“Life’s Deepest Mystery”

April 9, 2006

Calvin O. Dame 

This coming June I will be fifty seven, a number which like every number after say, thirty-nine or forty, comes as a complete surprise to me.  Like every human being who has made this journey, I suppose, these accumulating numbers take me by surprise every year. How could I have possibly gained such numerical status, the years have come and gone in ones and twos and threes, and now have gathered themselves into decades in an astonishing fashion.  I am sure that I am not the first person to be astonished at how the years add up.

There is some number reached, I suppose, when loved ones no longer attempt to fit all of the candles on a cake, it would be a practical impossibility to light the final fifty-seventh candle before the first one has burned down to the frosting, and should one somehow manage to light them all, they would create a domestic fire hazard and likely cause the smoke detectors to sound the alarm.  Whatever the number it is that makes lighting candles on a cake a practical impossibility, at fifty seven I will have long since surpassed that reckoning point.  

But fifty-seven is significant to me for another reason.  I am now an age which falls at the midpoint of my own father’s long dying and it is a sobering marker for me, as a son.  My older brother Chris, who many of you have met over the years, also passed this point a couple of years ago, with some of the same sober attention.  There is something sobering when a son surpasses the number of years a father lived.

I had no idea how young my father was when he died.  With the myopic ignorance of a young adult, he seemed old to me at the time.  Arriving now at the age he was, I have some  better idea of all that he had to relinquish of in the years of his dying, of how great a future he might have experienced, of all that he had, quite cruelly, to let go of in the course of his illness.

In 1979 my father was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, A.L.S., a degenerative condition that is commonly known as Lou Gerhic’s Disease.  ALS is a wasting disease, the muscles, for some reason, stop receiving the electronic impulses from the brain that tell them to move, so they stop moving, and gradually they waste away from disuse.

There is no cure, and the course of the disease commonly takes two or three years, and in my father’s case he lived about two years from the time of his diagnosis, which was probably three years maybe from the first hint of symptoms.

I’m not sure if there are any good ways to die. In my experience, anyway, every death is hard, whether a death is sudden or drawn out.  But, given that death is inevitable, I think that you can say that there is something to be said for each different way.  In the case of a sudden death, we often say, “Well, at least they didn’t suffer,” or, “They didn’t suffer long.” But a sudden death often leaves the survivors wishing there had been time to say goodbye, to make amends, to say I love you.

And, of course, a longer death may include more anguish and suffering, but there is also, often, the opportunity to grow and to learn, to laugh together, to have conversations that are forthright, and to cherish moments that have become precious.

And so it was with my father’s illness.  From the unreality of the initial diagnosis, through anger and denial and all of the emotions of dying, there is in retrospect, and there was at the time, a deep sense of gratitude for the gift of those years.

Not that that it was easy.  It was not.  But it was fortunate in a way.  The course of ALS, though it is difficult and relentless, is not particularly painful; and it does not affect the mind.  “Calvie,” my Dad would say (and he is the only person in the world who ever would or should call be that, so I warn you all not to get any ideas).  “Calvie,” my Dad would say, “”I can’t believe how lucky I am to get ALS!  I could have gotten any number of other things and been all drugged up or worse.  As it is, I’ve got my mind, and that is what’s important!”

My Dad remained conscious and alert up to the last moments of his living.  He was as alert as ever when I last talked to him the afternoon that he died.  He gave me a dollar, telling me to pick up a Boston Globe when I came back to the hospital in the morning.  I know that he was pretty sure he was going to die, but he didn’t want to get caught without the morning paper, jut in case.

I carried that dollar bill in my wallet for years; it is still tucked away somewhere.

Our family changed in those years;

·        it began to change in the tense weeks when my Dad finally admitted that his clumsy walking might be more than a nagging foot injury and he made the first appointments to get some testing,

·        changed when the diagnosis was announced,

·        changed when the diagnosis sunk in,

·        changed as my dad began to lose more functions and gradually brought his working life to a close,

·        changed as my mother took on greater responsibility and took up roles my father had to leave behind,

·        changed as my brother and sisters and I moved a new next step into adulthood, as our parent and parents begin to need to be cared for and nurtured,

·        changed, changed, changed, changed, changed: changed as we worked our way through the enormity of accepting that my father was dying and that our lives would never, never, never: never be the same again.

