Life After Deaths

(reflections occasioned by the April 9, 2007 issue of Newsweek, which contains several articles about cancer, and several more about belief and disbelief in God. Also, reflections on recent deaths among my friends, and readings in the daily devotional Forward Day by Day) Years ago, the morning after the suicide of a teenaged girl in our church choir, our rector Karen Evans put aside her Sunday morning sermon to discuss the event. I barely knew the girl apart from her crystal-clear and pitch-perfect voice (and her name was Crystal), but my eyes sting whenever I recall that moment. Karen said, "I'm feeling many things, and first, I'm feeling anger...at Crystal, for taking away herself, and the years we would have had with her. " In an interview, Elizabeth Edwards has another way to say the same thing about the cancer that has re-emerged after she thought she'd beaten it: "The cancer will eventually . . . win this fight. I come from a family of women who live into their 90s, so it's taken something real from me." This morning after the Church's somber remembrance of Christ's crucifixion and burial, I'm getting ready for the funeral of my ex-neighbor and friend Kathay Walters. Just a week ago, she and her neighbor Dottie laughed with me about Kathay's brand new diagnosis of diabetes, and how she "wasn't gonna take no shots!" I hate to think of what Dottie told me about Kathay's final hours -- an emergency surgery followed by violent reaction and rapid shutting down of organs. The tears that follow death are for ourselves. We cry because we've lost a loved one. We've lost the future that we had expected to share with them. We may cry for regrets about something we should have said or done. We also cry literally for ourselves -- the selves that were reflected in the eyes of an intimate, their memories of us. I learned this in a single moment, when I was leaving the home of my grandmother Thelma Maier for the last time, where she had made me feel like a little prince: that part of me was gone. These last four weeks, I've thought a lot about death and the life that may follow it. This is Lent: 'tis the season to be pensive. Besides, Kathay's will be the fourth funeral I've attended in this time, nearly doubling the number I've attended in my whole life. Sharing tea with my friend Nikki and his wife Mallika in the home where I used to live, across the street from Kathay, we all expressed shock. How rapidly it happened . . . how the wheelbarrow loaded with weeds sits in the unfinished flower bed . . . how just two weeks ago, she dressed up and went with me to the fish restaurant where I'd been planning to take her for years . . . how Nikki and Mallika had taken food over to the house when she was feeling ill (as she had taken care of me when I was in a wheelchair recuperating from a car crash in 2000), but she had not answered the door -- and they'd never seen her again. Nikki, who has welcomed me to Hindu poojahs in his home, surprised me by imagining Kathay in heaven looking down on us, now free of the disabilities and financial worries and family battles that frustrated her, and laughing ( or maybe furiously complaining to the Authorities ) about the irony of how her house (her pride and joy) was immediately occupied by family members who had recently fought her in court over the care and death of her mother Montez Box. I'm the Episcopalian. Do I believe in life after death? Elizabeth Edwards, in that Newsweek interview, talks of how she had to re-adjust her fundamentalist beliefs long before her cancer, back when her 16-year-old son Wade was killed when wind swept his car off the highway: "The hand of God blew him from the road." She now believes that God promises enlightenment and salvation, not protection. I suppose she means "enlightenment" as something that guides our thoughts and deeds in life, and "salvation" as a reward after. I believe in God who is that force inside us, urging us in certain directions; a force inside the universe urging it creatively into its shape. I would not call a freak gust "the hand of God" and, when I have a narrow escape, I thank God for life itself -- and to give me guidance and energy for what I have left to do -- but I don't thank Him for the escape. Imagine: "Dear Lord, thank you for crashing that car into my side at just the right angle to crack my bones just enough to lame me for six weeks, but not to damage any internal organs or crush my spinal cord.") . Besides, if I thank God for my narrow escape from death in that car crash, it follows that I must I blame God for killing Kathay, or for killing my friend Leslie Walker from cancer three weeks ago, or for not saving the young man Michael Harper when his parents and friends and our whole faculty were praying for healing. I believe in the way people live on in the lives of the people they've touched. I believe in touching those lives. I believe that's what Christ was about. I believe that the parts of scripture that tell of eternal paradise or eternal damnation are brought down to earth by other parts that make clear that death is final. I'm about to leave for Kathay's funeral; tomorrow, I'm going to celebrate Christ's resurrection. Do I believe in Christ's resurrection? What about Paul's letters, as when he says, if there is no resurrection after death, then we Christians are the most abject of all mankind? Here's my bottom line: We celebrate something that can happen in our lives today. I pray to and for people who have died, as if they can hear me, or, alternatively, as if I'm dealing with parts of me that they represent. So, I'm just doing the best I can; I leave life after death to God.