it.”

Rather than reject his handshake I took his hand in mine and began to squeeze his finger nubs. He was in his 70's and I was barely 30 and in the best shape of my life. I squeezed until I saw tears in his eyes. Then I whispered, “Preacher Jones, you are one sick son of a bitch”, smiling to beat the band so the people around thought I was being gracious in a terrible situation. I finally released his hand and slapped him on the shoulder in a clerical way, but hard enough to make him stumble a bit.

That was the worse funeral I ever had a part in.

My first funeral was of Miss Bessie. Miss Bessie was 97 and lived with her two sisters, 93 and 87. She had been dying in the same hospital on the same day as the birth of my son. Labor was slow going and so I made several trips back and forth between labor hall and Miss Bessie's room. I had been telling her about what was going on downstairs, how my son was being born. I'm not sure she could hear me but I kept telling her since it was all I could think of to tell anybody at the time.

After my second visit to Miss Bessie, I was sitting in the room with Bern. Things were going nowhere and she was getting impatient. I wasn't sure things could get worse but they did. A nurse stuck her head in the room and said, in a confused and questioning voice, “your father is here?” We knew good and well neither of our fathers were anywhere near and caught the nurses confusion just as a voice said in a stage whisper: “Father in God...”

For reasons beyond all my comprehension, the bishop had decided to make a pastoral call to labor hall!

“Get his ass out of here,” Bern hissed at me, fire in her eyes.

He was apologetic when I steered him out into the hallway, but I don't think he understood why she wasn't grateful he had come. That taught me another rule for priestcraft—never go to the room of a woman in labor unless you're summons. There are places priests should never go....

While Josh was being delivered by C-section, Miss Bessie slipped away though that mysterious door to whatever comes next. Life and death mingled together, mixed up, passing like ships in the corridors of Charleston General Hospital.

Three days later, our son came home and Miss Bessie had her funeral. There was no moaning as she put out to sea. She had lived a great span of years and had only been sick for a week or so at the end. She was another of those skinny, unmarried women who seem to live so long. Might be a cautionary tale in there for women considering marriage.

The family plot was straight up a hill ten miles or so outside of Charleston. The only vehicle that could get there was a four-wheel drive Ford pickup truck. The hearse carried Miss Bessie to the foot of the hill and two strong gravediggers transferred her to the back of the truck. I had intended to go up, but since the funeral director had to by law and the truck would hold only three passengers, I climbed up in the bed of that Ford and committed Miss Betsy to God and the earth. Then off she went, bouncing up and down on a rocky 45 degree angle.

Her sisters and a few others waited in the car while she was put in her grave near her people. One of the sisters, Miss Mable, said, “just two more trips to go....” I knew she meant for her and Miss Dorothy. But I left before either of them died. They were very thin and unmarried.

*

Once, shortly after we moved to New Haven, Josh and I were going somewhere in the VW bus. New Haven has several large and sprawling cemeteries within the city limits. By chance we passed two of them in a matter of minutes. Josh, barely 5 years old, said, “there sure are a lot of dead people living in New Haven.”

Mouths of babes and all that. I'm pretty agnostic about ghosts and communications with the Great Wherever, but every time I leave a room for a few moments, turning off the light, I say to myself, “Hello, Virgil!” My father was the world's champion at turning off lights. Since our children complain when they are visiting that our house is too dark, I must be channeling Virgil pretty well.

Lots of dead people live most places, it seems to me.

*

Once, after a funeral when the cremains were interred in St. John's Close, a young funeral director asked me if a person had to be a member to be buried there.

“No,” said knowing we had interred ashes of several folks from the Soup Kitchen because they had no where to rest.

He smiled broadly. “I have these cremains....”

Turns out his funeral home had a contract with the two hospitals in town to cremate unclaimed bodies. But after cremating them, they weren't sure what to do with them and the boxes were taking up most of a cabinet in a storage room.

“Most of them are babies,” he said.

“Babies?” I asked, “people left their babies bodies at the hospital?”

I was initially horrified until he explained that many of them were still births and premature, damaged children. Some people didn't have enough money to pay for burial and others were so upset and confused they simply signed the papers while in shock.

So, that All Saint's Day, at the end of the Eucharist, we took the cremains he had collected over the last few years out to the Close and buried them together. We put the names on the plaque in the church narthex (front hallway of the sanctuary for those who don't speak 'Episcopalian”). One or two were indigent adults but most were, as he told me, babies. Some of them didn't have first names so they were 'Baby Girl Smith' and 'Baby Boy Jones'. One I remember had the remarkable name “Baby Boy Bugalu”. Whenever I looked at the plaque, I always found his name and caressed it with my fingertip.

So a tradition was born. Each All Saint's Day thereafter, ashes with no where to go found a resting place at St. John's. Other funeral directors found out about it and brought their unclaimed ashes as well. That little sacred rectangle of earth became home to the forgotten and left behind of the dead who lived in Waterbury.

I found out most everyone had the same initial reaction to the babies as I had—shock and a bit of anger toward the parents. I spent time, in writing and All Saints' sermons, explaining that we need to try to imagine the anguish people felt at losing a child and how anguished people often make strange decisions out of the fog of grief.

Then a member of the parish came to me and tearfully told me how she had lost a third semester baby while traveling in the south. It had been decades before and she was so drugged up by the hospital staff that it was well on the way home before she thought to ask what happened to the baby. Her husband, stricken and paralyzed with loss, had signed the body over to the hospital to depose of.

“I can only hope she went to some place like St. John's,” the woman told me, “and now I can finally grieve for that child I never knew.”

The second year a couple of people I didn't know showed up for the All Saint's Day interments. They approached me afterward. They both had the same story as the parishioner. In the case of these two they had both been young and unmarried when their babies were born dead. In fact, the two of them had discovered they shared the same secret, since almost no one else knew their stories. They were weeping too, mourning for those children who never lived and they abandoned in death. The service had been a form of absolution for them both and they weren't keeping the secret any more.

“My husband and my two teenagers don't know about what happened,” one of them told me. “Now I can tell them and I can finally be comforted for that awful loss.” That sounded like very 'good news' to me. A Gospel moment in the courtyard of a church.

*

Marty and Fran came to St. John's one Sunday and never left until they retired to Florida. Marty worked as a civilian for the State Police and Fran was an office worker somewhere. They were great—Marty was a big, grown up kid who looked like the actor Fred Gwinn. Fran was feisty and ironic and funny. They were great fun to have around. They both were in late life second marriages and were always bringing visiting grandchildren to church. One of them had the first name Bradley, so he and I had more than a passing relationship. That I never knew which of them was the 'real' grandparent said a lot about their relationship.

They were two of those people who move to Florida because it is part of the thought that that's what people in Connecticut do when they retire. All their families were in New England, so they came back often, always stopping in for a Sunday 'hit' of St. John's funky parish life and worship. I liked them both immensely. Marty was one of those 'Corvette guys' who never outgrew his love for fast sports cars. He had a gizmo on his Buick or Oldsmobile or whatever it was--'American' for sure—that allowed him to turn on the motor from a distance. He's leave the heater turned on in winter and the AC in summer and when he got to his car after breakfast it was either warm as toast or cool as sea breezes. I always coveted that feature.

On the way back to Florida from one of their swings north to see family, they wrecked and both were killed. Instantly, I pray. The car went through the medium, across 3 lanes of northbound traffic and through the guardrail on the northbound side and into a tree. Perhaps Marty, who was driving, had a heart attack or went to sleep. I can only hope Fran was asleep and didn't realize what was happening until it had happened. And it happened and they both died and the two families wanted a joint funeral at St. John's. It is a huge, Neo-Gothic church, and I had to figure out how to get two coffins in the transepts without blocking the center aisle or the steps to the altar for communion.

And we got it done. Children from each family spoke, we broke the bread and shared the wine and then went on a wondrous ride. Two hearses were necessary since, unlike bicycles, there are no hearses built for two. We buried Marty first, beside his first wife, who died before he met Fran. Then we wound our way down the Naugatuck Valley to Fran's family plot. I thought of them so much as 'together', it was hard for me to imagine them being separated by death and having two different resting places in the rocky, rich soil of Connecticut. But that's the way we did it. One funeral and two different interments. I only hope those two—who seemed so 'right' for each other, can find the other in the General Resurrection. (Though, honestly, I can't say I believe in such a thing....)

*

Mrs. Carter was from Barbuda, a little island in the Caribbean that, from the stories I've heard about it from her large extended family, is about as isolated and undeveloped as any island in the chain. She and her family have been in Connecticut for many years—all hard working, soft-spoken and physically striking. Her children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and assorted other relatives came to church and sat near each other. The kids—boys in suits and girls in dresses with little hats and white gloves (imagine that!) sat through the services without coloring books or electronic gadgets or even stern looks from their parents. Every time someone told me they wanted to come to church but their children would misbehave, I wanted to say, “Consider the Barbudians”.

Once a new seminarian asked me in hushed tones, “why do all those Black people sit together?” She thought it had something to do with unwritten rules about race in the Parish.

“What would you think if 20 or 25 people sat in the same area and all had red hair?” I asked her.

