Category: Personal
A Jon Post
I’ve started and re-started this note several times. I knew, I knew I needed to write something and I felt the urge to get pieces of myself and my grief onto this page.
This seems as good a time as any to do it.
While the year is hurtling into March, the end of last year and the beginning of this one have seemed to freeze in place for me. Grief can be cold some times.
Like death.
DIES iræ, dies illa,
solvet saeculum in favilla,
teste David cum Sibylla.THAT day of wrath, that dreadful day,
shall heaven and earth in ashes lay,
as David and the Sybil say.
Manuel was a hustler, a “get-what-I-can-because-life-won’t-give-me-anything-for-free” kind of attitude infused how he carried himself.
A few years ago, following dreams for a better future, he hopped the border into our neighboring country, South Africa, a nearly mystical land of opportunity and wealth to many Mozambicans born into poverty. All seemed well and he made a habit of sending the strong South African Rand back to his wife and sons to keep them sustained while he bounced from opportunity to opportunity. At the beginning of last year, a small lesion appeared on his shin but he blew it off, knowing that he had no time to slow down in his quest for a better life for his wife and two young sons. After only a few weeks it grew to be too painful to walk so he presented himself to one of the government hospitals in South Africa where they quickly diagnosed him with a bone-deep carcinoma and took his leg above the knee before he could even think through what it meant to have only one.
In pain, and learning to use elbow crutches on his own, he lost his job, his home, and his way of life and limped his way home to a small border town on the Mozambican side of the South African border called Ressano Garcia. There, he tried his luck at facilitating currency exchange at the border for only a month until a lump started growing in his groin above his amputation.
With no way to return across the border he came to the Maputo Central Hospital.
By the time of his arrival the metastatic lump had exploded into a full blown necrotic wound on his inguinal lymph nodes, pouring its cruelty across his leg, his groin, his clothes, and his soul. Manuel had always found a certain comfort in his strength and in the caricature of masculinity he tried to embody. Cancer’s claws often seem to pinch the places it knows will bring the most shame.
When I met Manuel he was a shell of his former self, and I only came to know bits of his story after I invited him to come to my home and began helping him with daily bandage changes. His drive to get home between oncology appointments and his drive to find something or someone that would cure him lent itself to tension between the two of us. But tension doesn’t seem to be able to snap the cable forged from the steel of bodily vulnerability and bodily fluids. Manuel made many mistakes. So did I.
Last week he died in pain while looking for ancestral power from ancestral medicine in the home of his ancestors.
O what shall I, so guilty plead?
and who for me will intercede?
when even Saints shall comfort need?
Selma came back to Maputo and I’m pretty sure she knew what it meant.
She had come here a year prior, done six rounds of chemotherapy, 30 days of radiation-therapy, and gone home to her young daughters with high hopes that her cervical cancer had been eradicated by the toxic combination of oncological regimens.
It was not.
Selma’s cancer did not wait long. Coupling her determination to her weariness, Selma repeated the 1000-mile journey back to Maputo to repeat medical imaging scans and be re-evaluated for a second line of treatment. Her scans confirmed what was already suspected. I remember well sitting in a dingy office with her and a young oncologist, doing our best to hold the space for her grief and to make clear what the limits of chemotherapy were. She smiled, affirmed she wanted to try chemo again, and came to my home.
Months went by and, even as her own body grew frail and thin, she smiled through the pain and drew upon her faith and her family tradition of serving those around her. Selma had a strong will, a ready smile, and nimble fingers. She passed hours of nausea and body-aches knitting special gifts for my daughters, the other patients at Casa Ahava, and even staff members at the hospital. For every other patient at Casa Ahava, her love and her service became a bulwark against the despair brought on by chronic illness.
Six months of chemotherapy could not hold back the malignancy in her bones and her body. She went home to her two young daughters to die. We ache at the missing of her smile.
Last week her right leg stopped working at the hip.