It was not an easy time; so much of that experience was horrible: the lost capacities, the lost future, the lost dreams, the lost opportunities, the aching grief, the treatments, the emergency rooms, the hospital bed brought into the house. 

Still, at the same time, those years had a richness to them, and an immediacy and a joy, a joy that was bittersweet and real.   The years of my father’s dying were bittersweet, bitter with loss, sweet, sweet with the days we had, sweet with much that passed between us all.

My Dad became a different man, or maybe I should say, he got to be a person in a way that he very much wanted to be, but had been prevented from being by his own family upbringing and by the constrictions place on men who grew up in his generation.

In the years of his dying, my Dad, John Dame, became startlingly open and emotionally available in a fashion I had never experienced before.  He let himself be dependant and in many ways relished being cared for in a way that took me and everyone else by surprise.  While he was always caring and loving, he had not been, what’s the right phrase: user friendly, warm and fuzzy, open with his feelings?

In those last years he engaged with us and shared in way that, quite frankly, left as all astonished. I loved my Dad, and I enjoyed his company, but before the illness he could best be described as bossy and curt.  And after the diagnosis? Well, he was still bossy, but he was more likely to be present and available than he was to be curt.

A lot changed in those years, our roles in the family, the family constellation, our connections to one another, my father’s approach to and  presence in our family life.  I learned so much during that time, some lessons that have been useful to me over the years, as a minister and as a father, though I can’t help but wish I had not needed to learn some of these lessons  so soon.

But there was something else happened in those years as well, something for which I will be grateful for the rest of my life.  A parent teaches their child or children so much about the world: to eat and drink and walk and run and go to school and throw a ball and swim and study and look at stars and say please and thank you; how to light a fire and how to mow the lawn and drive a car and how to go to the prom:  all that stuff, so much stuff I couldn’t fit it all into a sermon, it would take too long.

And here was the final lesson that my father taught me, I mean, there are plenty of important lessons that he taught me over the years, but in those final years he taught this by example:  He taught me how to die.  Oh, I don’t mean he taught me what it is to die, but he taught me what it is to live with grace and faithfulness as that moment which awaits us all draws close.

For the most part, my Dad lived the last years of his life, the years following the news of his diagnosis, with a grace and an acceptance that and an enthusiasm that was a revelation for me then, and is a standard for me now.  I hope that I have that kind of grace as I come to face the reality of my dying.  I hope I have that kind of grace throughout my life, for that matter, because, let’s face it, I already have news that I am going to die, even if I do not have a specific diagnosis.

My Dad lived to sing at Barb and my wedding; there are pictures of him, he was using two crutches by then, he had not been forced into the wheelchair, yet.  (And, Yankee that he was, though I drove him all over town, I could not get him to buy a pair of shoes for the wedding; he was not about to spend good money on shoes he didn’t think he’d get a chance to wear out.)

And he lived another year; he hung on through his last fall, wasted and frail, waiting for Alyson, as it happens.  Alyson was due in early November, but those of you that know her will remember that she has done everything in her own sweet time, starting with getting born.  She was three weeks late and I was concerned, for Barb, of course, who did not seem to be having that much fun, and for my Dad as well, who I knew was waiting on this one event before he let go.

And he lived to see Alyson, lived to hold her.  There are precious pictures taken the day after Alyson was born.  I have to tell you that our families, the Crowleys & the Dames, had planned Thanksgiving together, to celebrate what should have been a three week old baby. But Alyson delayed her arrival to the day before Thanksgiving; the families went ahead with the plan to share the meal.  And Barb used her doctor credentials to check out of the hospital quickly.  And now there are pictures taken in the midst of this grand family celebration, pictures of my Dad, wizened and red faced, holding Alyson, wizened and red faced, one strong personality on the way out, one strong personality on the way in.

He died not much more than a week later, ready to go, more than ready really, tired from a long struggle in a frail body, but with one foot still in this world, arranging for the morning newspaper just in case he lived to see another dawn.

Now, those of you who read the church newsletter this month know that my sermon title came to me this way: I have over the years at our semi-annual church services auction, offered for bid the opportunity for someone to provide me with a sermon topic of their choice.  Susan Burnett had bid on and one that chance, and just in the nick of time she delivered up a sermon topic.  Susan wanted a sermon with two things in it.  She said, “I want to hear you preach about what you think happens when we die.  And I want to hear about what it was like when you father died.”