Something came across her face that seemed like enlightenment. “A family,” she said, “...but so many....”

On Mrs. Carter's birthday, there were perhaps 75 or more family members in church with her. I sometimes thought there were more Barbudaians in Waterbury than in Barbuda. And each of them was fiercely committed to her. She was truly the matriarch of that large and handsome clan. Two of her sons and their families were very involved. Between them and the assorted kids, we once turned over the entire service to honor her on some milestone birthday. All the readers, chalicists and acolytes were related to Mrs. Carter on that day.

She was a delightful and sunny person. “Fad-er Bradley”, she would say in her charming accent, “how are you today?” She always brought me something from her trips back to the island. One gift was a huge and perfect conch shell that is still in our back yard. Another time, because she knew I kept bottles of hot sauce around the church for my use, she brought me some hot sauce from her home. “Dis is not like your haht sauce, Fad-er Bradley,” she said, “use jist a drop or two.”

Well, I like hot sauce and thought she underestimated my taste for it. One morning I sprinkled it liberally on my scrambled eggs and spent much of the next hour or so drinking ice water and blowing my nose. I should have never doubted her wisdom.

Wise, that is what she seemed to be. She had worked long and hard for her children—mostly as an aide in a nursing home, I believe—and had found wisdom in her work and her years. Besides her immediate family, there were others she had unofficially adopted. People I knew to be her nieces or cousins all called her 'momma'. And as she lay dying, she waited for one of them to come before opening that mysterious door and passing through. I've never figured out how people know 'to wait', postponing death until some particular person shows up, but I've seen it enough to know it is so.

I visited her often during her last illness. The nursing home where she was wasting away was on my way home, if I went the long way. And I had seen her the afternoon before her death, surrounded, as always, by quiet, loving guardians from her family. It was a constantly changing assortment of people—many of them children and teens—who sat with her daily and, I suspect, around the clock—always with a CD of gospel music playing from the top of a chest of drawers. The morning of her death a daughter-in-law called and asked me to come again. I told her I'd be there in the afternoon but she insisted I come now. The niece she had been waiting on had come—Mrs. Carter never said that she was waiting on that particular relative, being in a semi-coma most of the last week, but her family knew it was the truth. Several of them had told me, “When she comes, momma will leave....”

When I arrived with my communion kit and oil to anoint Mrs. Carter, the family had filled the room and were spilling out into the hallway. It was 8 in the morning and some of the kids there were in school uniforms with back packs. The people parted for me, murmuring thanks and touching me softly. I never quite got used to the profound respect they treated me with and it was only with great urging that I ever got any of them to call me “Jim” instead of “Father Bradley”. I never even suggested it to Mrs. Carter: I was simply 'Fad-er Bradley' to her.

I said the prayers for the dying, noticing that people in the room were holding each other against what was to come, sobbing without sound, faces wet with tears. Then I realized I only had a dozen or so little wafers for communion. Since there was no room for me to move around, I passed the elements and told them to share. It was like loaves and fishes in Mrs. Carter's circle of love and the last person got as much bread to dip in the wine as the first. An hour or so later, she died.

Her funeral was one of the most elegant and lovely services I've ever known. It was a cold, cold day with spitting snow but when we got to the cemetery, everyone—dressed uniformly in black—stayed until the casket was lowered and the grave was completely full. At first family members tossed in handfuls of dirt and the little girls dropped flowers in the gaping hole. But finally an end loader came and finished the job. The 150 or so people didn't seem willing to leave even then, touching and whispering, telling stories of Mrs. Carter, until they were chilled to the bone.

Having seen her finally buried, the grief lifted for the meal—an amazing collection of island dishes, the next better and more delicately seasoned than the one before. It was through Mrs. Carter and a reception after the funeral of one of her relatives that I first tasted goat. The thought was somehow revolting to me, but it was so well prepared that I loved it. I wouldn't dare try to cook goat though.

Several of her grandchildren were in the Chorister Academy at St. John's and I would talk to them before rehearsal. After her death, they told such sweet stories about Mrs. Carter. One of them, tall and beautiful, said, with whimsy instead of sadness, “I love her more each passing day.” I found that remarkable coming from a 13 year old. And I knew it was true.

*

Gravesides are the last place people still have some connection to the one who has died. Most people walk away with the casket still above ground. Somehow the practice of filling in the grave seems a better final parting—not leaving such intimacy to strangers. It is at gravesides that the stark finality of death becomes finally undeniable. I remember helping fill the grave of my dear priest friend, Peter. He was deeply involved in environmental ministry and was a long time chaplain at a exclusive private school. One way or another—as seminarian, part-time assistant, interim rector, assisting priest—Peter's altar had almost always been at St. John's. His wife and daughter were wonderful parts of the parish family and just before I retired, I baptized Peter's grandson. When his parents and godparents presented him and said, “we present Peter to receive the sacrament of baptism”, I nearly wept in joy and in the memory of my friend. I remembered much, in that moment, about Peter's life, but I also remember softly dropping evergreen boughs on his casket and then helping shovel in the dirt. Something healing in being part of that last gift to him.

Once, in one of the first few funerals I was part of at St. James in Charleston, Evan, the Baptist funeral director handed me a handful of rose petals. He intended me to scatter them on the casket at the words of committal.

“What's this?” I whispered, confused.

“For the casket,” he whispered back, confused himself by that point.

“I want dirt,” I told him.

“Dirt?” he asked, a little aghast.

“Dirt,” I repeated and he found me some.

It is sometimes remarkable to me that Christians have developed funeral practices that seek the lessen the finality of death when it is the finality itself that we need desperately to face head on to begin to heal.

*

When you have children, they are always babies in your heart. My children are both in their 30's. Josh has three children of his own and is a lawyer. Mimi works in Development for the American Ballet Theatre and is a woman. Mimi is a woman—graceful and lovely beyond her knowing...but she and the big-shot lawyer are still small children to me. And perhaps the hardest death to bear is the death of a child.

I'm making a list and checking it twice about things I want to check out when and if I get to the Kingdom of Heaven. I want to have a sit down with Yahweh and ask the Great God Almighty to clear up a few things I think were left hanging in Creation. At the top of the list is the question about dead babies.

Dead babies are hideous, awful, unspeakable, unfair, nasty, brutish and ugly. There should have been a default built into the system that never let children die before their parents. Something kinder was called for. Bern once gave me a pen and ink drawing that was of seven tombstones. Each had the names and dates on them. On either end of the stones are the parents. In between are five children. You notice, looking at the picture, that the parents lived to ripe old ages and all the children died in the first three years of life. That is a profoundly painful work of art. If I could, I'd take that with me through the mysterious door for my sit down with Yahweh. “What the hell was this about?” I'd ask God, and wait as long as necessary (it being eternity and all) for an answer.

There was a wonderful young couple at St. John's—let's call them Adam and Eve—who became members while engaged, got married there, remained very active and joyfully, and a year or so after their marriage, 'got pregnant'. It was something they'd longed for, hoped for, waited for. They were transformed by the promise of it all. They turned a room into a nursery and started painting, picked out names, began buying fuzzy toys (Eve) and sports equipment (Adam) for their coming child.

But when Eve went for her seven-month checkup, their world turned upside down and inside out.

The doctor seemed anxious during the examination. His tension was contagious: Adam and Eve caught it in about 10 seconds.

He asked Eve if she'd been spotting. Only a little, she told him, just from time to time.

Pain, he asked, had she had any pain? Indigestion for a week or so, she answered, her heart clutching into a fist.

No heart beat. That was the issue, the problem, the reason for his questions and the death of joy for Adam and Eve.

Their baby was dead. Just like that, their world went from joy and light to the dark night of the soul. And, for medical reasons I do not comprehend, what Eve had to do was carry the baby to term and deliver it, dead as a doornail. She carried the damaged fetus two more months and gave birth to Death.

I'll leave all the excruciating ironies of that for you to sort through—I'm waiting until I get to ask God about it.

So, Adam and Eve lived their lives as if in a web of sorrow. They went to work. They prepared and ate meals. They tried to behave normally in an insane situation. And finally, mercifully, Eve went into labor and delivered her dead child after 10 hours of pain that did not lead to life.

I was there near the end (summons, not on my own). I waited with family from both sides. All this happened in a 'birthing room' of a major hospital. On the door of the room, the staff had put a painting of a black rose. The other doors had blue roses or pink roses on them. In a place of such expectation and possibility, there was this little island of pain—cold, damning pain.

A black rose.

In that 'birthing room', we took turns holding that dead baby—so perfect in every way except she could not, would not ever breathe or laugh or cry or live. And I baptized her, not even sure what I was doing theologically, not caring really, knowing only that it gave some tiny sliver of comfort to people as beaten down, exhausted and condemned to pain as anyone could be. I spoke her name—a name she would never hear or be known by or have nicknames derived from. And I know, from having been through it with both of my wife's pregnancies, what Adam and Eve did, before those horrendous weeks when she found out she was incubating death. They had played out their baby's life a thousand times. They had, in their minds, taken her to the baby-sitter and picked her up, listened and watched for her first words and steps. They had lived with her, through their imaginations—seen her through childhood diseases, off to school and even as the woman she would become giving them grandchildren. That's what expectant parents do—live out their child's life in their hearts, wondering how she'll react to Christmas, if she'll like cats or dogs, what her voice will sound like, if she'll be musical. There is seemingly no limit to the human mind's ability to project life into the future when a baby is coming.