Recall, dear Jesus, for my sake
you did our suffering nature take
then do not now my soul forsake!
Elcina was one of my favorites.
In work like this, much like in parenting, I am sure I’m not supposed to have favorites but my I can’t seem to avoid it sometimes. Elcina found her way into Casa Ahava and into my heart about the middle of last year. Her home is only a two hour bus ride away (still far but much closer than most of the others who come to Casa Ahava) which is usually a reason to disqualify someone from coming to my house. When I initially began telling her oncologist this, he pulled out a mountain of papers, each with a detailed report of her health, each directed to a different service at the Maputo Central Hospital. Cardiology, gynecology, pulmonology, physical therapy, nephrology, neurology, radiation-oncology, my head spun. Elcina’s breast cancer had invaded nearly every system in her body.
Elcina’s mother, who had accompanied her to the hospital, had just returned home to attend to farm and family so she sat alone on her hospital bed when I first came to meet her. As I often do, I asked her what she understood of her disease. As patients often do, she told me the extended story of what brought her to that bed and the many hardships along the way. When she came to a conclusion, I re-emphasized the question, asking what she understood of her sickness today. I have often found it to be remarkable that, given the clearly late-stages of cancer and illness someone is experiencing, they rarely have a cognitive or expressible in words understanding of their illness. Some time ago, this led me to believe in an absence of that understanding in any capacity. After having many of these conversations over these years, however, I’ve come to realize that the cognitive is not the only, and perhaps not even the best, way of understanding and integrating the reality of one’s own dying time. This was true of Elcina.
Elcina came to Casa Ahava and had an amazing bodily bounce-back. Her chemotherapy pushed dark tendrils a little further back, the tube pushed between her ribs into her lungs found plenty of necrotic liquid to pump out and offer air to starving lungs again, her heart medications reduced blockages and lowered blood pressure, and she found her sass again.
I could hear her laugh from 100 meters away.
While weariness did occasionally slow her down, she took to long walks and bus rides around Maputo city, encouraging her roommate to play and laugh a little longer with her in the light breeze of the afternoon. Her two younger sisters came out to visit her and, their little smartphone’s volume pumping its little heart out, they all danced under the shade of our veranda and our mango tree.
Elcina was one of my favorites.
Chemo doesn’t work forever, particularly the handful of old generations of chemo we have here in Mozambique. Liquid secreted through lung tissue and Elcina’s chest heaved a bit heavier when she walked. It pushed through pericardium walls and her heart beat quicker and shallower in its labor to push her chemo-laden blood through her veins.
Her laugh endured. But her energy did not. My urgent visits to the hospital with her increased. Echocardiograms, vacuum tubes squeezed through ribs and lungs, more morphine… and more days spent laying in her bed.
In intimate and emotional conversations Elcina had made it clear that she wanted to die at home with her mother when her time came. “That time” can be reckless in its approach. Elcina’s blood pressure plummeted and we frantically organized for her older sister to come to our home so she could accompany Elcina to her mother. On Elcina’s last day here, a hot day in mid-January, her roommate Isarda, stood faithful witness to what was occurring. Similar to the conversation from 7 months prior, neither Elcina nor Isarda had made cognitive what was happening in the spiritual. Nor had I.
As Elcina slowly edged into the back of our van where we had made a wide space for her to rest as she prepared for her journey home she reached out to her roommate, her playmate, her partner in chronic illness, Isarda..
And yanked her tightly into a sisterly embrace.
“This is not what we agreed to” Isarda screamed through her tears and through Elcina’s silent grasp. “It’s not what we agreed to” Isarda cried out again and again.
Elcina’s hand stroked Isarda’s head through the tears we all let flow. She never said a word.
I took off my shoes.
Two weeks ago, Elcina died in her mother’s arms.
Your gracious face, O Lord, I seek;
deep shame and grief are on my cheek;
in sighs and tears my sorrows speak.
