#SOL17: On Getting Into the "Christian" Heaven (or Not)

Calvary (M.A. Reilly, 2013, South Dakota)

"History," Stephen said, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken." James Joyce, Ulysses 

I. 

I was walking down the street in a town where I do not live when I was stopped by a sign in a shop window. 

Only Born Again, Evangelical Christians will know salvation. 

No one else will enter Heaven.

What first caught my eye was the word, heaven, and I slowed thinking about Rob, who is dead nearly a year, and wondering what happens after death. I am only beginning to emerge from the shock of my husband's too-soon-death and am attracted to possible answers I do not have. And so I read the whole message and then thought about my husband who was kind and generous to others.

He was also Jewish.  So, no heaven for him?

II.

Evangelical Pastor Billy Graham would tell you that my husband is presently in hell.

He tells his faithful, "The hope of eternal life rests solely and exclusively upon your faith in Jesus Christ! Make no mistake about this...When Christians die, they go straight into the presence of Christ—to Heaven—to spend eternity with God. An unsaved sinner’s destiny is separation from God, a place that Jesus has called hell." (from here).

Honestly, given this rhetoric, this sense of singular entitlement, is it any wonder that hate crimes against Muslims and Jews are soaring?  

III. 

In the 2016 U.S. election, 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump. Further in a recent poll, "[m]ore than any other religious group, a strong majority of white evangelical Protestants hold a positive view of President Donald Trump...They are also the only religious group to to favor the temporary ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries" (from here). 

Is that the christian evangelical way?

Refuse entry to the dying children of Syria (unless they happen to be Christians)?

Turn one's back as families are split apart?  

IV.. 

History teaches us that it is at best, worrisome, when organized religion and politics intermingle. In more extreme situations when God's voice is heard by only a select group--mass murder is often served alongside the "saved" who murder or remain mute. One only has to think of Ludwig Müller, the man Hitler appointed Bishop to the German Evangelical Church in 1933 to understand how 'good' Christians can do evil things and do so with righteousness that defies the foundations world religions are based upon. 

Müller believed in Christ the Aryan and supported the "purification" of Christianity and the instruction of youth to pray to Jesus and Hitler. It was ordinary people, like those who prayed each Sunday in German Evangelical churches, who gave rise to the Third Reich. Those Protestant pastors who publicly objected were sent off to concentration camps. 

Love thy neighbor was written out of the Aryan bible. 

V.

For the last thirty years, here in the United States, a moral majority--the Christian right, has been flexing its muscles. Are these, like the German Evangelical Church, God's only chosen group?  Is there no Christ in this brand of christianity?

According to Graham, evangelicals who are born again don't need to be good.  They only need to confess their sins to God. 

Graham says,

“There is no judgment, no Hell, for those who are in Christ...You can confess your sins, turn your back on your sins and receive Jesus Christ as your Savior now." (from here).

No judgment for earthly sins? 

Nope.

None.

Friends, this is how evil gets normalized.

#SOL17: Partial Answers

Tappan Zee Bridge (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

I.

Beyond the restaurant's windows, the Hudson River flows and the light falling is nothing less than perfect. It is an unusually warm afternoon given that it is still winter, and Jane and I sit at a table for two. I listen as she explains she has learned to be satisfied with partial answers, to be satisfied with the answers she has. These are important words, ones so critical that I ask her to repeat them and even now, I feel certain that I have forgotten the arrangement of sounds and syllables.

It has been the longest year.

II.

Awhile later we are outside walking by the river and we past a man, one who seems to be about the age Rob was when he died and this man asks quite boisterously if we are having a good day.  He says this as he exhales smoke and I think how is it my husband who did not smoke is dead a year from lung cancer and this man who smokes is not?

The hardest thing to learn after the death is that there are no comforting answers to the question, Why Rob? Why him? Why?

#SOL17: Distances

A road in Tuscany, Rob and I walked (2013)

One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by  perceiving the relationships in it... Barry Lopez, Crossing Open Ground

I.