(A related aside: no one I know—even me—takes miscarriages seriously enough. Couples who suffer miscarriages have done the same imaginative living out of their child's life as someone who gives birth to a dead baby. And yet I've never heard any clergy talk about the two in the same way or with the same seriousness. Since miscarriages are usually the result of injury to the mother or a damaged fetus, people don't seem to assume it was a 'baby'. But I believe the pain is the same as losing a child at birth or afterward. Hideous pain it must be. God better be reading up on what to tell me when I ask about all this....)

I was with Adam and Eve for several hours between the baptism and the funeral. I mostly said nothing and did nothing. There was nothing to say and even less to do. All that mattered was being there—and even that only mattered tangentially.

So the day came. The service at the church was solemn and tearful. The long ride to a rural cemetery seemed to be without end. And as we stood in the snow beside that tiny little coffin, the temperature was in the teens and the wind-chill near zero. A bitter day for a bitter task.

It was then that I noticed the spray of flowers on the coffin. They were roses and baby-breath—red roses instead of black and the breath that baby would never draw. There was a ribbon amid the flowers that said: OUR LITTLE ANGLE.

The florist must have been dyslexic and reversed the E and L so that the message seemed to refer to a small geometrical shape rather than a celestial being. As I prayed the prayers at the grave, I prayed as well that I was the only one who had noticed the 'angle' on the ribbon. But as the short, freezing service drew to an end, I noticed Adam shaking his head and biting his lip. Then he nudged Eve with his elbow through their winter coats and nodded to the coffin. She saw it, realized what it meant and I committed their child to the earth while they choked back laughter.

A little later, at a relative's house near the cemetery, Adam and Eve and I drank alcohol and laughed out loud. They hadn't laughed since that awful day two months ago. They had gone through the motions of life, completed tasks, prepared and half-eaten dinners, laid down to sleep with Death in Eve's belly—but they hadn't laughed, they told me, not once, until then.

Laughter at a transposed 'e' and 'l' gave them back a bit of their lives. They went on. Moved to another state. Had a baby. They called me from a far-away hospital to tell me about Tilitha, their wonderous child. I noted without mentioning it that they had named her what Jesus called the little girl he raised from death. “Tilitha cum”, he said, and the dead lived. I can only imagine that was what they experienced—resurrection from the death of their baby.

Every week or so I drive my dog to the oldest cemetery in Cheshire and walk him like I walked the dog before him. There is a section of the graveyard I call 'the Peanut Gallery' because only children are buried there. Often, around the birth days on the stones and around holidays, I'll discover little gifts on those tiny graves. I've walked that path for almost two decades now. I've seen fresh graves, yet without a stone and the toys left on the just turned earth. Through the seasons I've seen turkeys at Thanksgiving, Jack-o-lanterns near Halloween, Christmas symbols, little crosses of palms and Easter eggs on those graves. I've seen it all. And I've seen, over the years, the Barbie doll in disarray, the tiny trucks rusting, the mouldering stuff animals. People do tend to get on with life. My favorite grave is of a teenage girl. (Is having a 'favorite grave' too macabre?) Her name matters not. Names, as important as they are, pale in the cosmic stillness of death. But on her gravestone is says this:

Caring, kind and fiercely free,

She moves on impatiently.

I especially fond of the present tense of “moves”. I'm not at all sure what I think about the mysterious door we all approach, but I'm glad they didn't put 'moved on'. It leaves the whole question of death up in the air a bit—dynamic and full of possibilities.

And I think the words are a wonderful way to say good-bye to a dead daughter. I'm half in love with that 16 year old. She'd be nearing 40 now on this side of the Door. Who know where she moves on the other side.

Fred, an intern who will be a wonderful priest, and I did the weirdest thing I remember doing in a long time just a few months before I retired. “Uncle Jimmy” had died. I was out of town and wasn't at his deathbed but I knew his nephew, a gracious, generous man who lives on the Jersey Shore, had wanted me to be sure to give his 'uncle', who, in fact, was more like his father than his uncle, last rites.

Jimmy was this tiny little man who had a girlfriend who was in a nursing home. He went to see her every day on the bus and then took the bus back to town and stopped by St. John's to sit in the nave and pray. Then he'd go to the Elk's Club and have a nip or two before going home. And once a month he'd stop by the church office and write a check for his 'dues'. Lots of the older folks, mostly union members when the brass mills were working, called their contributions, 'dues'. I'd catch him in the church from time to time and give him communion. Wade, his nephew, an organist at his church in New Jersey, was glad to know all that.

Since I needed to anoint Jimmy, Fred and I went across the street to the funeral home and one of the funeral directors let us in to the embalming room where Jimmy was laid out. There was a woman there too, large, quite young, I thought, and, like Jimmy, covered by a sheet with her head on a little notched support. So I anointed Jimmy, touching his room temperature forehead and asked God to see him through the door into whatever comes next.

When I told Wade about that, apologizing for not having done it before Jimmy died, he simply smiled and thanked me. How gracious people are—Jimmy dead and Wade living.

For the living and the dead, there might just be life after funerals after all.

So, it actually happened....

I thought it would, but I couldn't let myself think that in case it didn't happen.

Part of my father's creed--"never hope for too much because you'll most often be disappointed."

I swear he taught me that! I forgive him, but it was an awful lesson to learn, though often true.

My father was a class A pragmatist.

But it actually happened, by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court made gay marriage the law of the land. I always thought Justice Kennedy would be the vote that mattered and made the difference. And he did just that. I had hoped Chief Justice Roberts would have considered his legacy more than his conservative credentials and made it 6-3. But he didn't, and I understand why.

It was a case of judicial activism--making the Constitution say what it should instead of what it does. Like the Warren Court in the 60's, jumping ahead of the society and setting the course for the future.

Lots of folks won't agree. The decision will divide us more than unite us as a people, a nation.

But it was 'right', just as Brown vs. The Board of Education and Row vs. Wade leaped ahead and brought us to where we need to be.

It was when the 'closet' disappeared that turned it all around. People suddenly realized their friends, their families, people they cared about were gay...and that made all the difference.

I pray the remarkable, healing and wondrous reaction to the massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, will change the conversation about race in the same way as gay/lesbians coming out of the closet did for that conversation.

No violence or breaking of the law in any way after 9 people were slaughtered for being inclusive and welcoming. The Confederate flag coming down in Mississippi and off license plates in Virginia. Real movement about a hateful symbol that had be shrouded in 'heritage'. Maybe a path of peace and reconciliation now that wasn't possible in Ferguson and Baltimore.

Something to pray for, at least.

Just as I thought our country was slipping back into Regan-esq ways of being, the Supreme Court has given me hope. And Hope is good, no matter what my father thought.

Chapter Five

5. Some People I

I've mentioned the Rev. Wil B. Dunn earlier on in these musings. He was a character in the comic strip 'Kudzu' by Doug Marlette (also an award winning political cartoonist). The Rev. Wil was a rotund preacher who always dressed in black with a string tie and a huge hat reminiscent of Mexican padres. He was a cynical, self-serving minister who developed what he called 'a ministry to the fabulously wealthy' and pandered himself to a rich Southern bigot. Of course the comic took place in the South where Kudzu grows and such preachers as Wil are in abundance. Rev. Dunn and the strips title character, an angst ridden teenager named Kudzu Dubose, often had philosophical and psychological discussions while walking down a dusty country road. Kudzu would confess deep secrets to the pastor, looking for guidance. Once, when the teen asks, “What would you do if you were me?” Wil B. replies, “If I were you, I reckon I'd give up, change my name, have plastic surgery, and move to Nome, Alaska....” In the next frame Kudzu looks confused and depressed and the parson continues, “...of course, I'm not you.”

Another time, after Kudzu tells him one of his most profound thoughts, Rev. Dunn responds, “Son, don't ever tell that to another living soul.” In spite of his unorthodox counseling style, Wil B. often said, “Human Relations is my field....”

In a way, Human Relations is the only 'specialty' of the last generalists we call 'parish priests.' Once, when a friend, surprised to know (as people often were) that I worked more days than Sunday, asked me what I did on the other days. I told him, “I walk around and talk a lot.”

In fact, I also walked around and 'listened' a lot too. Language and presence are the only real tools of parish ministry, so far as I can see. And it is involvement in people's lives that defines the role of a priest. A cynical description of 'human relations' for priests, one I've heard too much, is this: “Hatch 'em, match 'em and dispatch 'em.” Baptism, marriage and funerals are some of the statistics about what a parish priest does, but it is probably just 'being there' that matters most, if it matters much. When I'm not being skeptical, I can see that 'being there' in peoples' lives matters a great deal.

