Saying Yes to Life, and Saying Yes in Death

This is a post I hadn't expected to be writing, and I wasn't sure it was even appropriate to go public with this private family grief. But I know there are readers of this blog that care about me and my family. So here it is. 

My year is off to a strange, sad start. My husband died a week ago today. 

He had been declining more drastically each month from advanced Parkinson's, made worse by COVID-caused isolation in the care home where he now had to live. I hadn't been able to visit him in-person for months, although we had phone calls and staff-facilitated FaceTime. But I could tell he was slipping away further day by day. Still it was a shock to get a call early on that Tuesday morning that he was gone from this world forever. 

My older son, Christopher, and I had already planned to spend that day together. Christopher had told me over the holidays that he wanted to ask his boss if his mom could come along for one day of driving on "the highway route" which is up in the mountains; his current truck-driver job is driving new truck models to gather data for the engineers. He was so excited to have me witness his driving prowess in navigating a huge semi over treacherous Berthoud Pass. At first, I had told him, "Oh, no, you don't need to do that, I have so much work of my own that I need to do." Yes, I actually said that. And he said, "Aw, come on, it will be fun!" So I agreed to go. 

I used this anecdote in the end-of-year guest sermon I gave in church on December 27th, paired with the parable of the banquet in the Gospel of Luke, where the rich man invites countless friends to a feast he is hosting, and they all come up with excuses for saying no, so the man issues invitations to the hungry and homeless instead. I built the sermon around what I was calling "the Gospel according to Jerry Herman," composer of the musicals Hello Dolly, Mame, and La Cage aux Folles, all of which feature a show-stopping song about seizing the moment and living for TODAY.  Perfect for my purposes, Mame even utters the famous line, "Life's a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death." So my message in the sermon was: when you are invited to the richness of the banquet of life that God has laid out for us, say YES. So what choice did I have but say YES to Christopher's invitation to spend a day riding in his big rig through the gorgeous wintry mountains of Colorado?

 

We had already set the day for this adventure to be that Tuesday. When I got the news about Rich's passing, I called both boys immediately (my younger son, Gregory, now lives in Chicago). Christopher and I agreed to proceed as planned. Rich loved the mountains so much and engaged in so much environmental activism to preserve their unspoiled beauty. The "highway route" goes past the turnoff for the very area of wilderness he loved best: the Troublesome. We would have the whole day to be together in the mountains he loved, and to listen to music he loved (Mauricio Pollini playing Chopin, the overture to The Magic Flute, Arlo Guthrie singing about Alice's restaurant), and to share memories. 

Well, an unexpected snowstorm came up, and the Eisenhower tunnel was closed for our return trip, and we had to spend an extra three hours backtracking to go over Berthoud Pass a second time, this time in pitch-black darkness with intensely blowing snow. Christopher, always cheerful and chipper, said, "I think this is Daddy's way of having us spend more time in the mountains today." I said, "I just hope this isn't Daddy's way of having us come spend eternity in heaven with him today!" But Christopher handled the hairpin curves with amazing calm confidence. We had left in the morning at 8:30 and didn't get back to "the yard" until 7:30 that evening. It was exhausting for both of us. But it also felt so right: Rich loved grueling mountain treks and preposterous plans gone awry . And so we had ours. This summer Gregory will come, and we will scatter Rich's ashes in the Troublesome, along Trail 1135 on Arapaho Ridge. 

I'm very sad, of course, but also enormously relieved that Rich won't linger in depression and pain in a nursing home for another twenty years, as happened to his mother.  I have many conflicting emotions now, but the dominant one is gratitude. I am grateful not only that he is now released from suffering, but that I did say YES to the banquet on that remarkable day that proved the most fitting way to remember the man my children and I loved. And I'm grateful that I said YES to all the adventures we had together as a family.

When that final farewell comes, may we all be able to be grateful for the times we said YES.