It is nearly a year after Rob's death. It is nearly a year and I struggle to accept how someone who lived so wide awake is no more. His was an animated life--no standing on the sidelines for my husband. He laughed often and told stories continuously--lapsing into any number of voices while doing so and gesturing with his hands.

He was a full-body storyteller who was often the center of a gathering. His was a gregarious life. Rob loved people, and derived energy by being among others. And now all that liveliness is gone.

Gone.


II.

And though I have more memories than minutes, I still feel an absence as if the Law of Conservation of Energy was wrong. I too have read the first law of thermodynamics and understand (somewhat) that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but rather is transformed. Isn't that what Whitman was all about at the end of "Song of Myself?" Look for me under your boot heels, he told us. But that knowledge offers the widow cool comfort.

It is the large, yawning space that has opened this last year between my husband's animated life and his death, that is so hard to cross, so hard to give a name to that sticks.

A million times I have turned to say something to him these last twelve months. A million times I have turned and remembered he is no longer here.

#SOL17: A Thin Place

March 8th will arrive--and with it, the one year anniversary of Rob's death. This evening I wondered if the distance between earth and heaven might be more permeable on such a day.

I come from Ireland and though I don't practice Celtic spirituality, I did grow up hearing stories about the afterlife and the spaces between here and there. It's a thin place when the boundaries between earth and heaven become more transparent. In such a space we can better sense the divine--commune with those who have gone before us. The Celts call these spaces, CAOL ÁIT.

As a teenager, I was fascinated by the closing lines of Whitman's Song of Myself.  I would walk about reciting these lines in my mind--almost as if they were a mantra.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. 

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood. 

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

I wonder where Rob has stopped, who he now is, and what he means. He told me heaven was a parallel universe and I should sense him in the darkened sky.

"Leave breadcrumbs," I whispered as he was dying. "Leave breadcrumbs and when it is my time, I'll follow."

#SOL17: Late Day Light

Linens (2016)

It's mostly about the light--the way the late-day light falls through the back windows of our home.

Hopper light.

And seeing it today brought me back to those years when I tried to explain Hopper light to Rob as we sat on the porch of an old Maine inn. Or that time we sat for hours opposite of Nighthawks at the Art Institute and later braved the cold, cold wind to eat the best Barley soup at Russian Tea Time.

Late Day Light (Reilly, 2010, South Dakota)

Or that time we found ourselves in the Badlands and I looked at where he was pointing and lifted my camera to capture the way light drifts there and then settles. It's always been about the light with Rob since I first saw him sitting in the afternoon class where we met.

Mostly, it's the light today that tugs at my heart, that has me thinking about the man I lost and how that lost feels like a too-big hole.

During Rob's last weeks of life--when he finally came home after so many days lost in hospitals in order to spend his last days with Dev and me, the feel of sunlight amazed him. He would tell our friend Michael and me that it had been so long since he had felt the light.

And the light a year ago was so much like this afternoon. A bit warm. Beautifully thin and so perfect, I could not lower the blinds. I watched as it lit the table and chair as it did the linens on the hospital bed where Rob slept a year ago.

#SOL17: Something About Love

A collage I made while Rob underwent spinal surgery. (1.8.16)

I. 

One of the last things I did with Rob while he was in the hospital was to paint. By then he had been moved to palliative care and the doctors needed to take him off of high flow oxygen in order for him to come home. His last request was to be able to come home to die. After spending 50 consecutive days in the hospital, he would come home two days later.  But on that Monday morning, Rob was very worried about coming off of the high flow oxygen, because he feared he would become oxygen-deprived. No matter how much assurance the medical staff gave, he still was concerned. He needed to be off the machine as it could not be used in non-medical settings. On the day after Valentine's day the doctors removed the machine and oxygen delivered through a nasal cannula.

The nurse checked in on him and said she could get him a sedative since he was so nervous. After she left I remembered that a few weeks earlier I had put together a small art kit for him to use. I asked him if he wanted to do some painting, and he brightened, and said, yes. I took out the kit and he selected some water color pencils, brushes, and one of his notebooks and he painted. When the nurse checked in again, she saw what was happening and quietly left us alone.