Felicidade was sitting patiently in the treatment room on the floor below the rest of the oncology service.
Her painful IV port protruded from her arm and her drawn face marked the long road she had already traveled to be here, in the oncology ward, hoping for a miracle. She was quiet and hesitant when I first approached her. Her oncologist had recommended I speak with her about coming to Casa Ahava though he didn’t have the time to accompany me in the introduction so she had no idea who I was. Although her family had more resources than most here in Mozambique, they did not have what they needed to house and feed her so far from home so she had spent the previous three months living in the gynecology ward, coming once a month to the oncology ward to get her chemo, then walking back across the hospital to her space in a hospital room full of strangers.
Felicidade’s personality was not warm. She carried herself a bit distant and sad, and she rarely opened up about her own inner struggles. When she did make known what she was feeling, it was nearly always pain. Her trusted Layne with the intimate details of her cancer and her body. As is often the case with cancer, Felicidade was stripped of privacy and dignity by her illness. Felicidade invited Layne behind the curtain of her soul and she trusted Layne to create space between the anguish of late stage cancer and her nerve endings. It was difficult.
When she began a new line of chemo, one which required 5 days of continuous IV treatments, I drove her to the hospital with a heavy heart. It is never an easy week for our patients who need to be admitted and lately they have needed it more than not. Still, I did not think hard on the consequences of walking her to her bedside, carrying her small backpack full of clothes and toiletries and a few snacks, and giving her a smile and a shoulder squeeze as I left her there.
Four days later I got a call at about 5 AM from the nurse on staff. Felicidade had died early that morning in her bed, struggling to breathe.
How worthless are my prayers I know,
yet, Lord forbid that I should go
into the fires of endless woe.
Azarias came smiling to my car and my home in August last year.
His one good eye beamed and he expressed how happy he was to become a part of the Casa Ahava family upon his arrival. His home and family were remote and, though I did not know it at the time, he had been in neither for a matter of years. Azarais’s stoicism in the presence of pain struck me as paradoxically exceptional and, strangely common. While it is impossible to have a true sense of the pain someone else is going through, I have found myself consistently astounded at what I imagine the pain levels of many of my patients to be, given the extent of their illnesses, wounds, and treatments. I have caught myself several times falling into the expectation that chemotherapy and radiation therapy are just “not that bad” given the grace and patience with which many of my patients undergo their horrors. Azaraias was no exception to this and his flint-faced approach to the rigors of chemotherapy contributed to my unconscious downplaying of its effects.
The exceptionality of his patience in the face of pain showed itself when, as I would help him with his daily bandage changes, he would tell me that he did not sleep at all the previous night as a result of the intense pain in his head and eye (the location of his tumor). I found myself simply staggered at his ability to function given how deeply and consistently Azarias’s pain impacted his life. To my own shame I often looked for ways to discount the accuracy of his words, assuming they carried less severity of meaning than the plain understanding of them. I still have much to learn in this work.
The last morning I spoke with Azarias, I woke to find him sitting outside, his body sweaty and his eye bleary. I was preparing to take another patient to the hospital and he was sitting on one of our outdoor couches near the door to her room. Despite his clearly difficult night, he smiled at me and he used an uncommon word (for him) to describe his current state. “Estou aguentar, Jon” he told me. “I am holding on” or “I am enduring” he said. His smile was strained but faithful. His breath was shallow but consistent. And he told me he would see me when I got back from the hospital.
Three hours later Azarias went to his room to try to get some rest and fell asleep on his bed. He did not wake.
When the doomed can no more flee
from the fires of misery
with the chosen call me
Joana spoke poor Portuguese but even in her limited vocabulary she expressed how eager she was to escape the bowels of the hospital in which I found her.
Her large protruding tumor above her right breast was a constant ache, was constantly in the way, and was a constant reminder of the death she carried in her body.
