Sunday
August 13
Talking About Death
By Marsh Chapel
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Testimonials always get my attention. I love to hear people tell stories about what works for them. Diet testimonials are the best: “How I lost 96 pounds and transformed my life.”
Children give testimonials all the time. A three-year-old said:
“I was really, really scared, and then I put my special blue blanket over my head and now I’m not scared anymore.”
The Tabitha story is a testimonial of the early church telling how Peter resurrected Tabitha from the dead, this devoted woman who helped the poor.
I’m convinced that we can all benefit by becoming more comfortable hearing and telling stories about death. Every single one of us is going to die, and if we live a very long time, we’ll have to deal with the death of most of our friends and family.
In addition to death, we have hundreds of other kinds of losses. Like people moving away, the world falling apart, families falling apart, health and health care falling apart, society and the climate acting crazy and out of control, and everything changing all the time. All losses prepare us for the next loss and the biggest ones, especially if we give testimonials, stories from our own experience about what makes loss bearable, and how we have grown and learned from loss.
Today, I will continue to talk about Tabitha, and I want to share 8 testimonials from Mom’s passing.
TESTIMONIAL #1: Death is Normal
Note: our family is far, far from ideal, but Mom and Dad were superstars about talking about death.
Death was kind of like a distant relative we would finally get to meet and when we did, it would be very wonderful. The Best. Safe, Fun, beautiful. Quite soon everybody we knew and loved would join us.
As children, we went to the calling hours of our parent’s friends and relatives from the time that we could behave. I remember mother and Grammy looking at my Great Aunt Lilly in the casket and straightening her dress, and talking about her.
They answered my 7-year-old questions: “Can she hear us?” No, not like we hear people.
“Can I touch her?” Yes, but her body will be very cold, and her spirit isn’t in it any more—it is with Jesus. Her spirit can visit us in our hearts, when we think about her, but it doesn’t live here any more. It is not scary. Just different. God has it figured out; we don’t have to worry about it.
TESTIMONIAL #2: The Bible Speaks
Picture this: I was 12, sitting at my grandmother’s funeral. The preacher got up and read from John 14.
Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not let them be afraid.
Believe in God, Believe also in me. In my father’s house are many rooms; If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.
At that moment the Word was so profoundly real that I knew it was true in a mysterious kind of way, and I also knew from that day forward that the Bible could speak to you like a close friend, and tell you things you needed to know. When people read stories about what Jesus said, Jesus was talking directly to you.
TESTIMONIAL #3: Cremation
I remember the struggle that Mother had years ago, deciding to be cremated instead of buried, because she loved the casket traditions she grew up with.
Daddy reminded her that at one of the churches he served the cemetery had to be dug up and moved. When they excavated, they saw that at the bottom of each grave was a simple layer of earth that had once been a body a hundred+ years before. Mama said in her southern voice:
“Well, I guess I might as well be cremated and get it over with.”
TESTIMONIAL #4: Humor and Sorrow
Mom and Dad were OK about death, knew it would come, and Dad made jokes about it all the time. When we was really sick, he’d say: ”I made honorable mention in the obituaries this morning.” When he began to lose mobility he said: “keep moving and they won’t throw dirt on you.”
They made funeral arrangements early on, talked about it, and dealt with death a lot. They had such a positive feeling about death, but they weren’t naïve. Dad lost two siblings in childhood, Mom lost her mom and dad and six brother and a sister, one of them dying by suicide. They lost their oldest son. Dad always told the story of how a soldier on each side of him died in World War II. They weren’t immunity to tragedy, heartbreak, unfairness, horror. But still: Death was normal and God is in charge.
TESTIMONIAL #5: Saying Goodbye
We were with Mom when they took out the breathing tube they had given her until we could all arrive in North Carolina. Her brain aneurism had made it impossible for her to breath on her own at 85 years old. She lived about 10 minutes and then in one last long exhale, she was gone. He essence vanished and left her sweet old body looking like a beautiful sculpture, not a living being.
Just the night before, I talked with her on the phone. Her last words were what she always said at the end of a phone call:
Bye bye darlin’ I love you.
I’m telling these stories, because I think it is important to give testimonials about death and dying. Death is normal.
Telling the stories of this precious season called the end stage of earthly life is healing. Sharing our faith and trust in the eternal presence of God is comforting. And it is important to remember to say something like “bye bye darlin’ I love you,” every time.
TESTIMONIAL #6: Memorial Services
As a pastor for 40 years, I have performed hundreds of Memorial services, and I have loved doing them. But going to Mother’s service as a daughter, not the minister was different.
I wasn’t talking about someone else’s death.
I was experiencing my Mama being gone, and her spiritual presence being with me. It wasn’t like the Bible story of Tabitha being raised from the dead when Peter prayed.
But for me it was a small scale subtle experience of resurrection. Mama is gone. And the great mystery is: Mama’s spirit is still here.
