Humanity

Yesterday one of our less-than-favourite Starbucks customers was in the newspaper.

In the obituaries.

I feel kind of guilty about it.

"Why?" asked the Milk Guy. "Do you really think whatever spiritual forces you tap into, killed him just because you didn't like him?"

Not at all.

"Maybe he's in a better place," he suggested. "In that case, you should be happy for him."

Sure. Maybe he is. I don't feel that I am in a position to discuss the likelihood or non-likelihood of this. But that's not really what was bothering me at the moment, either.

It's that . . . sometimes people are really jerks. Or unmitigatedly annoying. Or something else that triggers primarily negative reactions in people surrounding them. This man was, to me and my colleagues, unfortunately one of those people. But the last thing I said about him while he was alive, I said in the backroom of the store and it involved a lot of tisking and eyerolling and "I know"-ing. If, after you do that, you find out you're never going to see that person again because they died, it just does kind of weird things to your head.

I don't suppose, had I known he was going to die this week, I would have found him any less annoying in the interim. I don't know that I feel he was, by his usual actions in our store, necessarily deserving of any excess of respect. But knowing that he's dead now reminds me that we're all going to. Because we're all human. It reminds me that here was a human being for whom Jesus died, and none of us are deserving of any excess of respect in ourselves--but Jesus is, and this whole time I was taking for granted some dude that He loved and suffered for.

It's possible this man wouldn't have noticed had I treated him any differently than I did--particularly because I think most of the time I was at least polite if not cordial to his face. It's possible he wouldn't have cared. But I feel like my integrity's at stake, because I know what my inner attitude toward him was, and I also know what I say I believe about humanity and Jesus and what that means for personal interactions.

And I'm really scared that, even having come to this realisation, it's not going to make much of a difference.

The Grieving Process

There are quite a number of people whose departure from this life to the next has saddened me in some way this year. I guess, just as you can't predict when someone is going to go, you can't really predict when it's going to hit you. Or hit you again.

Last night I dreamed that I was invited to see Lloyd's house. I'm pretty sure he didn't live in a British terraced house (known as a row-house to us Yanks) relocated to Pennsylvania, but if he had, it might have looked like the one in my dream. In my dream I walked up the steps, through the front door, and straight to the back of the house where his study was. Somehow I knew that was where his study was. The door, which had one of those textured-glass windows in it, was ajar, and the light was on.

I entered slowly, reverently, almost expecting Lloyd to be sitting in there, working on a book. Someone was in there--one of the publishers or somebody who had been involved in getting me there--and everything seemed to be exactly as Lloyd had left it and exactly as I had expected it . . . but Lloyd himself wasn't there at all. I thought how ironic it was that I had actually been invited to his house but had never gotten to meet him in person. And I started to sob.

Clearly this dream was triggered by something I got in the mail yesterday, which I didn't read until I got home from work at 11.30pm. It was an invitation from a publisher to "light refreshments" at an establishment in New York City, in honour of Lloyd. I had half-imagined that someone might have found out about me while going through Lloyd's paraphernalia, but I didn't really expect anyone to do anything about it. I was kind of stunned and overwhelmed and flattered.

A publisher is going to be there. And some literary agents. I went to bed wondering if it would be totally tacky to go network at an event in memory of someone who had fairly recently died. But I guess my reasons for going wouldn't be entirely mercenary. I think the dream proved it.

Everyone Keeps Dying All Over the Place

Well. They do.

So far I still don't know what it's like to have family kidnapped and my entire community slaughtered. But some people do. Like Emmanuel, for instance.

Emmanuel and Jemima came to work for the group of churches I also worked for, just about a year before I left London. They're Rwandan. Emmanuel was a pastor, and he and his wife and children were not exempt from experiencing many of the atrocities that occurred in their home country. The faith they exhibited in the aftermath was inspiring, and the love was more inspiring still. Although they reached out to whomever God put in their path, they're heart's mission was to bring the reconciliation of Jesus to their fellow Rwandans, even though they were no longer in Rwanda. They never told whether they were Hutu or Tutsi. They never told anyone. "We belong to the Third Tribe," they said. "Jesus' tribe." They wanted everyone to belong to that tribe.

"Someone should write their story," I said, on probably more than one occasion. I never did anything about it, though.

Then Emmanuel contracted some sort of cancer. It was pretty sobering news to find out, so soon after leaving the scene. "Someone should write their story," I said. Emmanuel and Jemima and their adult children believed he would be healed, and truly, I didn't hear anything about the cancer anymore for a long time, so I thought maybe he had. You sort of lose touch with people after a while of not being in their presence regularly anymore.

Then this year, three years after the first diagnosis, my friend Jayne wrote and said that Emmanuel's cancer had become suddenly very aggressive.