We have had other patients in the past who spoke little or no Portuguese and I am always left with a distinct feeling of an impassable chasm that exists between us simply because we do not have the same words with which we spell out and describe the world. I often heard the fear behind the rudimentary Portuguese words Joana used to ask her questions about how bad it looked when I changed her bandage. I often saw the sadness in her face when she heard that her chemo would be delayed again because her blood levels were just not high enough to start.
But I so rarely heard it in her voice. She was gentle, she was kind, she was shy.
Her open necrotic wound continued to grow and she developed a chronic antibiotic resistant infection. Her chemo was just not helping. We have a small couch reserved for conversations surrounding topics like that and so when I called her to come sit on that couch with Pedro facilitating the language transfer, she knew what she was there to discuss. In her beautiful Xitshwa language, she explained that she had had a dream of her whole family singing the funeral songs over her and lamenting her death. When I asked her if that made her afraid she quickly said it did. At first glance it was easy to assume that she feared that dream heralded her death and that she was afraid of dying. When I pressed just a little bit, “What is it that you are afraid of, Joana?” her bold response was not that she was afraid of dying. It was that she was afraid of dying here. The family funeral songs being sung were for one who had not died at home. Joana belonged to Mabote, her family name and the name of her village. Joana belonged to her people and to her land and she was afraid her death would be among neither.
Last month Joana went home to die and to have the funeral songs sung over her for one safely where she belongs. Last week her wound was bigger, she was weak and afraid, but she was home.
Joana is where she belongs.
Before You, humbled, Lord, I lie,
my heart like ashes, crushed and dry,
assist me when I die.
There is a Gregorian chant called the Dies Iræ! Dies Illa. The music of that chant created by an unknown Franciscan monk 800 years ago and its trochaic meter intertwines ascent and descent before finally descending in a falling scale. For several hundred years, long before the formal study of death and death trajectories were created, this music has represented death and dying in theatre and the performing arts. Only later have we come to see the musical representation often approximates the energy and strength of the dying person waxing and waning then falling steadily in a morbid resolution of its fatalistic melody.
Since December the power of that chant has cast its spell over me as I have held the broken pieces of my soul in a tenuous grasp on sanity while death has walked the hallways of Casa Ahava.
Come murmur with me the final lines of this call, this chant, this spell. Come hope for rest for the restless, peace for the weary, and a bit of joy in dark places.
Lord, all-pitying, Jesus blest,
Grant them thine eternal rest. Amen.
A Layne Post
Her smile, a head tilt, a little laugh.
I’ll be honest, nothing we were saying was funny or light. But with her chin held high she said, “I am going to die in style.” I shook my head, grinned, and assured her that I had no doubt.
Her courage astounded me. I breathed deep, being present for that holy moment.
We talked about legacy projects, about cards for her children. We talked of hard things… necessary hard things to make space for future beauty.
Silence lingered for just a bit and, rubbing a piece of grass between my fingers, I looked over at her and told her how glad I was to have known her, to have had this time with her.
I don’t always get that chance.
I slapped my thigh and told her it’s time to make lunch. She stood to hang her clean and dripping clothes.
Holy moments in the middle of the ordinary.
Sitting on the porch later that day Jon and I reflected on how many sacred conversations have been had sitting on these sidewalks of Casa Ahavá.
These past couple of months have been difficult for me emotionally and spiritually. The suffering and death this year at Casa Ahavá is heavier, closer together. I just couldn’t catch my breath. All felt dark, all bad, all hard. I pulled back some, leaned on Jon and my community.
Thankfully I can feel my lungs filling up. I am reconnecting. I’m remembering why I love what we do.
Today I sat in a room and had some good belly laughs with two ladies.
Holy… smack dab in the middle of the hard and the ordinary.
To our supporters, I am ever grateful for your prayers, your financial support, your love for my family, and your compassion towards our dear patients. I really believe so much in this project of ours and yours.