HOWARD AND LEE-ANN

They just showed up one day for the Eucharistic. I knew Howard because he frequented the Soup Kitchen from time to time, and though he didn't seem like the typical guest, he was on a margin somewhere. Every once in a while, he'd help out the sexton or work in the parking lot for big services, gently telling the overflow cars where they might find a spot. He's a big man who's partial to wearing western clothes—cowboy boots and hat, a fringed leather jacket, little boa ties with a skeleton steer's head as the clasp to hold the strings together. He was an affable and humorous man without a steady job, though he was glad to work. He wasn't typical, but I came to think of him as one of the Wanderers on the Earth that passed through St. John's. But I couldn't, for the longest time, figure out why he wandered.

I found out from someone that Howard had once worked in construction, high-up stiff on bridges and buildings that paid a handsome salary. I asked him about it and he told me that no one would hire him any more.

“How come?” I asked.

He smiled, “I tend to fall too much....”

He had fallen from several stories twice, a couple of year apart, and ended up unconscious for a few days the first time and a few weeks the second time. “I guess they thought the medical costs were too big a risk,” he told me. “Bosses don't like paying for intensive care.”

Some time later, I asked Howard about his comas, which is what they were, after the falls. He was a bit vague about it all, but he told me something remarkable. “I guess I wasn't through with the work after the first time,” he said, growing uncharacteristically somber, “so they needed me to fall again so I could finish it.”

Question him as I might, he couldn't tell me who 'they' were or what the details of the 'work' of being unconscious was all about. However, he was adamant that a coma is a place where things go on in a different sphere, a different level of existence than being awake and walking around. And it wasn't like dreams, he told me, although his dreams became more and more vivid after the falls. But the 'work' wasn't dreamlike, it was 'real' in a way as real as being conscious is. I tried to imagine all that in a dozen ways. Sometimes I'd come up with a new metaphor and check it out with him.

“Was it 'work' like physical work?” I asked once. “Did you have to 'do' things? Who told you what to do?”

He grinned a crooked grin that by them I realized was most likely the results of brain trauma, and shook his head. “Not exactly,” he said, closing his eyes, perhaps trying to picture it in his mind. “Something like that, but not exactly. And they never told me who they were.

Later, I imagined them as angels who met him in some 'waiting room' between existences and encouraged him to finish something he needed to do in his heart or soul. That made Howard laugh until he had to wipe his eyes. “It sure wasn't heaven,” he finally told me, “or very holy at all.”

So, I went away to think about it some more. At least I had a reason why Howard didn't seem inclined to hold jobs and sought out the soup kitchen from time to time. Falling 40 feet or so and landing on your head once, much less twice, must have jumbled things up pretty well. He would never discuss the medical procedures he underwent. Either he was embarrassed about how much his brain had been tampered with by surgeons or he honestly had no idea what they had done to him while he wad doing his coma work. Once I knew the story, I did notice suspicious scars and indentations on his head and places where hair didn't seem to grow. And I began to suspect that his craggy, just out of line face hadn't always looked that way but was the best the doctors could do with what the falls had given them to work with.

I never thought of Howard as 'unfortunate'. He seemed to have a sunny and optimistic disposition and genuinely enjoyed his life, such as it was. I'd occasionally see him in the back of the church on Sundays and could tell when he reached out for the bread that his hands had done a great deal of physical labor. He almost always had tears in his eyes when he received the sacrament and would grip my hand with both his when I laid the wafer in his palm. His hands were huge and powerful. I didn't feel sorry for Howard at all. Then Lee-Ann showed up and I came to almost envy him.

Lee-Ann was from a whole different world than Howard. She was a schoolteacher, obviously bright, very well-spoken and dressed like a middle-class woman of 40-something. When they came to communion together that first day she was in church with Howard, his eyes were brimming over and he was smiling like a crazy man, beaming, radiant. 'The look of love' was all over him, breaking out from deep within and almost illuminating him. Howard was in his 40's as well and had never married, or, to my knowledge, ever been serious with women. But that day, kneeling beside her, glancing at me and then at her, he was like a child who had discovered something wondrous beyond compare, like a man who found a treasure in a field or a pearl of great worth. Everything about him spoke loudly. “Look what I found!” he was saying, without speaking a word.

Interestingly enough, that first Sunday I saw them together, there was an interment of ashes in the Close. When St. John's congregation approved the idea of burying ashes in our court yard, after a loud and unexpected debate, a committee laid out a parcel of ground where the ashes would go. It is discretely marked off with four stone markers that create a rectangle 6 feet by 15 feet or so. If you didn't know what you were looking for, you'd never find that burial ground—that was one of the stipulations of the committee. Since St. John's is in the middle of a city and the Close is a place of heavy traffic, the committee didn't want people to be able to find the burial spots lest they do something untowardly or disrespectful to them. So the rule was: “all ashes interred will be interred in the designated area.”

That Sunday I was breaking the rule, much to the chagrin of some folks, and interring some ashes next to the church, outside a Tiffany stained glass window that depicted an angel orchestra. I'll get to why I broke that rule somewhere else—suffice it to say that Howard and Lee-Ann witnessed the interment that morning.

When Howard introduced me to Lee-Ann, after the cremains were poured and the prayers uttered, she was wiping away tears and told me how moving she thought the interment had been. We talked for a while and then they went off, hand in hand like two teenagers, down the sidewalk to Lee-Ann's car. They became regulars at church after that and got involved in things Howard had never considered doing before Lee-Ann. They were fixtures after only a month or so. I can see them at the coffee hour in my mind's eye, leaning against each other, talking with a group gathered around them, drawn—I suspect—to the warmth of their obvious love. Howard bloomed in the wonder of his great good luck and in a few months they came to me wanting to be married.

All during their pre-marriage sessions, I couldn't keep a smile off my face as I asked the questions I typically ask and encouraged them to talk about their lives and their relationship. I don't think I've been, before or since, in the presence of a couple whose devotion was so palpable. It wasn't just Howard who had found a treasure in an unexpected field and was willing to give all that he had to that treasure. Lee-Ann was no less smitten. During the months I knew her she seemed to grow 10 years younger—her middle-aged good looks transforming into an ageless beauty. And I had no doubt that it was love that did the wonders for both of them.

Usually, when I ask a couple at the first session 'why they want to get married?', I tell them there is only one 'wrong answer'. And when they say “we're in love”, I tell them that is the one wrong answer because love will go away. I don't do that in a crass or cruel way, but it is important to me that people realize that like any 'emotion', love comes and goes. My skeptical assertion is only to lay the foundation for suggesting that marriage requires 'commitment' more than love—so that when the bad times come, times romantic love can't manage alone, there is something else to rely on. “For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health” is, after all, what the vows say. And I just want to be sure that the couple understands that romanticism and infatuation and sexual attraction might not be enough to manage those vows without something nearer the bone, something like a choice you make rather than something you 'feel'.

I've had lots of couples balk at my suggestion that love might not be enough to forge bonds to withstand the realities of life. And, at least I don't go as far as my friend John, a psychologist who tells people in pre-marriage counseling that the moment will could when they realize it “would all be better if the other one would die right now!” I suspect that moment occasionally shows up in the course of a life-long relationship, but I soft-peddle it by telling couples that love comes and love goes and love comes again and it is in those times when love seems to be on vacation that they must reach down and let the 'choice' of being committed take over.

Howard and Lee-Ann smiled broadly at my assertion about 'love' not being the right answer. They looked at each other and glowed. “Don't worry,” Lee-Ann said, “we've got it handled.” And I must admit that I believed them completely.

Lee-Ann's teenage daughter from a previous marriage started coming with them to church. It was obvious that she was as taken with Howard as her mother was. The three of them struck me as a remarkable 'fit'--perfectly at ease with each other, gently teasing and totally committed. Lee-Ann, I decided was absolutely correct: the three of them had it handled.

The celebrations of marriage tend to run together over time, but I remember clearly the exchange of vows between Howard and Lee-Ann because they were both crying and laughing at the same time while they tried (with scant success) to repeat what I told them. And everyone in the church that day was crying and laughing as well. I don't remember anything quite like it.

So, you obviously realize by now that something as astonishing as the way these two star-struck lovers had found each other when neither of them had any intention of stumbling across such rare joy must end in profound tragedy. We are all skeptical enough to imaging the dropping of 'the other shoe' and cynical enough not to believe in Fairy Tales with 'happily ever after' endings. (Maybe it is only in retrospect that I can write such things. I know for sure that I wished them joy and long-life because I derived such pleasure from their happiness. But, after what happened, it is hard not to look back and imagine such a purity of human joy was bound to have something bad intervene. I simply don't know why it so often seems that bad things happen to good people.....But they do.)

On their honeymoon, Howard and Lee-Ann were white-water canoeing when their canoe capsized. It took Howard a few moment to find his feet since the water was rushing and the rocks were slippery beneath him. But he came up, sputtering and laughing, realizing he was in about two feet of water. He told me much later that he looked down stream first, thinking he would surely see Lee-Ann, drenched and bruised, but laughing as the sun sparkled off her orange life jacket and her golden hair. He waited a few moments and began to call to her, looking at the banks of the river—only 12 feet wide at that point—expecting to see her there waving. When he couldn't see her on the shore, a terror made worse by its unexpectedness suddenly gripped his heart and he started running up stream, as best he could, slipping and following considerable quantities of the roiling stream because he kept yelling, “O God! O God! O God!” over and over, reverting to that most simple and primal of prayer forms that disaster drives us to pray.

