Anatomy of a Death-Watch

I have been asked about my mother by many well-wishers: thanks to you all.

It might seem strange that a blog mainly devoted to football, music reviews with recipes, theology, and a strong belief in short movie reviews (for here at RipChurch we are focused above all) should preoccupy itself with personal things: and there’s nothing more personal than how we suffer, and how we die, and how we let go of those we love.

Sex is nothing compared to suffering when it comes to putting the stuffing into words like “love”: I’ve sometimes thought that when people say “I love you,” we should not kiss them but immediately go into a catatonic state and see what they mean by it.  (I’m not known as a good date.)

When it comes to the condition we call “spirituality,” the intensity of suffering and death bathes us in a strange light.   I don’t think much of a spirituality drafted in the library or the bedroom or the bathroom (where some do their best thinking) that has nothing to say when it’s confronted by the form of a loved one who is starving to death because of cancer.   That’s something you only really discover when you go through it, or when you read about it in the right frame of mind.

When I first began to chronicle faith and doubt as a person lives with cancer, it felt a little strange to write such things.  I can’t think that anybody wants to read it much, and RipChurch is not meant to be a bulletin board on my mother’s health.  Maybe I had some dim idea that a blog about faith, culture, and the agony of doubt is not really complete without staking its claim in lived experience.  

But at a certain point in mom’s journey, I had to start drawing the veil over that project: while I observe the suffering, and think about it almost constantly until I’m too tired to sleep, it’s hers.  It’s not a thing you can offer the world entirely any more than you could offer the world an obscene portrait of those you love.

So things changed, and I first began disabling the comments section on posts about my mother and my family, and then I stopped writing about it altogether.

But it’s winding down, and time to write the penultimate post on this.  Doubtless I’ll reflect on grief more deeply, and with astonishing authority, very soon.  But for now, there are only two posts left for me to write on the subject.

There are no atheists in foxholes, says the old proverb, and one might say with equal justice (and equal falsity) that there are no Christians with Stage IV cancer.  There are only people.  And there comes a time when the community of suffering binds you to human tragedy more than to any particular creed or faith. 

We are living out Psalm 22, which cycles through its agony: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  I can count all of my mother’s bones, her mouth is dried up like a potsherd.

This is not a metaphor now, not a hyperbole, only the strict truth.

It is true that the psalm ends in triumph, crushing under its heel the poisonous head of death.  But we don’t get to see that, not from where we sit. 

We only hear and see the suffering servant, the voice of lifelong love, begging for death to come and come quickly.  We gather our family history, our old jokes, our ideas, our shared experiences around us like a cloak, and wrap ourselves in them.  But coherence slips away until we are not the same as we were, and we become something new and a little strange to ourselves and each other, glistening like naked people caught out in the rain.

The human race, I tell my students, has a one hundred percent mortality rate.  I’ve not ever said that glibly, I think.  But until we face it, we are courteous to death as we are courteous to God, respectful but unafraid of an abstraction.  When once we encounter the real thing, we are terrifyingly altered.  To yearn for God is to yearn for terror.  To face death, at least in this form, is to invite your compassion to become a king that rules with a brutal, iron fist, who shakes you awake in the night, calls you back to the bedside, turns you away, taxes you, and puts you to bed again to wake with the feeling that you’ll never be the same.

You won’t.  Be sure of that.

But in the death-watch, you face yourself as you are, because you have no stomach for games. 

This is the price you pay for having loved.