"But someone needs to write their story!" I said. It hit me, then, that I had wasted a lot of time and opportunity. People are worth more than their stories, but their stories are always worth telling. Everybody has one. Over the last few months, as people I care about keep dying (Grandpa, Lloyd, Phillip), I've been realising with waxing and waning but quiet desperation that there are all these people around. And no matter how well you love them, you never quite love them enough, and you always take them a little bit for granted, and there are always things about them you never quite learn or know sufficiently, and most of the time you miss out on something.

Emmanuel died over the weekend.

I could still write Emmanuel and Jemima's story. I could talk to Jemima. Her side of the story is just as compelling as Emmanuel's and I would be remiss to discount it. I could talk to their children. I could talk to my London church family, who got to know them better than I. But the grief's too fresh now, and I don't know when it won't be. And in the meantime, I missed the opportunity to really sit down with this man of God and take down the story from his point of view.

I have a Rwandan outfit that Jemima bought me when we celebrated Emmanuel's induction into the service of our church in London. It's purple and beautiful. Maybe I'll wear it on Sunday.

Phillip

My cousin Phillip was 20 or 21, I think. He was deeply involved in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He was getting a degree in civil engineering, and this summer he intended to take a sort of "civil engineering missions trip" to a developing nation. He sent us all an endearing and earnest and confident and hopeful letter about it, requesting prayer and financial support. Then he rode his motorcycle from the East Coast to the Rockies to meet up with the group he'd be working with. After a week of orientation, he and his bike got hit by an SUV. He died instantly.

It's not like he and I were extremely close, really, but we had been getting closer. His family and my grandmothers are currently geographically nearer to me than any of my other family members, so I tend to celebrate holidays with them. One Christmas he taught me a few basic chain-mail weaves. It was fun. He was a good teacher, and very patient. He let me keep the chain I made.

It's not like I'm in doubt about his current location (if "location" is the appropriate word, about which I am more in doubt). There's this part of me that's a little tentatively jealous . . . how great would it be just to be with Jesus right now, without all this "glass darkly" stuff?

I'm not sad for him (although his trip would probably have been fun), but I'm sad for the rest of us, particularly his immediate family. They have already gone through years of baffling, heart-wrenching, completely exhausting struggles. Why this, too? I wouldn't blame my uncle if he started introducing himself as "Job" from now on. I wouldn't blame him if he's feeling some rage.

People say, "Poor Job--not only did he have to go through all that suffering, but he didn't even know why. He didn't even know that God was having a bet with Satan." Huh? That's supposed to make everything okay?

I don't really think he would have felt better if he had known that. Even if you assert and, in some form or other, believe as I think my uncle does, that God has a purpose for everything that happens and that in the end what matters is that He is glorified, there are still all these feelings that get involved. How could they not? And aren't they supposed to? Didn't God give us feelings--because He has them Himself? So it's hard not to feel like a pawn, and unjustly treated, even if you trust that somehow, in the end, God's going to do something good with the thing (or things) that just crushed your soul into the ground.

Lloyd

Yesterday I got an email from Dear Friend Paulina. She told me that Lloyd Alexander has died at age 83, two weeks after his beloved wife, Janine. Paulina's a librarian and can find out about these things. Here is an article about it.

Some other famous people have recently moved on to a new plane of existence, notably Kurt Vonnegut and Jerry Falwell. But I didn't really have much to do with either of those guys. Lloyd, on the other hand . . . I'm having a hard time imagining it. I feel like I should write him and say, "Dear Lloyd, I heard that you died last week. I hope everything's going okay." Too bad they haven't figured out how to get mail to the afterlife. It might just make the postage hike worth it.

I first “met” Lloyd through some characters of his at the public library I frequented as a child, and it’s probably safe to say my imagination was never the same again. Our sixth grade class was having a contest to see who could read the most Newbery Award books within a certain period of time, and Lloyd Alexander's The High King was on the list. All the boys in my class were reading the Prydain Chronicles, and I was pretty sure I would therefore find the book scary or violent or boring, but on the other hand, it looked sort of interesting . . .

You're not really supposed to read the last book of a series first, but in this case it might have been good I did, because I was completely won over. I proceeded to read the books leading up to it, and then started in on the Westmark Trilogy. I wanted to be Mickle. I loved Theo, and Mickle was a little awkward but very cool and I used to go off into the woods behind our house and act out the stories to myself. In junior high I wrote a letter to Lloyd and he sent me his autograph. In high school I got a local Welsh pastor to teach me Welsh because I had become so enamoured with the place and its mythology through Lloyd's books. I no longer remember any Welsh, apart from the first verse of Psalm 23, but I still have a Welsh Bible and dictionary.