When the others realized Howard and Lee-Ann were no longer with them, they pulled in the shore and rushed trough the woods, back up-stream. I was told, not by Howard, but by someone who claimed to have heard the story from one of the white-water group, that it took three men to drag him off her, on the river bank where he had dragged her limp body and tried everything to revive her. Howard broke one of the men's jaw and did damage to them all until he collapsed into a shattered heap that the EMT's carried out on a stretcher and delivered the two of them—one dead, the other praying for death—to the nearest hospital.

Two legends persist: either Lee-Ann struck her head and was knocked unconscious, face down, or somehow her life jacket tangled on the rocks and held her under until she drowned. I can only pray it was the former and she did not have to experience the unrelenting terror of being underwater, aware and hearing Howard's plaintive shouts of “O God!” as she died. Which ever really happened, she died in water not much deeper than a bathtub and much of Howard died with her.

I did more funerals than weddings in my 35 years as a priest, so they blur in my memory even more than the joyful celebrations. And I don't remember much about Lee-Ann's memorial service, not because it was just one of hundreds, but because it was one of those rare funerals when I was personally so grieved that I hardly remember being there, much less presiding. I believe that a priest develops a sixth-sense about joy and sorrow so that he/she can begin to evaluate the mood of the moment. And that day, the day of Lee-Ann's service, was off the Richter Scale of mourning. It was like walking into the looking glass—the joy of the wedding was cruelly reflected in the stone-cold mourning and suffering of the funeral. And they were so close together as to make your head swim with incongruity, like being caught in the death's grip of a rushing stream.

There was no interment of Lee-Ann's ashes that day. Howard carried them with him in the front seat of Lee-Ann's car. When he got home, he put the box in his bed. He took her cremains wherever he went for several months. He stopped shaving and mostly stopped bathing and nearly stopped eating. He grew guant with grief and disheveled by disaster. His smile disappeared and, after finally bringing me the ashes to bury, so did he for a long time.

I had promised solemnly to God and the Close Committee to never again venture outside the designated burial after interring Sonja's ashes beneath the Angel Choir window. But when Howard finally brought Lee-Ann's ashes to me, he remind me that their first Sunday together at St. John's had been the day of Sonja's burial.

“Lee-Ann told me over and over,” he said, between shuttering sobs, “that she wanted to be buried under a window too. She said it so much I had to tell her to 'shut up' about dying.” He paused for a long time before continuing. “It was the only time I was ever angry with her. I just couldn't stand hearing her talk about dying....I couldn't stand it.”

So, for the second time, I broke the rule. Lee-Ann's remains are under the window next to the one where Sonja's ashes abide. For several Christmas' someone always put a poinsettia there, and at Easter a lily. I wasn't sure if it were Howard or Lee-Ann's family. He family took Lee-Ann's death almost as hard as Howard did. Like him, they disappeared until one November day, near Thanksgiving, a couple of years ago. Lee-Ann's mother called to ask if I had seen Howard, knew how he was, where he was....My answer was 'no', three times 'no'. She was disappointed and concerned. “I worry about him now,” she told me. “For the first few years I didn't want to see him, didn't want to be reminded of the sorrow...or the joy. But now I'm ready. If you see him, make him call me....”

One of the things we tell ourselves when people die is that at least we have the happy memories. But sometimes, remembered happiness is as sharp a pain as remembered loss. Especially when the joy was so complete and so short-lived as Howard's and Lee-Ann's. Mourning is a complicated enterprise—much lie doing work unconscious, not quite understanding the task or how to complete it, not knowing who or what is making you work, knowing it is as necessary as it is difficult.

I saw Howard several times I the last two years before I retired. Suddenly, he'd show up in the back of the church and bring himself, weeping openly, to the altar rail. Lee-Ann's family found him first. On rare occassions they'd track him down and come to church with him—her mother, her sister, even her daughter once. It was excruciating to see them together, but better to see them together—still broken in remarkable ways, but standing up and moving on, trying to smile, full of memories that ache with the heights of joy and the depths of despair.

Once, when they were there, I snuck out of coffee hour into the Close to smoke one of the cigarettes that drove most of the parish crazy. Those I served and who served me became 'the tobacco police' for me. They tried shame and fear to make me stop. I should, maybe I will. But that cigarette took me out where I saw Howard and Lee-Ann's mother and sister draped around each other, looking down at the little piece of earth beneath the Presentation in the Temple window where Lee-Ann rests. There was nothing to say, but I stood with them for a while, embraced each one and slipped silently away as they presented their tears and longing and, by that time in the process of their loss, their thanksgiving for Lee-Ann's life at the Temple of our achingly sad and profoundly radiant humanity.

SONJA

When the idea of interring ashes in the Close first arose from a group of parishioners who wanted to find their final rest on the grounds of St. John's, I thought it was a slam-dunk, an idea whose time had not only come but to which no one could possibly object. After all, weren't church burial grounds a fixture in many places and didn't the cathedrals of Europe serve as crypts as naturally as they served as places of worship? A no-brainer of an idea that was brought to the Annual Meeting of the parish as an afait comple—right? Oh, no, beloved, not so fast....

Dr. Sweeny, a retired physician, one of the sweetest men I ever met, got up and started asking questions I could not only not answer, I could not exactly understand. He wanted to know about health codes and what if the church closed some day and a court house was built where the Close was now and about other laws we hadn't considered or looked into. By reputation alone—as a sweetheart and a brilliant doctor—he threw the meeting into chaos. Others were coming to the floor microphone to display their insights into a subject they had never considered before the previous five minutes. Motions were made and amended and voted down. Other motions were made, amended and tabled. Chairing the meeting, I was swimming in depths of Roberts' Rules of Order far beyond my ken. Finally, a motion for a full report on all the issues raised be prepared and a special parish meeting be called to make the final decision.

The whole experience reminded me that there's no such thing as an 'obvious answer' to a bunch of Episcopalians with a microphone. It also convinced me of the existence of my guardian angel, who blocked, during the debate and vote, the thought I had as soon as it was over, saving me from my poor impulse control. After the motion for a report passed and someone got up to talk about something else, I turned to Lucy, the Senior Warden, sitting beside me at the table and whispered, “that was an awfully long discussion over a few ash holes!” She laughed and whispered back, “thank God you didn't say that out loud!” And thank God I did...and my better angel as well.

At any rate, what was proposed and passed unanimously a few weeks later was, I must admit, a lot more 'put together' than the original proposal. Lots of details—like how to keep track of whose ashes were where, and some simple paperwork to be filed, and the rule about only interring in the designated spot came out of the extra time for thought. It was that last thing—the rule about not just burying ashes hither and yon but I a marked off spot—was the rule I broke when I interred Sonja beneath the Angel Choir/Orchestra Tiffany window.

When I first met Sonja, already a member of the parish for over 80 years, she was in her early 90's and spent Tuesday and Thursday mornings serving lunch to elders in St. John's auditorium. It was an outreach ministry done with the Commission on Aging. Sonja was, in many cases, 25 or more years older than the people whose plates she carried to their tables. She called them 'the old folks' and sometimes, 'the old farts' because Sonja had a mouth on her that would make a sailor, or most anyone, blush. She once told me, “when you're as damn old as I am, you can say anything you please.” Then she winked through and over the coke-bottle-bottom glasses she wore and pinched me. When you were as damn old as Sonja, you could also pinch and poke and kiss anyone you damn-well pleased too.

She had come to this country from Sweden when she was two or three with her baby brother, whom she adored, and her parents. She claimed to remember the voyage and coming through Ellis Island. And she certainly remembered having broken her leg when she was eight or so and sitting on a wall in front of her house with her leg in a cast. Along came John Lewis, the venerable Rector of St. John's from 1900-1940, in the first years of that long incumbency, out doing house calls. Dr. Lewis told her she was a pretty girl and asked if she went to church. She told him no and he went right in her house and signed up that Swedish family to come to the 'English' church. He baptized the two kids and welcomed her family and sat with them when the news came that her brother, who was a soldier in WW I, had been killed in action. She always carried a picture of her brother with her and her eyes would well up whenever she showed it to you. He was a handsome man in a uniform. It struck me as remarkable that I knew someone whose younger brother had died in the First War. To hear Sonja tell it, he signed up at 16, lying about his age. She was just out of high school and working. His death broke her heart.

She worked for one of the clock makers in Waterbury for 50 or more years. During much of that time, because she was small and agile, with supple fingers, she was one of the women who painted the luminescent, radium packed paint on the hands and numbers of the clocks so they would glow in the dark. She worked with tiny, delicate brushes that she kept pointed by placing them between her teeth and pulling them out, ingesting, over the years, more radioactive material than could possibly be good for you. Yale University did a long study of all the women who had painted the clocks. Many of them died young of bizarre diseases, cancers in obscure places. Sonja was the last member of the study group, living to be 103, and was hardly sick a day in her life. “I shine in the dark,” she told me, more than once. As Kurt Vonnegut was accurate in saying, “So it goes....”