Rob painting while in Palliative Care. (2.15.16)

We each painted for about an hour and during that time Rob could see that he was getting enough oxygen and began to relax. He completed the painting he titled, Freedom Sunrise.

Freedom Sunrise (Rob's painting, 2.15.16)

Art I made using Rob's words and images.

I have thought often about the title to the work and cannot remember if I asked him about it that day. I have forgotten so much. What I do remember is that later I would promise Rob that I would create art using his words and images and I did so a few weeks after he died.


II.

Play has a way of helping us redirect energies and on that day while Rob calmed himself by getting lost in the paintings he was making, I took solace in watching Rob paint and the slight respite from the many tensions and worries that had become more the norm by mid February. 

We were so us that morning. Just Rob and Mary Ann together in what we were each making--there on the page and also there in the room. We were wonderfully quiet that morning. 

Love is so often about what gets made with others.


III. 

When I think about our marriage, I think of the Greeks. In an interview with Krista Tippet, contemporary philosopher, Alain de Botton says,

The Ancient Greeks had a view of love which was essentially based around education, that what love means — love is a benevolent process whereby two people try to teach each other how to become the best versions of themselves (from here). 

We did try to occasion in one another better versions of self and learned how to do this fairly well by the time Rob retired from public school teaching and we became work partners. I cherish those two years we worked side-by-side. Partners at home and at work. What a gift. 


IV. 

Love requires trust of other and self. It requires being wrong and saying so. It draws energy from humor and playfulness, and almost always--humility. Our relationship was as flawed as it was passionate, and across nearly three decades we took time to learn the many faces of being vulnerable. But early on, we were slow leaners, especially me. I am reminded how years ago when I was angry at Rob for something I no longer can remember, I had broken two Waterford wine glasses on the dining room table. I was starting on a third, when he asked me if I wanted him to put on a dress so I could talk more directly to my mother. It was a sobering moment and one that stays with me. We agreed later that night that we would have a safe word that when said meant the other was acting crazy. We promised to only say this word at such times. We practiced this until we no longer needed it. The break in the drama that these pauses allowed afforded us the time to name what hurt so much--what hurt so greatly that the only safe person in the world we could show such pain to was one another. 

None of marriage is particularly easy and even less so when we became parents. But trust did emerge and take hold. Trust bloomed full. 

Rob saw me though the deaths of both of my parents, as I did for him when his dad died. Love saw us comfort each other when we learned that the infant we expected to adopt in a matter of weeks was deemed no longer adoptable. His development revealed developed catastrophic disabilities and his life expectancy was reduced to mere months. The agency would not allow us to adopt him.  This was a time of grief and we clung to one another. Love showered us with joy when two months later we opened our hearts again and this time we became parents to Devon. 

It is these habits of love that helped us to become more courageous when feeling pain and joy, sorrow, and ambiguity. It is these habits of love that allowed us to remain committed to one another, to our marriage, and of course--to our son. About ten years ago at the wedding of two friends, the groom surprised us and made a toast, saying that he learned what a good marriage is by watching us. We worked hard.


V.

Since Rob died, I think about our marriage. Now and then I recall a time when my better self was off on holiday. It's painful to recall these times. I wish I could have been better, kinder, and certainly--more patient. I wish now that I could have been the better wife, the better lover, the better partner. There are moments when I recall something spiteful or careless that I said to Rob--and I want to erase those moments and be able to say that I never caused him a moment of uncertainty or pain or sorrow. But I know that I did all three and did so more than once.  

But what I learned with my husband is that love requires no penance. It is more grace than forgiveness, more steady hand than flux. Rob did not need more from me than what I gave him and the truth is that what we each gave was more than enough. 

All those years ago on a snowy and cold December morning in the front parlor of Dave's home in Vermont when we each uttered that first pledge of love what we did not know, could not know then was that we were saying that in spite of and perhaps--because we were each so flawed, we would love one another without excuses. We would love the flawed person we were. And we did.  Accepting self and other as imperfect was the very first step in composing better versions of ourselves. 