A Jon Post
A song has been resting on a bed in my house for the last four weeks. It rests in the bed near to where a young woman lay panting in pain four weeks ago. Reaching out to me, reaching out to Layne, murmuring to her brother in Matswa.
Matswa, the language Flora sung with the mother who raised and spoiled her, the mother 500 kilometers away and unable to hold her dying daughter while Flora wrestled through the pain and the meaning of dying young.
A decade in the death trade has given me some small familiarity with the rhythms and notes of dying and grief, crafting songs woven from the threads of suffering. In my case, those threads are usually passed through and tied to the eye of the needle of cancer, but really, that needle is not so important a part in the tapestry grief and dying weave from their songs. Like the music of many composers historic and current, most people (and in this, I include myself) do not recognize nor even enjoy the songs grief and dying compose upon first listen. For most people, it is a strange song, an arrhythmic beat, punctuated by cries and gasps, remembered for its long periods of silence interspersed with wails and howls or soft moaning then culminating in a crescendo of turbulence, noise, confusion, and emotion. This is the introduction most of us have to the songs of grief and dying and I do not blame anyone for their distaste for them. This distaste is most often borne for many long years after first hearing the duet of grief and dying sung in the throes of cancer, heart disease, SIDS, after a car accident, or finding a note left next to an empty bottle of pills.
The first notes I heard of that duet for Flora was when I was inviting her hospital roommate to come to Casa Ahava.
Selma was from distant Quelimane, a town in Northern Mozambique more than 1500 kilometers from where she sat in her hospital bed. Selma had done chemotherapy and radiation therapy last year but the dark tendrils of her cervical cancer had not been killed by those poisons so she was back in our hospital, depending on desperate doctors to offer her a desperate attempt to control the growing disease. As I invited Selma to my home, Flora wondered aloud (clearly for my benefit) “who will care for me when Selma isn’t in the bed next to me?”
Ah, yes, there they are. The African drum beats of grief and dying, playing softly in the background of this young girl’s request to follow her friend to my home.
The first thing to notice about Flora was her smile. It lit her face and the room and she made eye contact through intense eyes (exaggerated by her emaciated body). The second thing to notice was her swollen abdomen. Flora’s cervical cancer had grown at a terrifying rate in her body and bullied its way through organs, intestine, and bone, displaying itself prominently in a macabre and mocking imitation of the joys of a young woman in late pregnancy by forcing Flora to cradle her belly and support it whenever she shifted or walked from bed to bathroom.
It took little time to coordinate with her oncologist to bring Flora AND Selma to my home the following day. Flora was from the province of Inhambane, closer than Selma but still inaccessibly far in Flora’s condition. Flora’s plan of care was simple; a couple rounds of chemo to see if the mass in her abdomen would reduce at all but, other than that, try to control her pain and give her as much time as possible. Despite that plan having been explained clearly to her by her oncologist, in a quiet setting just she and I, I asked her what she understood to be happening both in her body and in her treatment. She expressed abundant hope, even expectation, that she would be cured, that her trouble walking would go away, that she would return to her mother and her younger sister; strong, sassy, and ready to prove how wrong everyone else was that this was a serious problem.
There it is again, the music of grief and dying. I know this verse well. This lament for the way things may have been, the loss of potential, the loss of future project, the loss of reputation and identity… So often upbeat, so often belying the story behind the music, all true, all good, all beautiful.
Flora’s cancer was not kind.
I suppose cancer rarely is but it seemed to hold some special malice for Flora. Malignancy wrapped its icy fingers around her digestive system, her nervous system, and her spine. Opiates passing through the bloodstream can sooth the pain of some, but not all of those systems. Bones are particularly resilient to any attempts to palliate their pain. Agonizing hours, days, and weeks passed for Flora at Casa Ahava. I am convinced that Layne was every combination of medical and miracle for Flora because what shoreline could be found in Flora’s sea of pain was guided by the lighthouse of Layne’s presence, wisdom, and medication dispensation. But storms on that sea make the waves of bone pain crash in a different direction as those of nerve pain which crash in an altogether different direction as those of muscle pain. In the turbulence of that storm, morphine can only offer succor in one or two of those waves but not all. Flora was very familiar with storms and with pain.
