The suddenness of it

 

A friend died yesterday. In the morning, before first service, he was at church drinking coffee. In the afternoon, he was gone.

I didn’t know Father Bruce Coggin well. Over the years we met occasionally because we had a few mutual friends. But recently he and I have had some good conversations in my cottage about the publishing world and what to do with all the things we’ve written. Father Bruce’s legacy includes an incredible amount of material, some published, some not—sermons, essays on history and the church, a memoir, travel pieces, accounts of growing up in a small Texas town and also of ten years spent teaching in Mexico, and a lot of miscellany. (You can find his published work by searching for Bruce Coggin on Amazon; the works include a book of selected writings by his grandmother, a remarkable woman way ahead of her time—Bruce saw himself in part as inheriting her writing ability and outlook on life. The book is A Soul Housed Up.)

Father Bruce was a gifted writer, with a clear style, an incisive wit, and an ability to see through the follies of mankind. He wanted to do something with all this work but wasn’t sure what. We talked about various possibilities, conversations that were as enlightening to me as they were to him. The last time we talked, he left with the enthusiasm of a man with a job ahead, one he was looking forward to. He was going to start with a web page, and a friend tells me he talked to her about it as recently as yesterday. I was looking forward to keeping up with his progress—and more conversation.

Sudden death is sometimes a blessing. The deceased is spared the pain, suffering, and indignity of a lingering illness. But it is devastating to those left behind. In this case, it seems especially tragic that a man is cut off when he had so much he was looking forward to accomplishing. Whether or not you want to believe that God had another, more important calling for him is up to you.

Not only do I mourn for this man, his family and friends, and the many former parishioners who are devoted to him, I am shaken by the suddenness of his death. I saw him less than a month ago; a friend tells me she had lunch with him a week ago; another friend talked with him about his web page Saturday; yesterday, he was at church drinking coffee, though apparently not feeling well. And then, suddenly he’s gone.

RIP Father Bruce. I hope you’re up there, finding God’s fingerprints in old and new places and writing furiously. And I hope someone down here publishes some more of your work.

Thoughts on mortality

 

A notice on Facebook this evening informed me that an acquaintance died suddenly, apparently yesterday, of a heart attack. She was a woman I didn’t know well enough to call a friend, but we had crossed paths enough that I knew she was vibrant and lovely, much loved by many people including close friends of mine. What do you say when you write the surviving husband in the instance of such sudden, unexpected death? I am always tempted to steal words from Katie Sherrod and say, “May she rest in peace, and rise in glory.”

Death is on my mind more than a little bit these days. I think it’s a combination of age—at 83, I have outlived many friends and contemporaries—and covid, which has made us all more away of our mortality. Some people will say they want to die in their sleep—a peaceful way to go, suddenly, without the agonizing knowledge that death is approaching. When a dear friend died, having moved out of my life several years earlier, her husband wrote that she was afraid of two things: falling out of bed and dying. So the night she died he sat by her bed holding her hand—he could keep her from falling but not from dying. I guess I too fear the fear of dying.

But I have also thought recently that if I died in my sleep, there would be so much left undone. My oldest son is my executor, and he and I work hard together to keep him up to speed on my career, my finances, my life. But what about that novel I have half finished? And the project I still want to write about Helen Corbitt, doyenne of food service at Neiman Marcus for the crucial years in the 1950s and 1960s. My blogs, and the letters of a Mntana author I want to edit. I have a lot of work yet to do.

I like to think I am a devout Christian, accepting the teachings of Jesus. Indeed, much of my political activism comes because I cannot separate Christianity’s preaching of love each other from politics as I see it today. Remember those bracelets people wore that said WWJD—what would Jesus do? In my book, most conservatives have entirely missed the point, and none so much as most born-again, evangelical Christians. Franklin Graham kind of Christians.

On the other hand, I’m not at all willing to commit myself on belief in the afterlife. I simply don’t know. I know a woman my age who truly believes she will ascend to streets of gold, and everything will be wonderful. I can’t quite buy that vision for myself, but what I do believe is that the soul lives on after it leaves the body. A big question for me: do we reunite with those we’ve loved? Could be ticklish sometimes—like ex-spouses, etc.—but there are many I long to see again. Can we as spirits embrace? I have no idea.

My thoughts on the afterlife are meant as a way of saying that I do not fear death. But I simply do not want to go. At least not now, not yet. I am too happy, enjoying this life too much. I don’t want to leave my children and my dog and my friends and those half-written manuscripts. I know I am among the fortunate, but life as I know it is too good. Which somehow makes me think though that even people in desperate situations cling to life—and that brings Ukraine to mind and the desperate people whose fate hangs in the hands of the superpowers. But that is another subject for another day.

A friend told me that once his father died, his mother soon tired of life. She felt she needed to follow her husband and be sure that he was all right. And maybe that’s the ideal state—to be ready to leave this life. Not with anger or sadness, just ready to move on. And knowing it.

Sudden death doesn’t offer you that opportunity. So I think tonight of that old nursery prayer which must have scared children to death:

Now I lay myself down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

And if I should die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take.