Well, a challenging choice.  And a two part request with a natural connection.   I’ve talked already about my Dad’s illness and his dying, about the surprising element of grace that suffused much of those years.  And that grace was in no small part a product of my father’s faith.  Many of you know that my Dad was a Methodist minister, but he was not only a minister, he was a man of deep faith, a committed Christian who took his own spiritual life seriously.

And he died as he lived, a man of faith, he approached his death firm in his conviction of the truth of the promises of Christian faith, the promise of a life hereafter and the promise of eternity spent in the presence of God.  He envisioned the moment of his dying as a crossing over, and thought of it as an adventure, the last great adventure of life, in which the deepest mystery of our existence would be revealed.

And there are many, many people in the world who share a similar faith. Indeed, most spiritual theories maintain that after the physical death of our bodies, our souls continue on in a purer form of some sort.

And some Eastern traditions maintain that after death our souls go trough various stages and levels of other-worldly planes before returning to the earth and being reborn in a human form once again; that the soul is reincarnated in human form.

In our traditions, both the Unitarian and the Universalist traditions, going back two hundred years to our beginnings on this continent, the adherents of these faiths were known as the Liberal Christians, and a belief in the afterlife was assumed.  The early Universalists, of course, believed in heaven, in an afterlife.  The Universalists were gathered around the belief that all souls would go to heaven, that there was no hell, which humans would be universally returned to God.  That is where the name came from.  From their reading of the scriptures, the Universalist were convinced that no loving God would create a human being just to damn them to hell for all eternity.

God is love, they pronounced, and would take all of humanity back into the embrace of love.  They did differ over the way it would happen, there were death and glory Universalist, you die and are immediately whisked off to glory, and there were death and purgatory Universalists, who believed there would have to be a period of urging, a purgatory, to wash away the sins of the earth on the way to heaven. Still, an after-life was taken for granted.

But a part of our heritage is also a scientific rationalism, a religious humanism.   There were both Unitarian and Universalists among the signers of the Humanist Manifesto in 1933.  There is within Unitarian Universalist a proud and vital tradition of rationalism, religious humanism and materialism.

A scientific rationalism sees science as the arbiter of human experience; religious humanism sees human nature, in all of its flaws, as perfectible and as the ultimate level of existence.  Materialism holds that, and I quote, “That physical matter in its movements and its modifications is the only reality and that everything in the universe, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of physical laws.” End of quote.

Most of those who embrace scientific rationalism and materialism reject the notion of a soul that is a separate entity from the body and which lives on after we die.

I am a religious humanist, a believer in science and a materialist.   I believe that our existence is limited by physical laws, not all of which we yet understand, but none of which are supernatural.  We live in a natural universe; the laws of that universe limit us.

One of those laws is that noting is ever destroyed, it merely changes form: the burned log is not gone, but transformed into energy and its constituent elements.

So, at our death, the elements of our existence d not disappear, the carbon of our bodies will go on being carbon and will be absorbed into new forms, likewise the electricity that courses through out bodies along the nerve pathways will move from our bodies back out into the natural world, transformed or just transmitted, but still physically present in the physical world.

However, I believe our consciousness is dependant on the existence of our bodies; it is with us as we live and it ends when we die.

This is a hard belief, and I sometimes wish I could embrace another, but I can’t.  I believe that after we die the physical elements of our bodies are absorbed back into the physical world through plain natural processes, and our consciousness ends.

I have thought hard about this over the years, and this is what I have come to.  This is what I believe, but I don’t know.  None of us knows, really.  Which is why I can continue to be a minister in a tradition which welcomes and embraces people who believe differently from me, in this matter as well as in other matters, because this is the fact of the matter: death is the journey from which no traveler returns. We do not know what happens when we die, no one has returned from that destination to tell us, no one knows.  It is the deepest mystery, linked like bookends to the other end of the spectrum, the mystery of our birth, the mystery of life itself!  If you do not believe that every breath we take is a mystery beyond explanation, then you are not really paying attention.

What interests me, really, is not our dying, which will come to us whatever we may think or wish or fear.  What interests me is our living, over which we have creative control.  I want to live well, I want to live a life worthy of the miracle and wonder of it, and I wish to live each day with grace and integrity and joy and enthusiasm, each day, each day in its course until I reach my last day.

And I wish to leave a legacy as rich as the legacy I received from my own father, in my living and my dying.  I want to face my own death with grace and equanimity, and send out for the morning paper just in case.