Last Suppers and Other Miscellania

Mom is alone tonight, the night before a rather serious operation. 

I was with her until five thirty in the afternoon, when I had to excuse myself to go teach.  Now I'm awake beside an open window listening to the chirping of insects and alive to the scent of moonflower and sweet olive.  It's bloody warm in New Orleans, and the night is close and muggy and still.

We do seem to read aloud a lot in hospitals.  This afternoon I'd been reading her Eric Metaxas' rather sardonic but good biography of Bonhoeffer.  ("If you can't be sardonic about the Nazis, whom can you be sardonic about?")

I had the feeling she needed the peace.  There had been a lot of visitors today, which was lovely but exhausting, and lots of news, which was neither lovely nor much welcome, about the near future of her body.

An operation was discussed, and she and dad along with the doctor made their decision, and so today was a parade of anesthesiologists and surgeons and interns and residents and nurses and nurses' aides.  And tomorrow will involve the interminable waiting around that comes while waiting for an operating table to come empty like bay-space in a car-repair shop.

And there will be orderly activities by the anesthesiologist, whose name is Andrea, and the surgeon, whose name is Walter: for some reason I'm thinking of them by their first names, stripped of their honors and titles, and seeing them as fallible, well-meaning, and diligent men and women.

While the afternoon sun was moving to set, we opened the blinds of the big window that shows the northern sky if you look up, and if you look down a tarred roof with its complex of pipes and ducts and vents, and endless windows for the sick and for the caregivers in the tower opposite.  She lay in bed, quite alert, drinking in every paragraph about the conference at Fanø, the Reichskirche's consecration of Müller, and Bonhoeffer's conclusion that the call of Christ was to a monasticism that embraced the world and was yet fully transformed and so might save it.

We read his letters, and the sometimes-too-accurate criticisms of his opponents, who saw the Confessing Church perhaps accurately enough as a tactical instrument and no more entitled to the title of "Church" than was the Reichskirche.

I read until my throat hurt.  She showed no signs of sleepiness or even disease.  At one point when I paused for water, she remarked, "Apart from this terminal illness, I'm in excellent health."

"Dietary," said a voice, and someone was coming in quietly, more quietly than the healers ever do.  (They make me think all the time of Shakespeare's stage directions: "Enter, With Flourish.  Exeunt with Trumpets.")

She had a plastic dish of pot-roast and mashed potatoes and green beans.  An indifferent but tempting cheesecake and a rather too-green salad were in plastic boxes.

As I read, mom unpacked all this, slipped the cheesecake over to me, set aside the salad for my father for his return, and began to eat.  

Somewhere in the back of both our minds as I read and she ate was the phrase, "Last supper."   She isn't supposed to eat tomorrow.

It isn't that she will die, most likely, on the operating table.

It's that the doctors will open her up and find there... what? 

A tumor-ridden digestive apparatus that must be excised, carved up, resectioned?   That's what happened a year ago.  It took ages to recover enough to sip broth without violent reactions.  Motility was slow to come back. 

And perhaps they will look, and shake their heads, and close her up and do nothing because there is nothing to be done.

Such will be the drama, and for us it will look like the dullest of life's days: a green waiting room, people coming and going, staying too long, leaving too soon, like chance meetings in the lobby of the auto repair shop.  We wait while our future is settled for us, by Walter, and by Andrea, and others whose names I will not know.

There will be nothing to do, no way to help, not much we can say to one another.

When all is done, we'll know what we do not know now.  We will have some healing, a little more time in which to read, to eat, to enjoy one another's courage.  Maybe we will lose all hope for these things.

They were never in our hands. 

Well-meaning people advise me that it's all in God's hands.

Those gnarled and bloody hands that soak nations in blood, and the human race in its own mortality might well be gentle, though how you'd know I couldn't begin to say.  I have hopes, as we all do maybe except the most bloody minded and ruthless atheist, some hope that the bloody god of war and death was ginned up by bad people and the god of last things walks in quieter slippers down these anesthestized corridors.

And here's a paradox: those hopes aren't something you can hang much on if you're not prepared now for them to falter and fail.  To see them as "real" is to cheat reality, to grab all the coins and devalue the currency. 

Are we ready to face their emptiness?

I think we are.  At least I felt in those hours reading to my mother, she's ready, that the tears in her eyes are for us and for things that are gone and not terror or worry.  Of all creatures of faith, her gamble on love and life is most clear-eyed.

But when you choose to worship, it's as well to worship the god who comes in quietly and lays down a last supper, who comes in silently with a smile to clear away the empty plate, the half-eaten beans and the barely touched potatoes, and the remains of a pot-roast, who pauses at the door to listen to the voice that reads a text that will perhaps be forgotten in the quieting mind of a sick woman who yet seems brighter than the stars and more full of life than the sun.  Something in that departing dark face seemed to me to have the feeling of love.

When it comes to courage, my mother is unmatched.  She's in better spirits than any of us.

When it comes to love, she reminds me of that god who left carrying her last tray, and there is no blood on her hands.

Comments

[Mark McNary]

My friend, your mother is ready and her strength as well as her courage will be realized whether time as we know it remains for her or she passes through the veil where time becomes irrelevant. I love her and all of you dearly. Debbie, Jonathan, Jesse, Elisabeth, and I have been praying for your family persistently. God is with her and He is with you all. Strength and grace for the journey, my friend.

[Kadie]

Her love, and courage inspire all who know her.

[Rachel Pridgen]

No good words. Just thinking of you all.