During one of the calms in the storm, I sat with Flora and her smile and asked her again, “What do you think is happening with your illness and your treatment?” Again she assured me she was going to get better and that, in fact, she was already feeling better than when she arrived at my house. But this time, she followed those assurances up with a question of her own, “What do you think, Jon?”
There they are; the uncertain notes, the lilting, questioning notes, the music of grief and dying dancing this way and that, as if unsure if melody or harmony is the best way forward.
In that moment, I was faced with a decision of faithfulness. To whom must I be faithful in the time when someone asks what I can see on the horizon of illness? Am I faithful to her family, which asked that I spare honesty and openness and use words which, while not “untrue” per se, at least communicate a hope that I do not have? Am I faithful to my teammates who tell me I am in danger of glorifying suffering, of becoming so enamored with it that I may do little or nothing to alleviate it? Am I faithful to the person in front of me who has a chance, a chance, at hearing the music of grief and dying and joining in harmony?
In that moment I chose.
I chose Flora.
“I think you are dying, Flora.”
A sad smile crossed her face and she nodded in acknowledgement and what I took to be acceptance. But the following days put the lie to my interpretation of her response.
Like a branding iron on her hip, her thigh, her back, the pain ripped through Flora’s already weak body in fits and bursts and she railed against it and against the music I asked her to listen to.
“I don’t accept it!” She cried and pounded her fist against the wall in agony, “I DON’T ACCEPT IT!” rang through the corridors of Casa Ahava, again and again. She hated the pain, she hated the cancer, and she hated my words:
“I think you are dying, Flora.”
Now dying, grief and Flora sing back and forth in a tumultuous fugue; contrapuntal, violent, one part taking the melody of the other, imitating, repeating… devastating. Terrible and beautiful in its tone, this section of music can rarely be ignored or forgotten.
Days passed like this. Conflict and emotion ran high among all of us who cared for Flora. Was I right to say what I did? Was the only accomplishment of my pronouncement to increase the pain of a young girl already nearly indistinguishable from the pain that defined her existence?
Another chemo treatment. Another week. More pain. More titration of morphine, amitriptyline, gabapentin, bisacodyl, and other chemical compounds building piers into the sea of pain and symptoms to break the fury of the tide pushing against the shores of Flora’s body.
And somehow Flora found days to smile. Days to laugh. Days to help in the kitchen… Layne carried her through much of it.
Another calm day came. Again, I sat in her room listening to the music.
Reader, if you are ever unsure what to say or do in the room with a person like that, pause and listen for the music. Maybe you won’t hear it. Maybe it will just feel awkward for you and the other person as you sit in the silence, between the beats of the music. Maybe.
“What is happening, Flora?”
“I don’t know, Jon.”
“Tell me about home, Flora. What is your mother doing these days?”
“She is preparing our family farm. Tilling, planting, cultivating, tending, and sustaining. But she is the only one who does all the work and then our whole extended family comes and eats from her farm. She works her fingers to the bone and eats nothing from the produce that comes from the soil she has prepared. Everyone else eats but her. She is the most generous person I know.”
Generosity. Selflessness. Doing all the hard work just so others can be sustained. This is how Flora spoke of and conceived of her mother, of her hero. I was swallowed up in the love and admiration Flora had for her mother. Silence. Waiting.
There it is again.
“Do you think you could be as generous as your mother, Flora?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Jon.” Uncertainty in her voice.
