Finding our Middle – 40 Days with Anna

Day 37 – Wednesday in Holy Week 

To Read:

Every minute of every day Anna lived, she totally accepted her life, and in accepting life, accepted death.  Death was a fairly frequent topic of conversation with Anna – never morbid or anxious, simply something that would happen at some time or other, and it was better to have some grasp of it before it happened than to wait until the moment of death and then get panicky about it.  For Anna, death was the gateway to possibilities.  It was Mum who provided Anna with the solution to the problem of death.  Like Anna, Mum had this lovely gift of asking questions that landed somewhere.

Being dead was nothing to get fussed about.  Dying could be a bit of a problem, but not if you had really lived.  Dying needed a certain amount of preparation and the only preparation for dying was real living, the kind of preparation old Granny Harding had made during her lifetime.  We had sat, Anna and I, holding Granny Harding’s hands when she died.  Granny Harding was glad to die;  not because life had been too hard for her, but because she had been glad to live.  She was glad that rest was near, not because she had been overworked but because she wanted to order, wanted to arrange, ninety-three years of beautiful living, she wanted to play it all over again.  “It’s like turning inside out, me dears”, she had said.  Granny Harding died smiling, died in the middle of a description of Epping Forest on an early summer’s morning.  She died happily because she had lived happily.  Old Granny went to church for the second time in her life.

To Reflect:

In all of the possible twists and turns of life as a vicar I never expected that one of the areas where I would develop an interest and a specialism would be that of thanatology – the study of the end of life.  But it seems that, quite by accident, I have become someone to whom people in the church and the Funeral Profession turn to for advice and, if they are lucky, some wisdom about what happens at the edges of life.  And from now on I’m going to refer them to these words from Anna, and Mum, and Granny Harding.

‘When he was finished making all the things, Mister God had undone all the muddle.  Then you can rest, so that’s why rest is the very, very biggest miracle of all.  Don’t you see?’

Somehow we (me, Society, ‘Civilised’ culture) seem to have lost the truth that death is a part of life.   If we are forever holding on to the busy-ness of life, wanting to control and conquer everything within our grasp, then we will never truly live.  We will be spending all of our life living muddly,  trying to force others, ourselves and even Mister God, into boxes which they do not belong in until we find ourselves in a box which we have been frightened of entering since we first knew who we were.

We have not learnt the words of Isaiah.  

For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel:
In returning and rest you shall be saved;
    in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.
But you refused.     (Isaiah 30v15)

We have refused to see that one of the reasons for life is for the rest that comes after the muddle of life.  

Granny Harding welcomed the rest; live had been lived, death would be welcomed.  Mum knew this and our beloved Anna, as we will read in the days ahead, knew this as well.

Why will we not see it?  Even when we do die, which we all surely will, we paper over the reality of what will come.  We use euphemisms to cover the inevitable; passed on, crossed over, gone to be with the stars….  We hide our dead, no longer seeing them die at home but in Hospitals and Residential Homes.  And when they die we seem not to want to gather to mark their deaths but instead have their bodies cremated unwitnessed and their remains delivered to us by the local parcel delivery service.   We seem incapable of uttering the ‘D’ word and are the poorer for it as we rob our beloved dead of their last words to us. 

Kevin Toolis in his wonderful book ‘My Father’s Wake’  (please try and find a copy to read) rightly rails against the ‘Western death machine’ which would never ever allow Granny Harding to meet the end of life, as did so many of her generation, in the same bed in which she was born.  

And we are the poorer for it…

 

Please Note:  These reflections are also published on my blog: suffolkvicarhomes.com on Bluesky as @suffolkvicar.bsky.social, and on my public Facebook page  Suffolk Vicar – Rev Andrew Dotchin.  If you would like them as a daily email please send a request to revdotchin@gmail.com

If you have enjoyed reading them please make a donation to The Clergy Support Trust who provided a  generous grant to help me find the space to compose them.