(If anyone ever asks me what I think is the secret of longevity, I will tell them, “be skinny and never marry.” Sonja was far from being the only long-lived spinster lady I've encountered along the way. I always tried to keep up with whoever the oldest member of St. John's was at any point. The current leader, though I'm not there to keep tabs on such things any more, is Gladys. I remember when Gladys had massive surgery for colon cancer. She was 93 and weighed 85 pounds prior to the surgery. She, like Sonja, was eccentric and a tad crotchety. For example, her nephew told me that Gladys and one of her brothers didn't speak to each other for over 40 years due to some oversight neither of them had been able to remember for two decades. Also, like Sonja, Gladys has a quick and acrid wit. When a nurse came in and said, “Mrs. Lancaster, your chart isn't complete. We don't have a list of your medications.”

Gladys gave him a withering look. She'd already made it clear to him she didn't think male nurses should care for aging women. She said, her voice dripping with insult, “it's MISS, Sonny....And there's no record of my medications because I don't take any....”

He looked at her for a moment, slapped her chart shut and replied, “I guess that's the way to do it.” When he left, Gladys smiled at me with great satisfaction.

Three days after the surgery, she was eating solid food, fully dressed and read to go home. “I've gained five pounds in three days,” she told me.

“Better be careful,” I told her, “your weight might catch up with your age...” I love those tough old women.)

Sonja would talk about the indignities the researchers from Yale put her through over the years. “But,” she always added, “they give me a check for each check-up. I'm going to outlive them all.”

As irascible and opinionated as Sonja could be (and she had an opinion about everything and everyone) she was fun to be around, partly because of her cantankerousness and sardonic comments. She had a little fan club among the faithful of St. John's who always made sure she had somewhere to go for Easter and Thanksgiving and Christmas. One Thanksgiving, a few years before she died, still and hale and hearth 100, everyone in her ad hoc support group was going to be out of town. One of them called me, frantic, and told me Sonja didn't have an invitation for Thanksgiving dinner. I told them I'd be honored to ask he and after some arguing about her not wanting 'to be a bother', she accepted gracefully. My children, who were in their teens, were horrified by the news that someone over 100 years old was coming to dinner. They already thought the collection of friends we generally have over on Thanksgiving were hopelessly senile and embarrassing—like me and their mother. But once Sonja got there, seated by the fireplace in the kitchen while dinner finished cooking, she somehow charmed them (or pinched and poked them, I'm not sure which) into sitting “for a minute”, she said, “and talk to an old woman.”

Sonja became the center of attention for the day (a role she relished in her own quirky way) and she regaled our children and our guests with stories galore and risque comments and remarkable puns about what others said. She ate everything on her plate and after I'd taken her home with a plate for the next day and come back, my son—a hard sell at any age, but especially back then—told me, his face and voice filled with astonishment: “Do you realize she's lived the whole 20^th century and then some?” I did, of course, realize that, not nearly so brain-dead as a teen imagines his father to be. He shook his head and went on, “imagine what changes she's seen....” He said that almost dreamily. Then, after a moment's reflection, he concluded with a smile of admiration: “That is one classy old broad....”

And she was—profanity and pinching and poking notwithstanding. Sonja was a classy old broad. And more full of piss and vinegar than most anyone I ever met.

She had outlived her friends and all her family since there'd been no contact with Sweden over the decades. St. John's had become her family—the only one she had besides the people who lived around her in the elderly high rise just across the Green from the church. Most of them she considered 'old farts' or worse. It was the bosom of the church that nurtured her in her aloneness (I'm not sure she was ever 'lonely). It was her church family that loved her in spite of (and because of) her independence and stubbornness. Some of Guardians of Sonja at the parish would be frustrated at her unwillingness to accept the level of help and assistance they wanted to give. She would steadfastly refuse rides to church in almost any weather. “It's just across the Green,” she say, “a person needs some exercise.”

She was a musician and played the piano at 90 and 100 as well as most folks who say they play he piano. Her voice had abandoned her so she resigned from the choir at St. John's in her mid-90's. But she loved music, loved it profoundly. Her radio was always tuned to the classical station and in her last few years she played it so loudly that I'm surprised the old farts in her building didn't complain—but then, their hearing was probably much worse than Sonja's. This is where the offense I committed about the burial of her ashes came in.

One day she came to see me about her funeral. She was 98 or so, but she wanted to make the arrangements, she said, “just in case”. She picked the hymns for her service and said, “I'll leave the readings to you, I don't listen to them anyway.” Then she gave me that patented wink.

“One last thing,” she told me, “I want you to bury my ashes under that window with the angels making music. There's one playing a piano—I imagine that is me.”

I told her the rule about where ashes could be interred and even walked her out to show her where the spot was, right in front of a bench beside the walkway on the outside of the Close. She stood with me, letting me hold her hand, and shook her head.

“Some street person will piss on me if I'm there,” she said. “I want to be over under my window.”

Perhaps it was the audacity of taking personal possession of a priceless and irreplaceable Tiffany window that impressed me. “MY window,” she said, just like that. Or maybe it was wanting to fulfill the longings of a woman who had lived almost a century. Or, most likely, it was because I was afraid to cross Sonja on anything, much less something so final as that. At any rate, I told her I would bury her ashes where she wanted.

“Promise?” she asked.

“I promise,” I told her.

“Cross your heart and hope to die?” she said.

I solemnly crossed my heart. Then she winked and pinched me and refused both a ride home and my walking with her. She sat off down the sidewalk around the south side of the Green. I watched her all the way to her building's door. She stopped several times to talk to people and almost smacked someone who tried to help her at the crosswalk. One classy old broad—with an edge to her.

I remember ferrying Sonja to the doctor one day and then back home. It wasn't a long trip, but as we were driving, she kept pointing out 'landmarks' that weren't there anymore. She was able to remember where businesses that had been 'out of business' for 50 years had been, where homes of her friends and members of the church had sat—though long since replaced by different buildings. She pointed out restaurants and schools and factories, long gone, but not forgotten, by Sonja. I invited her to just ride around with me for a while and she demurred, never minding spending time with a younger man, which included all but a handful of the men on the planet. She had macular degeneration, but I knew from experiencing my father with the same condition, that periphery vision improved as it became harder to look 'right at' something. For an hour or more, I drove the main streets of Waterbury and more than a few of the almost forgotten streets—but Sonja remembered and told me the history of the city for the past century in that one short ride. Her mind never dimmed—God bless her—and she went into that mysterious darkness (finally!) with her brain still working. Sometimes she attributed her memory to sucking on radium for all those years or to her Swedish genes or to just 'paying attention' for so long.

Sonja liked a glass of wine and she liked music and she always wore a wig, sort of a Mamie Eisenhower-looking haircut, mostly gray as befitted her great age. I never knew it was a wig, being genetically impaired from noticing such things, until I saw her in the hospital during the last days of her life. I walked into her room and saw this woman with snow white hair, thin and long enough to reach well down her back, in the bed. Her hair was so white it almost disappeared into the pillow and sheets. I was reminded of the shock I had visiting my 'Mammaw' Jones in the nursing home and seeing her hair down. Mammaw always wore her hair in a tight little bun on the back of her head since the Pilgrim Holiness people thought a woman's hair was too erotic to display to the world. Orthodox Jews believe the same thing and their women wear wigs as dowdy as Sonja's once they are married. Muslim women wear the head scarf. Hair IS erotic, and as shocking as it was to me, seeing Sonja with her hair down, spread out around her in the hospital bed made me want to weep with wonder. It was beautiful—that century old hair—fine as strands of silk and white as the hair of Scandinavian fashion models.

“My God, Sonja,” I said, not practicing impulse control very well, “you're a toe-head!”

She winked and I saw it quite well since the hospital had taken her glasses as well as her wig. “Pretty snazzy, huh?” she said. Sonja, I suddenly realized, had been alive when 'snazzy' became something people said. She had lived through and outlasted over a century of language innovations. It was an odd thing to reflect on, but my mind was throwing up thoughts from the sub-conscious level to distract me from the certain fact that when you're 103 and in the hospital, all is not well. I sat with her for a long time, not saying much, and she, for a change, wasn't chatty. I just held her hand, astonished by how strong it still was—the better to pinch and poke with—and wondered what on earth she was thinking.

A few days later, I visited her in another hospital room. She had a roommate who seemed to be comatose and was hooked up to all sorts of medical gadgets that sighed and whimpered and ticked. The woman looked terribly familiar to me, but then, I told myself, old people all look alike.

Sonja was sitting up in a chair, covered with sheets and gadget free. She smiled at me when she saw me out of the corner of her eyes, which was, after all, the only way she could see me...or much of anything.

“How are you doing, Sonja?” I asked, kissing her cheek and having her almost crush my hand as she took it.

“I'm in a damn hospital,” she said, “how well can I be doing?” Then she winked.

It turned out that she was ready to leave the hospital, according to the doctors. She told me a social worker was imminently coming to talk with her about discharge. “They want to send me to a nursing home,” she whispered, almost conspiratorially, “but I'm not going.”

I tried to be rational and honest and explain to her that she couldn't imagine she was well enough to go back to her apartment. She listened with simmering impatience and then said, “I'm not going to a nursing home, mark my word....”