“Sometimes, all the hard work is lain in front of only you. And if you do all that work, it is only others who will come behind you to be sustained by the fruit of your labor. One of my favorite stories, in fact, is that of a man who knew he was dying and told all his closest friends and family, ‘Take and eat, this is my body, broken for you.’ That man’s dying was given as sustenance to those he loved. That man did all the hard work of dying, and gave its fruit to those who came to his table looking for bread and wine. Maybe, your mother has the same generosity as that man. Maybe you can be generous too.”
The same wan smile. The same weariness in her face. But this time… her spirit took some small step… trying to dance to the music grief and dying were singing.
Now grief and dying sing like weeping violins, pouring lament into their duet while wringing beauty and ashes from every note, every measure, and every bar. For months they have prepared and now they introduce their final, terrible melody. They sing in a canon of descending chords, each note falling with the grace of a flower pedal, and the weight of a sledgehammer.
Flora’s body deteriorated rapidly. Quicker even than I expected. What vitality she eked from her muscles and bones took its toll on her and, no matter how urgent and insistent she was, her legs would not obey her heart.
Layne’s unhesitating presence was at her side the whole time. Into and out of bathrooms, showers, clothes, bedsheets, clean or soiled, Layne danced with Flora to the music we could all hear.
In a mysterious mix of body chemistry and spirit, dying people often see things the rest of us cannot. One afternoon, while Layne sat with Flora in the room of our house set aside for those for whom dying sings the loudest, Flora looked at the door and asked Layne, “Who are those people? Why do they have spoons and forks? What is it that they think is being served?”
What a strange vision to have three days before dying stops singing and grief carries the rest of the song.
Flora saw several people in the room with her and Layne, prepared for a meal, for sustenance.
Take and eat. This is my body, broken for you.
When I next sat alone with Flora listening to the music. She laughed and told me that this sickness was making her as dependent as a newborn child. Weeks or even days before, that confession would have been filled with a bubbling rage at the loss of her independence. This day, she laughed. This day, there was music in her voice. I asked her if maybe it was more like a grandmother who depends on the rest of us to carry her around than to an infant. She thought for a minute and then told me of her own grandmother who, when age took her ability to walk, would scoot around on her butt, taking hours to get halfway to her destination then just laugh when she didn’t make it. Flora took the better part of an hour telling me story after story of how she cared for her laughing, handicapped grandmother who died with a smile.
Four days Flora stayed in a bedroom in my home whose walls had already been soaked in dying and grieving. Four nights in a bed for a young girl learning to till the earth of her dying so that others could be fed.
Saturday came and, though in great pain, Flora wanted to bathe. In her determination not to be a nuisance, alone she shuffled her weary and pained body to the close bathroom. Layne found her on the way and, with a knowing smile, put her arms under and around her and helped her the last few steps into the shower seat where she helped her disrobe and wash her fragile body.
Rupture, screams, pain.
Friable inner tissues and compromised organs lost their tenuous hold on themselves and on each other and Flora’s cancer betrayed her one final time. Layne helped her to her bed. Layne stayed by her side and held her through all the wails, all the tears, all the heart-stopping fear, and all the unknowns.
The final crescendo. Here, dying’s solo is center stage, unrelenting and unashamed, where sanctity and sacrilege vie for prominence between moans and keening cries. This music has no obvious distinction between melody and harmony, it is darkness and light, paradox upon paradox, wholly figure and wholly ground, rooted in the temporal and expanded into the eternal. Dying’s solo is known around the world and across history and it is the cause of nearly every great and terrible event of each.
Layne held Flora to her bosom for hours on end. When Layne’s arms shook for the strain of it all, I picked Flora up one more time and laid her on a layer of cushions arranged so as not to place pressure where pain’s interminable grip held Flora in its fingers.
Matswa words stumbled out of Flora’s lips and she trembled under the strain of tilling the farm of her dying. I do not know if she saw those same spirits standing in the room, waiting to be served a meal or if she already saw eternity through the veil. Her strength, inherited from a laughing grandmother who scooted her broken body through the dirt and bushes of her ancestral land, lent Flora what was needed to pull her way through the field of her own dying and plough one last furrow into the soil.