#SOL17: The Constancy & Curiosities of Love

Last Valentine's Day with Rob in the Palliative Care Center

I.

Today,  I am thinking of you who I don't know.

I see you waiting beside a bed--the lamp light casting a partial shadow on papers you have long forgotten you hold. Or perhaps it's your hand I see reaching to pick up a phone and silence the ringer. Noise shatters the near silence you have come to know. Or perhaps it is you who let winter's coldness in through the doors that still revolve as you rush beyond them into the well lit foyer of a hospital you know too well.

After the death, you may well wonder, how is it that you have found yourself here? Here where the shoreline fails to meet the edge of earth. Here where nothing is sure. Here where the widening space grows too big for your slight body to bridge. Here where machine sounds and the drone of 10,000 bees are impossibly loud. Here where you have forgotten the cadence of your own name.

This is what it means to know an ending, to accept the mortal limitations of self and the one you love.
You will not save him.
You will not save her.
You simply cannot do so.

And now, your life depends on knowing this.
Feelings will come later.


II.

If only 
If only I.
If only I could.

If.

During the last month of life, Rob struggled to breathe and I struggled to save him.
Is there anything as loud as the constant hum and drone of a machine pushing oxygen into lungs that will fail?
And they did.

I kept wanting to save him thinking, This. This is what I was born to do. 
I couldn't.
I didn't.

His life was never mine to save.


III.

After his death, it was a sound like distant bees buzzing that I recall. A long, dark tunnel raised up from the sea like Jonah in the belly of the whale and I knew the comfort and pain of dark interiors.

There were narcotics to be bagged for the police. Liquids drugs to be washed down the kitchen drain. The funeral home to call for transport and clothes gathered and bagged. Everyone seemed to have a job in the aftermath but Dev and me.

I had been so very busy for months.


IV.

Still. So still.

My son sat next to the hospital bed and held his dead father's hand between the two of his. I gathered the adult diapers, the incontinence pads, the medical gowns, the yellow tubes of hydrophilic wound dressing, the too-many-to-count bottles of bedside-care foam body wash, the never-used contour bed pan--all of the things my Rob would have hated and dumped all of it into the garbage. I watched until my son released his father's hand. That was my job, one I promised Rob I would always do.

Watch over Dev, he told me an hour after we learned he had just weeks to live.
Watch over our son. Love him for me. 

To keenly watch is a language of love--one Rob taught me. I have been practicing this way of noticing for the last 30 years.

Later when it was time to sleep I took my phone as I had for the previous 6 months of nights and placed it next to the bed.

The phone did not ring.
There would be no calls from Rob ever again.


V.

I couldn't quite drown the buzzing, not for weeks.
Someone later would tell me, nothing will be the same, and this is the one truth I know a year later.

Nothing is the same.
Nothing.
And some days I am the better for it.
Some days, not.


VI.

After the death,  it's the existential loneliness that most seems to cause distress. My marriage, like yours, shielded me from the truth that we are all alone.

Now loneliness seems sharper, more acute, in the absence of the man I loved and do love.

VII.

A year has past, folded itself and disappeared, like smoke, like ash.

A year later and I know like I know my own name that how I loved Rob in the years we had together and how he loved me mattered more than any charade of life saving I might have dreamed, surely desired.

We were so flawed in our love for one another.
So beautifully flawed.

And that slim truth--that our expressions of love were flawed, is what I hold closest to me these days.


VIII.

Dear friend I do not know.
Dear friend who now enters this club of widows and widowers--a club you, nor I,  hardly wanted to join--the buzzing will clear.
Clarity will return.
Sadness will be redefined as too-sharp moments.

And there will be whole days of joy.

I repeat. There will be whole days of joy.

And beneath that joy--your one precious life will bloom in ways you could not name today. And I hope this blooming brings with it a measure of peace, and something unexpected.


IX.

A friend sent me two words when I was losing Rob, when I was watching him die.

She wrote, Stay curious.

I have. And staying curious has made the most difference.