a Sabbath, and the end of days

Sunday, October 17: a Sabbath

I determined to observe the Lord's Day as would a normal Christian not in the employ of the church. I laid aside all work and cares, attended the Presbyterian church near our home, and sat with Mother for several shifts. She, too, seemed to rest quietly, though she seemed more distant than the previous day.

The Presbyterian service was solidly mainline Protestant, lasting precisely one hour from 11:00 to noon, with about seventy persons present. There was a children's handchime group and an adult choir of nine singers, including the minister. There was a decent electronic organ, a baby grand piano, and competent musicians to play them. It was a staid, genteel service, a far cry from the Baptist church I visited in August, and a reminder why I am not a Presbyterian. But it was good to worship with these people.

Through most of my fortnight in West Virginia, the weather was splendid: day after day of clear blue skies, sunshine, and shirtsleeve temperatures. I fell into the rhythm of singing Evensong in the back yard, in "choir" opposite the large oak tree (Q. palustris), glorious in the late afternoon sun in its fall colors.

Sixty-plus years ago, my parents bought this property: two vacant lots later augmented by two more behind them, which had been logged over at some point leaving scrub trees and brush. My Father cleared it away with his brush hook and axe, but Mother made him spare this sapling, saying it would be a fine tree. Now in its full maturity, it dominates the yard, towering over the other trees in the half-acre at the back given over to woods and English ivy, perhaps a dozen or score of trees grown up over these six decades. I will miss it terribly, more than anything else connected with home. As a child, I used to talk to it and hug it -- in those days I could easily reach around it. Now its trunk is too large to encompass, and I have laid aside tree-hugging in any literal sense. But on this Lord's Day I pronounced a blessing on it, marking it with the sign of the cross. We are unlikely to meet again, this Q. palustris and I, unless it be in some forest beyond mortal ken.

Monday, October 19: the Feast of St. Luke

The days of our age are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years: yet is their strength then but labor and sorrow; so soon passeth it away, and we are gone. (Ps. 90:10)

I took the first shift. As soon as I saw her, it was clear that after fourscore years and fifteen, this was the end of days. Her lips were blue; her feet freezing cold even though her forehead was hot with fever (102 degrees); she struggled to breathe. Over the course of an hour, her respiration rate rose from the mid-thirties to nearly sixty; her pulse was rapid and increasingly irregular. The nurses let me call my sister from the nurses' station. On this day, we would not stray far from her side.

But the room remained cramped, too small for both my sister and I. When she arrived, we again took turns staying by Mother, a half-hour or forty-five minutes at a time. In between times, we went outside, sitting on the porch or walking on a path around a county park adjacent to the nursing home.

Thus it was that Kathy was with her when she died. I knew as soon as I walked in, from the way the nurses looked at me. One of them told me before I got to the room. Kathy was inside, crying. But Mother was at rest, pale and calm after this day of struggle.

For much of the day, her eyes were open, the first time in many days. I do not know if she was aware of us, but I cast aside all concern for her roommate (who they eventually moved somewhere else for the day), and read Scripture to her, and Psalms. It occurred to me finally that I could sing. Church musician that I am, I should have thought of this long before. I sang what I could remember of several hymns, and three plainsong settings of the Kyrie eleison, which seemed the most appropriate of all. Standing over her, stroking her hair, and singing to her, it was remarkably like singing a lullaby to a feverish child, as she probably did for me.

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An Obituary

N.I.H. departed this life on the Feast of St. Luke, 2010, aged ninety-five.

A farm girl, she was the second of two sisters, "the one who was supposed to be a boy," as she related in later years. Tall, bookish, awkward, and fearsomely intelligent, she was no match for her sister, who married into the leading family of the district. In contrast, N. seemed destined for spinsterhood.

After graduating from high school at age sixteen, she attended Marshall University at the height of the Great Depression. She returned to her high school as a teacher of mathematics, living at home with her father and grandmother.

In the fateful year 1942, on a romantic whim she rode off with her handsome rascal of a boyfriend, a sometime coal miner five years her junior, to Bristol, Tennessee, the nearest place where they could be married without a waiting period. After a quickie wedding before a justice of a peace who specialized in such and a weekend in a hotel near the train station, it was off to war. They later managed a better honeymoon near the camp where he was stationed -- he had been in the Army since 1939, figuring it to be a better life than the mines, and was now a mess sergeant busy with feeding the flood of new recruits following Pearl Harbor. He eventually shipped out to North Africa, and was part of the fighting in Sicily and Italy. After their honeymoon, N. joined the Navy. She was part of a cryptography team that sought to break the code used by the Japanese Navy; they trained her in weather, and she (and others) compared the encoded weather reports broadcast to the fleet with the actual weather, looking for patterns. She said that in all those years, she had only one idea that was of any help.

After the war, her husband went to college on the G.I. Bill. They wanted to live "back home" near their families, but there was no work, so they moved to a larger town in the next county. They bought land on the edge of town, built a house (he, his brother, and their father, all of them skilled at carpentry and building trades), and had children.

N.'s husband died in 1975. She prospered as a widow, living a quiet and thrifty life at home, growing reclusive as family and friends passed away, one by one. She walked, gardened, canned, and read books, thoroughly content to be alone.

As the decades passed, she grew increasingly frail. At the age of ninety-three, she moved to an assisted-living facility. She made new friends and enjoyed her life, comparing it to being "with the girls back at Marshall."

N. lived a simple life, and accomplished little that anyone would consider special or outstanding. She did not work outside the home after her children came; she rarely travelled, hardly leaving her home town in her final decades. But through the long years, she maintained the values of thrift and industry that she knew were important, even when all around her was given over to waste and extravagance.

As a schoolteacher in the 1930's, she started a Girl Scout troop, the first in that part of the state. The values she lived and taught in Scouting were at one time widely held in society; they are no longer. She and others of her generation, the ones who knew the realities of Depression and World War, had much to teach us. Now they are gone, and it is up to us.

O Almighty God, the God of the spirits of all flesh, who by a voice from heaven didst proclaim, Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord: Multiply, we beseech thee, to those who rest in Jesus the manifold blessings of thy love, that the good work which thou didst begin in them may be made perfect unto the day of Jesus Christ. And of thy mercy, O heavenly Father, grant that we, who now serve thee on earth, may at last, together with them, be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light; for the sake of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP p. 486)