After college during my Life as a Nanny, I met Dear Friend Paulina and found out she was also an avid reader of Lloyd's books. Through a little finagling and working a connexion she had with Trina Schart Hyman, she got Lloyd to agree to a phone call with me for my birthday. I don't know that writers are always very good phone-talkers. At least, I have an intense phobia of the phone except as regards talking to my family--and Lloyd's own powers of conversation were a little stilted. (Furthermore, he had been put in the slightly bizarre situation of trying to talk to someone he didn't know, who doesn't really know how to ask good questions, and who had informed her imagination with ideas out of his head.) I don't remember too much of what we talked about, except for saying that I had just re-read the Prydain Chronicles and cried at the end, as usual, and wondering how he could ever re-read them and revisit those characters. He told me he couldn't, and he didn't. I don't believe he ever read those books again after they were printed. And I believe that almost every book afterwards was an attempt to recreate those characters without actually having to revisit them.

In spite of the awkward phone call, he was very gracious, and out of that conversation a patchy correspondence was born. Paulina and I sent him and Janine a box of cookies (which Janine, apparently, devoured). He gave me writing advice. He allowed me to inform him of my move to London . . . and my return to the U.S. He autographed the first edition copy of Taran Wanderer that Paulina discovered and generously bought for me before the trip to London, and autographed the first edition copy of The Iron Ring she bought hot off the press when I was there. Lloyd wrote to me about his and Janine's health and his garden and the weather and his cats and faith and God and relationships and current events. After a while our correspondence dwindled to simple Christmas cards--mine, the homemade ones I send to almost everyone I know; his, cartoon caricatures of famous paintings in which he is playing the violin to an audience of irritated or bemused cats. I went through a regrettable and completely stupid weeding-stuff-out phase at one point, and so I only have his last four Christmas cards and a few arbitrarily-saved letters. I regret not saving everything. I regret that I never wrote and told him my book is finally getting published. And I'm sorry he never got to read it.

But I'm grateful to him (and Paulina) for the chance to know him a little bit. I miss him and his Christmas cards already. And I really do hope everything's going okay.Artwork:

Prydain Characters, watercolour by jennw2ns, 1995. I painted two and sent Lloyd the other one. I think he framed it.

After Gustave Caillebotte: "Paris in the Rain," Christmas card by Lloyd Alexander, 2003.

A Celebration of God’s Glory in Memory of One Who Loved Him

That was what the front of the programme said for Grandpa Madeira’s funeral. Even though he went Home a month ago, the funeral wasn’t until Wednesday. I know. It’s kind of weird. Everybody thinks so.

But it kind of makes sense, too, when you consider that there were three hundred people who came through the reception alone. I have no idea how many attended the actual service, but the church where it was held—the church Grandpa planted decades ago—was packed. If the service had been before Christmas, probably a lot of those people would not have been able to make it there.

Sometimes I’m in awe of my relatives. One guy who isn’t even related to us and I’m pretty sure never worked with Grandpa drove up from the Carolinas to attend the memorial service. A lot of the people who used to work for Grandpa years and years ago came, even though he’s been out of the pastorate for a long time and most of them work in big huge churches in the Midwest and you would think they would have better things to do with their time. An elderly Haitian pastor cancelled a speaking engagement because he said, “My best friend has just died, and I want to be at his funeral.” It’s kind of a dizzying realization that somehow I got lucky or blessed or whatever enough to be the granddaughter of a Great Man. (I actually can say I was even luckier to be the granddaughter of two, but I didn’t know my other grandpa as well, and he went Home right around the time this one’s Alzheimer’s started making itself known.)

The thing that made him great, though (and he would never have considered himself to be so) was how present God Himself was in Grandpa's life. He was kind of quiet (except when snoring or laughing). He prayed a lot. He just wanted more than anything else to do what God wanted of him. Even when he got Alzheimer's--even at the very end when he couldn't even talk anymore--he was different. Alzheimer's patients often get belligerent. Grandpa never did. Sometimes he cried. More often, he smiled. That's the glory of God IN someone who loved Him. It boggles my mind that God can be so present in regular old human beings. People like Grandpa remind me that He can--and He will if we ask for it, apparently.

It was great to hear people reminiscing about how much Grandpa loved (still loves) Jesus and how much he loved people—how loved we felt around him. It’s inspiring to realise that people got to know that Jesus loves them because Grandpa did. I was struck with the thought that here we all were, hundreds of us crammed into a church because we had known and loved and been loved by this bald guy, and really, even though we could cry in missing him, we weren’t really mourning him. We were celebrating that God came here at Christmas and died and returned to life at Easter so that we could live undyingly with Him. We were celebrating that Grandpa is getting to know that for real now. And maybe we were crying a little bit because we haven’t experienced that fully yet ourselves.