So we spoke of other things and I gave her communion and kissed her cheek before leaving. She grabbed my neck with her strong right hand and squeezed until I thought I might cry. “Did you see my friend next door?” she asked, finally releasing me. I thought she meant 'next door' at her apartment and was trying to explain I didn't even know who lived next door to her when she interrupted, rolling her cloudy eyes at my stupidity, and said, “no, I mean in the bed 'next door'.”

It turned out that it was another member of St. John's, a woman in her 90's—another skinny, unmarried woman in her 90's—who had been in a nursing home for as long as I'd been at St. John's. That's why she looked so familiar to me, but my ageist prejudice had kept me from recognizing her myself. When she died, a few weeks later, it was discovered that she had left her estate to St. John's, nearly a million dollars she and her unmarried brother, who had died two years before, had saved up over the years they lived in skinny, unmarried bliss. Nobody had imagined such a bequest from her. But when I turned back toward Sonja, surprise on my face, she told me, “I knew her and her brother well. They both worked for the phone company. She's got money, you know....”

I anointed that parishioner, but not Sonja, because I knew Sonja would relent and go to a nursing home, alternatively driving the staff crazy and seducing them into loving her, and outlive us all. Freda, beside her in the next bed, was not long for this world I could tell. So I gave her the last rites of the church and prayed for a speedy release for her from earthly bonds. And I was struck later by what the odds were about two women of such ages who had know each other for over half-a-century and had gone to the same church, ending up in the same room in a hospital in a city of over 100,000. Just my sub-conscious mind working overtime again, I believe. As I was finally leaving the room, I met the social worker coming in to talk with Sonja.

“You've got your work cut out for you,” I told her. “Sonja says she's not going to a nursing home.”

I said it light-heartedly, figuring that Sonja would relent finally, after an extended bout of contrariness. I also thought I'd better come back the next day to see Freda, if she lived that long. But, like she always did, Sonja surprised me and Freda outlived her. After her contentious conversation with the social worker and her oath-filled promised never to go to a nursing home, Sonja asked to be put back in bed where—either out of an act of will or ultimate stubbornness—she died within the hour.

Her funeral was one of those rare occasions where all the tears—and there were plenty of them—were out of relief that Sonja hadn't suffered and out of joy for having had the pleasure of her company on this odd journey from cradle to grave we are all on.

After the service, an elegantly dressed man with a Spanish accent came up to me and hugged me. His cologne was both expensive (at least to my spell) and perfectly applied. He was like a gentleman just arrived from the Pampas or Old Spain. He told me how much he had loved Sonja—he and his 'friend'--and that he was so moved by her funeral that he would become a member of the parish. I thanked him, asked his name and decided I probably wouldn't ever see him again. Lots of people tell me, after weddings and funerals, that they are going to join the church. I chalk it up to emotions that will soon fade. But they don't always and he was a member of the church for quite a few years before he died. Even after we started a Spanish Eucharist, Diago kept coming to the English mass. He was elegant to the end of his life. He always hugged me and his cologne was never overdone and was certainly not anything you could buy in a drug store. He was one of the gifts, out of multitudes, that Sonja gave to St. John's.

Sonja, because she always 'handled' things well, had made arrangements with a funeral director. She came to the church in a casket and was afterward cremated. That's why her interment beneath 'her window' was on a Sunday. We kept her in the vault for a few days. There were often some cremains in St. John's vault awaiting final disposition. Sometimes they were there for quite a while, until the family could get everyone assembled from across the country, things like that.

(The reason I started storing cremains in the vault was that one Sunday we were doing an interment between the two services and, lo and behold, the funeral parlor had forgotten to bring the cremains down on Friday! Luckily, one of the partners in the firm was a member of the parish and rushed out to get the box of ashes. He arrived back just as I was about to inter a box of 48 black magic markers instead. I usually don't let the folks stay until I pour the ashes in the hole since they are as light as cigarette ashes and tend to blow around a bit.)

It might seem a bit macabre, but I actually felt good about having folks around, living in the vault (well, not 'living' living, but resting there for a spell. Like Freda, Sonja left her earthly possessions to St. John's. There wasn't a lot of them and most of them—pots and pans, furniture, clothes, towels and such—we gave away to various agencies who could pass them on to someone else. We kept her upright piano and it still resides (I imagine) in the Guild Room on the third floor of the parish house. It's not especially good and is most likely out of tune, but sometimes someone plays it for the church school children to sing. Someone, I hope, might tell them the story of where it came from and the remarkable woman who owned it and gave it to the church. History, after all, is a much too neglected object of conversation these days.

Two of Sonja's church family and I were the ones who cleaned out her apartment. Among so very fetching photos of Sonja's life we found a lot of her with another woman over several decades. As we passed them around, one of the people said, “this must be the woman she always called 'my friend', don't you think?” I had heard her say it a few times. I remember her saying, “my friend and I used to...” (fill in the blank) and “after my friend died....” Then I remembered the words of the elegant Hispanic man at her funeral: “my friend and I loved Sonja....”

We sat there, the three of us, and looked at photos of Sonja and 'her friend' through the years. No one said it out loud, but I believe we all knew we'd tripped over the obvious. Those two women in dozens of poses: joyful, solemn, teasing, smirking, laughing...all the while growing older—from young, handsome women on a beach, to older, less playful women in front of a monument, to middle-aged women on a porch, to the women they were, in their 60's in a living room beside a fireplace. I don't know about the other two people, since we didn't say it out loud, but I had a rush of happiness. Sonja had spent some 40 years of her great, long life, with someone she obviously (from their faces in those pictures) loved profoundly. She hadn't spent her life 'alone'. She had 'a friend'. And they were in love. Sonja just happened to outlive her by 40 years.

The other thing we found was a lot of literature from the group called the Rosicrucian Order. That group, an esoteric cult from the 17^th century, mostly Germans, claimed connections to the church of the first century. The whole mess is too complicated to explain simply, so let it go at this: Rosicrucian ('The Rose Cross') theology/philosophy posits a 'college of Invisibles' from inner worlds, composed of individuals who were 'Adepts', sent to aid in the spiritual development of humanity. Rosicrucian literature is a mish-mash of hermetic philosophy, alchemy, connections (however vague) with the Sufi sect of Islam and an influence of Free Masonry. People like Francis Bacon are suspected of being members of the orders and Adepts. It is Christian occult raised to the highest level and on steroids. Where is Dan Brown when we need him? The DeVinci Code didn't scratch the surface. Lordy, lordy, Sonja might have been and Adept! Who knew? Who could have known? It was a secret society after all.

Surprises emerge when people sift through what you leave behind after entering that mysterious door to whatever comes next. Be careful what you leave behind, unless your purpose is to leave behind a few choice bits for people to mull over. Which wouldn't surprise me at all where Sonja (God bless her soul) was concerned.

So we interred her ashes one fine Sunday morning after the 10 a.m. Eucharist, on the very day that Lee-Ann decided to come to church with Howard. The rest you already know.

JONAH

Before Sonja died and Lee-Ann died, Jonah died.

Jonah isn't his real name, of course. I haven't been using anyone's real name in the stories of these people. Those who knew them will recognize them no matter how I change the names. But I call him Jonah since the Biblical Jonah was swallowed by a fish and the Jonah I knew was swallowed up whole by life.

I had two incarnations in my life at St. John's. I was there before I was 'there'. I was the supply priest for four months until the parish called a full-time interim rector to be there until they called a rector a year or so later...which was me again.

One of the first Sundays as supply priest, I was in the middle of my sermon when a man came down the side aisle, dressed in ragged clothes, carrying a broom and shouting what seemed to be a mixture of light profanity and quotes from the Bible. This happened at the 8 a.m. Service with only 20 or so people there. I was in the pulpit, four feet or so off the floor of the nave and Jonah (as I learned he was called) stopped right beneath me and looked up, respectively removing his hat. He addressed me as 'Preacher' and launched into a series of questions about 'webs' and 'the fuckin' Virgin Mary' and 'why won't the Lord leave me alone?' Since he never paused in his tirade to offer me a chance to answer his questions, I waited until the stopped for a breath and said, “Tell me, sir, what is your name?”

“Jonah,” he said, seeming suddenly quiet and almost sane.

“Jonah,” I said sincerely, hoping to hell that it worked, “I want to thank you for all you've told me. I want to thank you, Jonah....”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he put his hat back on and said, “you're welcomed, Preacher”, then left with his broom.

After the service, the congregation was almost giddy and surrounded me, smiling broadly, all of them.

“That was just right, Fr. Bradley,” one of them said.

“The last Rector didn't know how to deal with Jonah,” another told me.

“Wanted to have him thrown out when he came in,” someone interjected.

“But you did the right thing,” another added.

“He's harmless, you see,” one more suggested.

“And we don't mind him at all,” was the penultimate statement.

“Not at all. We rather like him,” someone said and they were all silent, smiling.

I had passed the Jonah Test—a pop quiz I'd never expected. They were so pleased that Jonah hadn't been mistreated that I didn't have the heart to tell them I had no idea what I was doing when I spoke to him.