Surrounded by Christ’s love and Layne’s arms, Flora died.
Now grief’s coda fills the emptiness of dying’s sudden silence. Stunned, solitary notes. In those first moments, grief is muted, mournful brass instruments, and a slow, steady djembe to mark the beating of hearts and the breathing of lungs. Now our own chorus of griefsong responds to the call of Flora’s deathsong and the call/answer is most commonly recognized in African traditional music where a single voice calls and the host responds. Our griefsong sings faithful witness to the beauty of Flora’s deathsong.
One week later we performed our grief rituals here at Casa Ahava. Our family, our partners, and our patients, all joined together and let the ashes of our grief mingle with the weight of our memories and be cleansed by the pool of our tears. It was in this gathering of the living and the dying together that I saw most clearly that Flora had, indeed, learned generosity from her mother and strength in dying from her grandmother.
Our walls echo the songs of grief and dying here at Casa Ahava and the refrain sung for and by Flora has been rattling around my soul these last four weeks. I know you may not like their music very much. I know most don’t. But please find it in yourself to consider what Layne confessed at our grief rituals among our little community of the living and the dying; “I am better for having known Flora. She made me better.” may be true of that music for you too.
This is the hard truth Flora learned from her lineage of strong women: You can till the earth from which others will be sustained. This makes you generous. And you can laugh at your own weakness. This makes you strong.
And these truths are only sung in grief and in dying.
A Layne Post
Peace Prayer of Saint Francis
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.
Easter felt a bit different for me this year.
I have friends walking through the hardest days of their lives. My job, my ministry, revolve around people suffering, fighting to live, yet often dying. As I listened to worship songs of death being defeated, I felt a strange sting. It doesn’t feel defeated in the way I want it to. I believe Jesus conquered death and rose from the grave. I do. I also know the hard truth that death is still the required road to eternal life.
As I reflect on the story of the Messiah, I can see myself in the Jews. I, too, expect Jesus to come in all His power and glory to defeat the Romans, the oppressors… my oppressors, sickness, cancer, depression, hardship of any kind, maybe death…
Isn’t that what I was told? Isn’t that what you were told? I was told my whole life of a powerful Redeemer, who gave us the keys to the kingdom, who would deliver me from all my suffering. Ask and you shall receive.
Glory. Power. Dominion. Victory.
And then life.
It is so much harder and messier than I expected. More pain. More suffering. I have struggled to reconcile this Jesus I was taught with the life I am living. The formulas I was sold aren’t working.
The declarations. The faith of a mustard seed. The laying on of hands. The two or more that are gathered. The prayer chains. The begging.
Don’t get me wrong, it is not that these are bad. You’ll often find me rubbing a patient’s leg, whispering prayers and Biblical promises over them, and then face down in my bathroom pleading Jesus to intercede. I’m the first to jump on Facebook and ask for communal prayer.
But people are still dying.
I have known the truth of His presence. That wasn’t in question. He just looks so much different than I expected.
More honestly, He looks different than I want.
Where’s the victory?
What I realized is that this Jesus, who was born in a manger, who chose to live in poverty, who rode on a donkey, who washed the feet of others, who walked the Via Dolorosa, this Jesus, in His unexpected upside-down kind of way, instead of changing the required death-road to eternal life demanded by sin, decided to show us how to walk through suffering.
He showed us how to die.
He said, “Follow me.”
It isn’t that I don’t pray for miracles, or for relief, or for mercy. I do. Sometimes it is granted. I also know that when it doesn’t come, as it didn’t for Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, I am in good company. When the road ahead overwhelms me to the point of death, I have an example to follow.
He might not look like I expected or wanted; He is far more humble, but after some time in His presence, I assure you He is so worth following.