On Death and Inappropriate Words

I don’t always believe people.

At one point my pastoral duties required me to pay regular visits to a man whom I was quite sure was faking cancer. The pains, the decline, loss of appetite and weight, immobility all convinced me of just how badly he wanted attention.

I believed my own theory right up until the week or two before he died. Hospice had situated him in his own bedroom, his wife in her own bed and perpendicular to the new hospital one. By this time I began to be suspicious that this was not just an acting job.

But who could blame me. I had seen sickness dramatized to the nines. He played it up well, and said just the right things to evoke a robust tear from his visiting daughter’s eye. No one is that valiant when we die.

I knew he could fool people. He proved his uncanny ability at a local favorite restaurant on a Sunday afternoon. The line was unending, the outdoor heat where all waited was stifling. “Do you have a table for eight for Senator Danner?” he sunk deep into the server’s gaze with his blue eyes. “Yes sir. Right away!” she answered. I knew he could fool people. Was he trying to fool us?

Not too many months prior to the hospice bed, I refereed spousal arguments in the living room. Simple, tacky stuff that even newlyweds fight over. “I don’t feel appreciated.” They talked to me about “her” and “him” as if the two could not hear one another. Why shouldn’t I conclude their communication was all a game? Interiors were not explored, or known.

He once thought he had been healed. Told the entire church. For some reason I was just as skeptical of this news. Of course, how is someone healed of something they never really had? Actually this may be one of the more gainful miracles of life. When he stopped believing he had been healed, I don’t know. We seemed to go to the end, not knowing why he continued to decline.

We don’t like to acknowledge reality. Whether it serves us or not - we have an aversion to reality.

Why wouldn’t I believe someone who told me he was dying? I remember the morning I got the call. “Dudley’s dead!” as if she was surprised. I got there fast. I entered the bedroom, leaned over the perpendicular beds to embrace the wife. Just next to my head, Dudley stared at me with blue eyes wide-open, mouth agape, as if to inaudibly yell “Believe me now, you son of a bitch?”

Yes, I believed him then. But I wondered if it was too late. Secretly, I thought he just wanted attention. He got it alright. He had a memorial service in California and Texas. His ashes were present at each in a cardboard box, unadorned of the decorative urn to be shipped in time.

There’s nothing to make light of here. Death is death, hurting people are hurting people, funerals are funerals. Two gay men came to eulogize “Pop.” One of them farted in front of me when I went to visit the widow. He laughed too hard at his own joke.

These are things I cannot say. My role won’t allow it. And yet they are all true. It is just the beginning of the great secret I carry around all the time. Often, I am looking to make sense of a moment when so much of the time the meaningful events are incredibly dubious.

And I wonder if God rolls his eyes at our condition. Does he believe us? Is he convinced?

Posted on December 31, 2007 12:00 AM