Here's the story in short-hand that took me several years to learn. Jonah had come from a good family in Woodbury, an upscale suburb of the city. He had inherited and improved his father's general contracting business. Jonah built houses and office buildings and strip malls all over central Connecticut. He had a beautiful house and a lovely family—two daughters who were 9 and 11 when he lost them. He was a pillar of the community and obsessed with making money to add to the money he already had, oblivious to his own peril. One day he came home from work, late of course, after dinner and just before the girl's bedtime to find a darkened house and a note from his wife that they were gone....Gone.

His wife had cleaned out their bank accounts and most of their investments—at least that's how the story goes that I pieced together over time. Then she simply disappeared with the two girls who were the love of his over-worked, money-grubbing, there-is-never-enough life. Such as it was. And when they disappeared, I mean 'they disappeared'. None of the private detectives Jonah hired or the relatives of his wife he contacted could find her. Not for years. By the time I knew him he had somehow found her and carried a phone number with a Florida exchange on a slip of paper in his shirt pocket at all times. A couple of times I called her—and his brothers—for him, but they never wanted to talk to Jonah. By then the bridges had been burned and collapsed into a river that washed them to the sea.

Jonah walked out on his business—leaving houses and strip mall half built and involving him in law suits that became frivolous when he came back from wherever he went...Nineveh or Denver or someplace. When he came back he was a consummately broken man—financially, emotionally, spiritually and psychologically. It was a few months after his family disappeared that Jonah disappeared as well. He was gone (according to the stories I heard from others) for a long time. The fish of life swallowed him up and spit him out on some foreign and punishing shore. I tried to decipher the tales he told me when I talked with him, and I talked with him a lot. But part of it was gibberish and part was mental illness and all of it was in a code that only Jonah possessed the key for, and he wasn't telling.

Colorado figured prominently in his ramblings, and trains, and a 'she devil' somewhere, and the webs the Virgin Mary spun to ensnare him, and the not so beatific vision of a Lord who wouldn't leave him alone or release him from his personal purgatory. So, to appease the Lord who bedeviled him, he swept the streets of Waterbury and fed the pigeons on the Green. I often watched him feed the pigeons. He would come up with loaves and loaves of day-old bread (the kind just perfect for French toast—and sit on one of the benches of the Green to scatter the bread for the birds. After a while, because there were so many pigeons and so much bread, Jonah would disappear, swallowed up in the soft, feathery belly of a whale sized flock of birds. I worried about him, surrounded like that by a hundred birds or more—but then I'm of the generation that grew up with nightmares over Alfred Hitchcock's movie. Jonah was older than me and, if I'm not projecting too much, was most likely comforted by the blanket of birds that covered him, by the sweet down feel of their bodies, by their weight against him, by the cooing noise they make. The worse he ever experiences were some peck marks on his hand and claw wounds on his face. He didn't seem to mind.

He was always around. He did the circuit every day: from Immaculate Conception church, where he left flowers or a box of Russel Stover's candy before the state of the Virgin; to St. John's, where we would talk; to the corner grocery stores and convenience stores who would give him a loaf of bread until he had enough; to the pigeons on the Green an finally to his primary job of sweeping the streets. I would give him money on occasion and at the first of the month, he would bring it back two-fold. “I need to give you something for trusting me, Preacher,” he would say.

Once on a Good Friday, during the interminable three hour service we Episcopalians have, he came up to me during one of the extended silences. I was sitting in my black cassock in the chancel, trying to appear somehow penitent and grave, when Jonah came right up and said, “Preacher, can I have $10?” I could reach my pocket through the convenient slit in the garment and gave him the money more to get rid of him than out of the goodness of my heart. Twenty minutes later, he was back with a $10 box of candy. He came up in the chancel again and gave it to Mary Ann Logue, the Curate of St. John's at the time, a woman in her mid-50's who Jonah always called “the white haired preacher woman with nice breasts”. Mary Ann had learned 'Jonah Control' by that time, so she tanked him in a whisper and reminded him he needed to be going. After the service I told her, “the next time I see him I'm going to give you $10 and cut out the middleman.” But that would have ruined the fun and my continuing adventure of trying to figure out “Jonah World.”

For a couple of years I kept notes on what Jonah told me each day, but after that time I realized I was collecting code and gibberish on paper so I gave it up. I visited him once in the boarding house where he lived. His room was surprisingly orderly and spotless. He was clean and fresh from a shower, his hair carefully combed. He gave me a warm Coke and a stale cookie he found in a drawer. He continued the tale he always told and I left both astonished by his room's neatness and his appearance and more confused than ever.

(My older first-cousin, Marlin Pugh, once took me into his room that he had painted black and gave me two packs of Dentine gum when Dentine was smaller and more potent than today. He insisted I chew them all while he told me this strange and wondrous story:

“One dark and stormy night, three tramps sat around a fire. One said, 'Antonio, tell us a tale', so Antonio began....'One dark and stormy night, three tramps sat around a fire, one said 'Antonio, tell us a tale,' so Antonio began, One dark and storm NIGHT, three tramps sat around a fire. One said, 'Antonio, tell us a tale'....So Antonio began: 'ONE DARK AND STORMY NIGHT....' “)

I realized as I was writing it that there is no way, even for an old English major, to figure out how to punctuate the story of Antonio and his two fellow tramps. There aren't enough ways to distinguish between the quotes within the quotes within the quoted, for one thing. And, for another, the whole story, which Marlin carried on for 10 minutes or so while my mouth burned from Dentine, is utter nonsense raised to the level of the sublime. And that was Jonah's story as well. No way to punctuate it or understand it or decipher the code. All that—understanding his story and all—dwelled deep in the profoundly damaged mind of Jonah, who showed up back in Waterbury after his three year exile during which he experienced God know what, wandering the country in search of his daughters. And when he reappeared, he wasn't the successful, canny businessman he had been. He was a crazy man with a broom.

Early in January of 1992, after I'd know Jonah for two and a half years (nearly four years if you count the time I knew him when I was the supply priest), he came to my office as discouraged and frustrated as I'd ever seen him. Discouragement and frustration increased his powers of profanity, so excuse this memory of what he said.

“God-damn the Lord, Preacher,” he began, “I've been sweeping the streets for years now to set those fucking people free and I set them free and the damn Lord and the motherfucking Virgin Mary still won't let me stop sweeping. I'm supposed to go and fucking sweep the God-damn snow today on this shitty, fucking cold day! Why won't they let me be?”

Jonah literally collapsed into a chair in my office and his worn, wet broom fell to the floor. While he rested, I had a remarkable realization. During the last days of December 1991, the Soviet Union had imploded in on itself and the former satellite nations had declared independence. In some mystical and convoluted way, Jonah believed he had swept the Soviet Union away by sweeping the streets of Waterbury. Or else, that's what 'the Lord' told him: “Sweep these streetus until the Soviet Union is free and you will be free as well.” Or perhaps it was what the Virgin Mary told him: “I must keep you in my webs until you bring me enough candy and flowers and set those people in Eastern Europe free to worship me....”

I truly don't know about the voices he heard, but I know he believed them and I know he believed he had accomplished his Herculean task and deserved to be set free of his madness, his compulsions, his jabbering and his pain.

I felt like I'd found the lost chord or the missing link...and yet, I was no closer to Jonah without his madness than ever, I simply understood a tiny part of what was a harmless but haunting psychosis. He was as crazy and tormented as ever; perhaps even more so since the voices he heard—the Virgin and the Lord—had lied to him, misled him, used him horribly and for what purpose? What purpose indeed?

Some Waterbury fire-fighter, who deserves to be knighted if not made a saint, took Jonah in for the last couple of years of his life. I visited them in the fire-fighters neat little ranch house. Jonah was suffering from heart disease, little wonder, and never got over the betrayal of the Lord and the Virgin Mary and never escaped the Lord's command to sweep and feed the pigeons nor the Virgin's webs that kept him from being free.

He died, I was told, on the Green, feeding the pigeons. I was on vacation at the time. So when I came back and heard he was dead, his body swept away by his sane and successful brothers for a private, anonymous burial, I was saddened greatly that we never said goodbye. It's only a tale I heard around a fire bout his death, but I'd finally like to imagine he didn't so much die as he was ultimately swallowed up by the whale that haunted him all the latter years of his life, turned him upside down and inside out with grief and loss, left him on a small boat in a large and angry sea that gave him no rest.

I wonder about his wife and daughters—grown now, with children of their own. What stories do they tell of their father? And how could they know what a tattered and broom-carrying prophet he became: a prophet of the way life can be so tragic and messy and unfathomable and crazy that it will finally swallow you whole?

I wonder if the pigeons on the Green ever missed him—which makes me wonder about the life-span of a pigeon and whether memory can be passed on through the DNA of their species.

It all comes down to this, after all—for Jonah and Sonja and Lee-Ann and me and, ultimately, you: it comes down to the living and the dying and the being astonished by the cast of characters we meet along the way. The final choice is simple—dispair or hope. Human relations boils down to that in the end, and little more.

I miss Jonah and I live with the hope that somehow, in this life or the next or somewhere in between, we all get repaired, renewed, filled up with some abundance of life.

But, who knows? Who could know? Who, after all, would want to know?