The funeral for Katherine Pearson and Baby Boy Pearson took place at Grace Lutheran Church in St. Mark. Their bodies were laid to rest in the church cemetery on the east end of town, a short walk from the Pearson home. It was attended by a large congregation of mourning friends and colleagues. Neither Steve nor Kay had any immediate family members, no siblings, no parents, no cousins, to offer Steve personal support. Mary Thorsheim, sizing up the situation, decided to be his sister. And my wife and I, entering the church a few minutes before the Processional Hymn, became at her invitation the rest of his family. We followed the caskets down the aisle to their place at the foot of the altar and sat with Steve and Mary in the front pew on the left. The pallbearers, drawn from the faculty and administration of the college, followed us and occupied the first pew on the right.
The Lutheran funeral liturgy was conducted by the pastor with great reverence and restraint. To the surprise of all, he announced that instead of a sermon he was acceding gladly to the request of Dr. Pearson to celebrate Holy Communion so that Jesus might be directly present to all with a minimum of human intervention. My wife and I experienced this as a touch of pure grace. The first communicant kneeling at the altar railing to receive Jesus was Stephan. Mary and I needed to help him back to the pew.
After the lowering of the caskets at the interment in the cemetery, Dr. Pearson graciously accepted the condolences of all who approached him at graveside. He had decided against a reception. As the crowd melted away, he turned to my wife and me and said, with a depth of emotion that almost got away on him, “Her last words to me were, ‘I am … very happy … too…. Jesus just….’”
He choked up. Nothing more was said.
My wife and I choked up too.
With that, he took a deep breath and shuffled slowly over to his DeSoto. He drove the short distance to his home where, for all intents and purposes, he shut himself in for the rest of the summer. For the next two weeks, of course, he had a steady stream of visitors, including us, but after that his only consistent visitor was Mary Thorsheim who had promised Kay to “keep track of him in case something should happen to me.” She felt it was only right for her to share this promise with Steve whose response was, “I guess we can’t let her down then, can we?” And so for Kay’s sake he welcomed Mary into his home twice a week so that she could “keep track of him” and do whatever cleaning up she could.
What did Steve do during those many hours and days alone in his house that summer? No one really knows. He let their lilac hedge grow wild all summer, he let most of the garden overgrow, and he let the lawn go to seed. He was seen now and then by passers-by on the front porch in a rocking chair, pipe in hand. Some days the shades on the windows of the house remained drawn all day. Mary sometimes found him, when she came on her regular visits, sitting in the living room in the semidarkness in a kind of daze. He seemed largely oblivious to dawn and dusk, to growth and decay in the world around him, perhaps because in his soul that summer there was neither dawn nor dusk, neither growth nor decay. There was just numbness.
When he happened to remember that it was Sunday, he would show up in church. When he didn’t, his diligent pastor would pay him a visit, bringing him Holy Communion. Once Mary happened to be there when the pastor came, and they received Jesus together.
“Thank you, Pastor,” Steve said. “Thank you for appreciating that I need time.”
“Of course you need time, Dr. Pearson. When the time is right, God will speak to you as He knows best. Everything is in His hands.”
“I really want to believe that, Pastor.”
So existence dragged on for Steve, now feeling doubly forsaken. He was living in a vacuum. He lost all interest in the things that had once fully engaged him. They were all bloodless ghosts to him now. Nothing mattered anymore. Science? Dead! Learning? What for? Probing into the unknown? Who cares? Grief smothered his brain and all but gutted his will to live.
The only thing that seemed to lift him out of his numbness now, even if just momentarily, was the lingering memory of Kay’s last smile and her mysterious last words, radiant with hope and promise while grief was devouring him.
The summer inched on, pulling the dead weight of Stephan Pearson along behind it. He told me on his deathbed that he had spent most of that summer milling about aimlessly like a corralled steer, plagued by images from his past that wouldn’t go away, a collage of poignant scenes sometimes composed of elements widely separated in time. They often involved the interplay of his two angels. The sight of Kay’s last smile, for example, would merge for him into the feel of Cecilia’s first kiss, and then linger on and on. Or Cecilia’s bending down low beside the dead cardinal, tears copiously flowing, would blend into Kay’s heart-rending sobs at the mere suggestion of giving up her baby, and linger on and on. Or the feel of his hand pressed flat against Kay’s warm womb over their baby would become the feel of Cecilia’s warm body pressed against his shivering chest under the oak tree just minutes before she….
But invariably these scenes all eventually resolved into that last smile of Kay’s, which also lingered on and on.
What tormented Steve terribly that summer at his darkest moments was the recurring fear that the Kays and the Cecilias of this world, beautiful as they are, might be pure illusion, leaving sneering chaos as the only ultimate reality. Though he fought it all the way, there were long hours, even entire days, when he was overcome with grief and despair. He was in a continuous state of mourning for what felt to him like the demise of goodness itself, the death of everything worth living for.
The long late evenings of that summer often found him alone in the little fenced cemetery, an easy walk from their house, kneeling in front of the raw dirt of two of the three plots he had purchased, or leaning up against a nearby tree facing them. It was almost as if he was enviously eyeing the one unoccupied plot, barely able to contain his longing to fill it.