But we still experience it a little. Even though we all start dying as soon as we’re born, there’s life, too. At the end of the reception, the cousins got together for our traditional “Crazy Cousin Picture.” We take one any time we see each other. At first we were nervous that people would think we were being disrespectful. Then we decided that, since we weren't. It would have made Grandpa chuckle. Maybe, out there, wherever "there" is, gazing on the face of Jesus whom he loves, he still gets a glimpse of his crazy grandkids. Maybe he still chuckles.

As I Was Saying . . . Family

Grandpa Madeira died this morning. He’ll “be Home for Christmas.” He already is. Lucky. And it’s sure a whole lot better than being smothered with Alzheimer’s in a wheelchair in a nursing home.

But it’s hard. Hard on Grandma, who has spent the most recent years of her life singing to him and helping him play one-finger scales on the nursing home piano and spending most all of her afternoons loving what’s been left of a humble, great man whose final responses to her could be nothing more than a smile and a roar and tears. Hard on Mom, who was hoping to hug her dad one more time when she came home for Christmas, and now is flying back last-minute to comfort her mother. Hard on Dad, who had a great relationship with his father-in-law and now has to hold down the fort overseas by himself for a couple weeks until he comes back here to join us for the holy holiday.

But it’s a little easier, too. After years of watching a mind-numbing disease eat away at his memory and personality, words and abilities, it almost seemed to eat away at our (or at least my) memories, too. Now I feel free to remember him and who he actually was—and imagine who he actually is now, face to face with Jesus.

December 7 is his birthday. Apparently when I was two, I toddled around the dinner table unprompted and said, “Happy birfday, Grandpa.” He was fifty years older than I, so we always remembered each others’ ages. I feel like the lucky grandchild, because I got to live with him and Grandma for five summers in my late teens and early twenties, while I worked at a day camp run by the church he had planted. I borrowed his bike to get to and from camp. (I still have it, though I haven’t ridden it probably since then.) In the evenings I would come home and he and Grandma and I played Skip-Bo most nights. I grew to hate the game, mostly because I don’t really like games anyway, but I kept playing it, because it was a good way to spend time with them. Grandma won a lot. Grandpa would sit down at the card table with a sigh and say, with comic resignation, “Well, Jennifah,” (he loved to tease Grandma about her Rhode Island accent) “it’s time for my nightly humiliation.” He won a lot, too, but admitting that would have taken all the steam out of his mock laments. We would go for walks, too—just Grandpa and me—through Haynes Park, down to the water where all the boats were. I don’t remember what we talked about. Probably not much. He was quiet. But it was nice. We also washed the dishes together so Grandma wouldn’t have to.

He had a great sense of humour and an even better laugh to go with it. He loved the New York Yankees, for which I suppose I can forgive him, and he also loved cars. And he could sing. That was one of the last things he could still do, even after Alzheimer’s ate most of his brain away. He and Grandma harmonized together and sang “Gentle Jesus” over many a baby being dedicated to God in the church. I still hear them when I think of that song.

When we had family reunions and holidays and clambakes, and had stuffed our faces to the point of sleepiness, he’d pull out the antique milk-stool from his childhood and place it in the middle of the living room floor, lie on his back with his head propped on it, and konk out. He’d snore, and everyone would laugh. When I was in college, I had to write a sonnet as a writing assignment, and I wrote it about him:

Lines Upon My Grandfather’s Face

The subterranean rumblings, tranquil though
They were, accompanied who knows what dreams
Of joy and world-weight pain. Yet when he woke
To see our grins, his eyes showed laughter-seams
Which crinkled like dry rivulets beneath
The broad expanse of forehead crossed by lines
Of latitude and longitude. And each
Line marked a memory’s setting or a time
Which brought the furrowed wisdom to his face.
The gentleness of love and kindness crossed
The deeper rows that grief had carved in place,
Despite which, his expression never lost
A look of seventy years’ staunch content—
The strength where tears, but stronger joy, have met.

Grandma wrote us all an email about him, though, and she quoted another poem, by James Weldon Johnson, intimating that those lines on his beloved bald head have disappeared by now:

GO DOWN DEATH

Weep not, weep not, He is not dead; He's resting in the bosom ofJesus............................ And Jesus took his own hand and wiped awayhis tears, And He smoothed the furrows from his face, And the angelssang a little song,An Jesus rocked him in His arms, and Kept a-saying: "Take your rest,Take your rest." Weep not--weep not, He is not dead; He's restingin the bosomof Jesus.

Well, Grandpa, we love you. Happy birthday and merry Christmas! I can imagine they will be!