We didn’t do anything grandiose at mother’s service. We talked about how great she was with laundry. She never, ever washed socks with dishtowels. She started teaching adult Sunday School at age 80 when she finally got over a fear of public speaking.
Steve, Her former next-door neighbor of 20 years drove 2 hours to the service, came up front, and said:
“Jean knew that my partner and I were gay. She called us “the boys next door.” And she treated us like her boys. She gave us the key to her house in case we ever needed to get in. She was a wonderful neighbor.”
I just want to say that the town where Mom’s memorial service was held a decade ago was not a place where you talk about being gay, certainly not in church. But that is what happened at Mother’s service.
A Memorial service is a chance for God to use us one more time to make an impact on the people in our orbit.
A memorial service is a way of making all of us who are still alive, more aware of the small ordinary things that make a difference: keeping things and relationships really clean, being neighborly, kindness, making lots of people your family.
So don’t let me hear about any of you saying:
“Oh no, I don’t want anything. No service, nothing at the burial.” You’d be denying your friends and your family and maybe even some strangers, a chance for the healing of the Holy Spirit. That happens when our hearts are opened by love and grief.
Your memorial service or funeral is not for you. At your service, the rest of us have a chance to frame the relationship we had with you during life and start to piece together the relationship we have with you when you leave this earthly plane.
It is a time when we start picturing you with the angels–a new picture that needs developing.
TESTIMONY #7: Kindness
We had the calling hours at Mom and Dad’s house. People showed up with food and flowers and hugs and love and stories. All these people simply sharing kindness in the face of grief.
I started sobbing over the four chocolate meringue pies that showed up, because Mother always made Daddy a chocolate Meringue pie for his birthday. It was a symbol of 65 years of love, and marriage, and seeing it opened my heart, and I connected with the love, and with the loss, and with my Dad.
At the time of death or loss, or grief, people are more willing to be vulnerable, intimate with you if you create some space for that.
In the Bible story we read, that is what the women did for Tabitha. They came to her house to prepare her body, they brought the clothes that she had made for them and showed everyone and talked about her other acts of charity and devotion .
That Bible story in Act 9 give us guidance about how to go through the death of a loved one. They wept. They helped. They reached out for guidance.
We had calling hours at Mother and Dad’s home. Their neighbor, Mr. A.J. Dexter sat beside me and told stories about growing up as a sharecropper’s son. The sharecroppers were the next to the lowest on the social scale in rural N. C. in the 1940’s.
Sharecroppers were kind of like the women in the Bible that Tabitha served – poor women who didn’t have decent clothes until Tabitha made them and gifted them.
Mr. Dexter shared that his mother made his clothes from feed sacks. He stuttered so badly that all the kids made fun of him.
I asked Mr. Dexter, how did you get over stuttering? He answered quietly, with great authenticity, looking me in the eye:
Rebecca, I gave it over to the Lord in prayer. And the Lord gave me a 10th grade teacher who worked with me every afternoon after school before football practice, until I could talk. It was a miracle, he said, a miracle of prayer and conviction and her kindness.
That is what Peter did in the Bible Story. He prayed for Tabitha, this woman who has served God by serving the widows who had no resources. The story about Tabitha became a testimonial of how God can do what we think is impossible. Open-hearted testimonials like Mr. Dexter’s and Tabitha’s friends and her healing, open our hearts.
The pay-off of an open heart is the experience of being empowered by kindness, fueled by tears, strengthened by pain, and connected heart to heart with other beings – strangers who tell sweet stories at calling hours, characters in the Bible, and all the people you know. The open heart connects us with the divine mystery that Jesus proclaimed: “Where I am you will be also.”
Here is a summary:
Death is normal, God is in charge, talk about death, use humor, grieve, celebrate life at the time of death, kindness is the greatest gift, and God works in ways that seem impossible. Bear witness to this truth.
TESTIMONY #8: Life/Death/Life
My brother died of cancer at age 46. The night he died our whole family was there: his wife and three teenage sons, Mom and Dad, my other brothers and their families, and my own. When he breathed his last, we called in the Chaplain, who was wonderful with children. We talked about important things, and then all piled into one elevator. Just before it closed, one of Kelly’s sons let out the biggest belch ever heard, and everybody started laughing like crazy. Couldn’t stop. It was the type of laugh that released years of tension and sorrow.
A woman was running to catch our elevator, but when she got there and saw these crazy laughing people, she decided to take the next elevator.
We filed into the lobby, laughing, crying, hugging and talking about logistics. Logistics ground us at a time like this. The elevator opened again, and out came the woman we saw before. She came over to my Mom and my brother Jim and asked this question: “Has there been a birth?”
They answered at the same time: “Yes, there has been a birth.”
We are born. We walk together. We suffer, laugh, die, and we are given a new birth into what Christian call the resurrection and the life everlasting. God is with us the whole time. Thanks be to God!
And that is the good news of the Gospel.
–The Rev. Rebecca W. Dolch, United Methodist Minister Church in Upper New York Conference, Ithaca, New York
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