After Ruby gave birth to her second child, Ann, she spent the night, as she put it, in “unshadowed joy.” There was every reason to celebrate: it had been a normal pregnancy, the baby was healthy and beautiful, and David, her first child, now had a sibling to grow up with. Two days later, Ann died. As her father, Doug, remembers it:
When Ann was a day old, the doctor told us that he was very concerned about her, and that already at delivery he had noticed something wrong. Why he said nothing right away we’ll never know. In any case, we had to take Ann to a hospital halfway across the state (we were living in rural North Carolina at the time), and since the birth had not taken place at that hospital, Ruby was not allowed to stay with her. We had no choice but to return home. Waiting for news was agonizing. The hours seemed endless, but we could do nothing. We had no direct contact with the hospital.
On the second day, our precious little daughter breathed her last. Ruby was inconsolable and wept and wept. It only made things worse when the doctors told us the problem – we were Rh incompatible – and implied that there was little hope, medically speaking, for us to have any more children.
Leaving Ruby, I drove out alone to bring Ann back home to be buried. On arrival at the hospital, however, I was informed that her body had been turned over to a local undertaker, as required by state law.
I drove to the funeral home, and was at first received with great courtesy and solicitude. When the undertaker realized I was not there to buy a casket or arrange a funeral, however, he became icy and left the room. I waited at the front desk with the baby’s bassinet. When the undertaker returned, he was holding our little girl upside down, by the feet, with one hand. I reached for the quilt Ruby had made for the baby, but before I could do more, the man dropped her into the bassinet. He was cold, disgusted.
On the long, lonely drive home, I had to fight very hard to find forgiveness in my heart. I prepared a grave on our homestead, and together we laid our little girl to rest with very sore hearts.
Extreme as Doug and Ruby’s story may seem, it illustrates an attitude that is rampant in today’s world. Call it jadedness, indifference, or callousness – it all stems from the same lack of respect for life (and the loss of life), and it shows itself in numerous ways. It is there in hospital settings where “professionalism” demands that patients be referred to by room numbers rather than names. It is there at funeral homes, which often promote lavish spending by implying that to save money is to scrimp and thus dishonor the dead. (Who wants to be known as the family who bought their mother a budget casket?) It is also there where children quarrel – even if behind the scenes – over wills and inheritances, and deny a dying parent the possibility of a truly peaceful end.
Irreverence is also there when, because of our superficiality, we are unable to share someone else’s pain or grief, and thus try to gloss it over with forced cheerfulness. Linda, the mother of the young man I mentioned in a previous chapter, says such attempts tend to only worsen an already difficult situation:
Not long after it had become clear that medically speaking, there was nothing more to be done for Matt, a well-meaning neighbor cheerfully told my husband that she knew our son was going to pull through: “Matt’s not going to die. I just know he’s not going to die.” Obviously we wanted to believe the same thing. But to hold out a false hope to Matt when it was clear he was rapidly going downhill? That wouldn’t have been fair. A few days later a friend stopped by and told Matt he was “still praying for a miracle.” Matt replied, “Thanks, but I think it’s past that stage. The main thing now is that I find peace.”
During Matt’s last weeks, Linda also found herself struggling with what she felt was a general lack of respect for the finality of death – and not only in her son’s friends, but even in him:
Three days before he died, someone brought a handful of rental movies for him to watch, and when I voiced my worry that he might fritter away his last hours on earth entertaining himself, I found myself embroiled in a family fight.
People had brought him videos throughout his illness, and though I knew they meant well, I was always a little uncomfortable with it. It wasn’t a question of the movies – though some of the stuff he watched wasn’t all that great. I just felt he was using them too often, as an easy out, a means of escape from reality. I didn’t think it was healthy.
To be honest, I felt the same about a lot of other things people brought him: beer, hard liquor, dozens of CDs, posters, headphones, a radio, a new stereo system with six speakers, a Rio player for downloading music from the Internet, and on and on.
I remember talking about it with my husband and wondering: Is this really the best way of showing kindness to someone with cancer – dumping a lot of junk on him? Sure, we knew it would comfort him in a material way. But ultimately, these gifts were just things – things to divert him from real life-and-death issues he needed to face. Matt felt the same way about most of it, and at one point he cleared a lot of that stuff out of his room.
Anyway, I was concerned that Matt would want to spend what turned out to be one of the last afternoons of his life watching movies, and I said so. But he did not agree with me at all. He said, “I just want to be able to laugh and forget about things for a few hours! How can you be my moral compass now?” He was so mad.
I was in tears, because I was thinking, “Here’s this poor kid who just wants to escape for a few hours. Doesn’t he have a right to do that – to have a little fun?” Besides, I had just read this book on death and dying where the author talks about how important it is to create peace around a dying person. The book said, “no family quarrels,” and here we were arguing. It just tore me apart.
I love to watch movies myself. But I also felt, and still feel, that it’s too easy to escape (or let your children escape) so you don’t have to deal with things that are hard. I’m not just talking about cancer. Whenever you are in a struggle – any struggle – you need to set your sights on the things that will strengthen you, not distract you, if you’re going to make it through.
On the other hand, I thought, “Matt’s upset because I am being too moralistic. I have to listen to him. Maybe he’s saying something I really need to take to heart… After all, he’s dying! But he’s still my son, and I know that escaping is not good for him. Can I risk not saying something that might be vitally important for him?” It was one of the hardest moments I have ever faced.
Later, Matt calmed down and said he knew where I was coming from. He said that deep down he also felt that watching movies was a waste of time when he had so little left, and that he actually wanted to spend it with other people. He even thanked me for not giving in.
This is not to say that reverence demands a long face. Far from it. After Carole, a colleague, was stricken with breast cancer, it was her wacky humor as much as anything else that kept her afloat. At one point she even asked everyone she knew to send her their favorite jokes, and as they arrived in the mail, she collected them in a binder “for when I’m depressed and need a good laugh.” In Carole’s case, it would have been irreverent not to share in her goofiness. Shortly before she died, she told me:
I’ll be honest: when the time comes (as they say) I hope no one starts singing those hymns about floating around in heaven. I’d think I was already descending into my grave. You know, the words of those songs may be deep, but for some reason, hearing them sung reminds me of all the most depressing things in life. I know it shouldn’t be that way, but it is…I need energy, strength for the fight.
It scares the heck out of me to think of everybody standing around and looking all morbid or something. I don’t know; I guess every death is different. I hope there’s a good basketball game on the court outside my window when I go, and some hefty music coming up from downstairs…
What, then, is reverence? To explain it as the dictionary does – “honor” or “deference” – is a good start, but these words are still abstract. As far as I’m concerned, reverence needs to be experienced to be understood.
I opened this chapter with Ann, a baby who died as a result of her parents’ Rh incompatibility. Years later, after new research gave Doug and Ruby new hope, they attempted to have another child. But again things went wrong, and the baby was stillborn. This time, however, their pain was leavened by (in Doug’s words) “the redeeming effect of reverence.” Given his and Ruby’s high hopes, their loss was no less painful. But now, instead of loneliness and a coolly distant undertaker, there was the love of friends, the sympathy of an entire congregation, and the understanding of a pastor who reassured them that “no life, and no hope in the direction of life, is in vain.” This support buoyed them so steadily, Doug says, that when they arrived at the cemetery to bury Frances – by moonlight, and carrying lanterns – he did not dread the task before him, but felt like he was “walking into a haven of light.”