At the threshold

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 1, 2015

What is it like being at the end of one’s life? What do people think and write about? On this All Saints Day, we’ll say the names of loved ones we have lost.

Call To Worship

Our call to worship today is an adaptation of a poem by Birago Ismael Diop, a Senegalese veterinarian, diplomat, poet, and storyteller whose work revived interest in African folktales. He died in 1989, and many of you will recognize his words in the song “Breaths” by the African American women’s singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock.

Listen more often to things than to beings,
Listen more closely to things than to beings.
‘Tis the Ancestor’s breath when the fire’s voice is heard,
‘Tis the Ancestor’s breath in the voice of the waters.
Those who have died have never, never left.
The dead are not under the earth.
They are in the rustling trees, they are in the groaning woods,
They are in the crying grass, they are in the moaning rocks.
The dead are not under the earth.
Those who have died have never, never left.
The dead have a pact with the living.
They are in the woman’s breast, they are in the wailing child.
They are with us in our homes, they are with us in this crowd.
The dead have a pact with the living.
The dead are not under the earth.

Reading

A Parable of Immortality by Henry Van Dyke

This is a poem by Henry Van Dyke, an American author, statesman, Presbyterian clergyman, and professor of English literature at Princeton University until his death in 1933.

I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze
and starts for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength,
and I stand and watch until at last she hangs
like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says,
“There she goes!”

Gone where?

Gone from my sight … that is all.

She is just as large in mast and hull and spar
as she was when she left my side
and just as able to bear her load of living freight
to the place of destination.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment
when someone at my side says,
” There she goes! ”
there are other eyes watching her coming …
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout …

“Here she comes!”

Sermon

I was at the bedside of a man in my congregation. He was dying. “I don’t know how to do this,” he said. He had been a professor, a scientist. He’d been mean to his wife, mean to his grown kids, mean to the people in the congregation. I was surprised at the openness of this moment.

“I don’t either,” I said. “I’ve sat by a lot of people while they were dying. It looks like you just go farther and farther away, and your body shuts itself down. Maybe it’s like falling asleep. You’ve done that plenty of times, right?” He was fighting, kicking at death like he had kicked at life. One thing I’ve noticed over my thirty-five years of being a minister is that people seem to die the way they live. Some want to be no trouble, they slip away when no one’s looking. Some want to be surrounded by family and friends, some want to be sung to, read to. One man who was well loved in the congregation died in the hospital, and his nurse that night happened also to be a member, and his wife was there. She held one hand, Greg, the nurse, held the other, and I held onto his feet as he breathed his last.

My mother died at home. She’d been sick for five years, and she’d asked to come home to die. We made a pallet by the couch where she lay. I slept there that night. Sometimes when she’d called out, I’d said “I’m here.” Once, she said, “Just a second, I’ll be right there,” as if she had a long way to come back to where we were watching with her. One gardener said he just hoped he wouldn’t outlast his legs. When his legs went, he was ready to go. He was 92, and he said he’d thought he would like to get to 95, but now that he was looking at it from a wheelchair, he didn’t care to get there so much any more. My great-grandfather, the preacher who had been at his church fifty-four years, who retired when he was 80 by saying, after the sermon, “no one should preach past their 80th birthday, so today I retire.” As the buzz in the congregation died down, he asked Brother Matthew to pray, and while everyone’s head was bowed for the prayer, he walked down the aisle of the church and out the front door. That was his last day of work. When he lay dying, his family kept watch on the porch. Through the open windows they heard him saying “Isaiah, I’m James Hearst Pressly, from Statesville, North Carolina. I’m pleased to meet you. Jeremiah, James Hearst Pressly, Statesville, North Carolina. Pleased to meet you.” Then he died.

The end of life is a threshold time, meaning that it is a time when things come up for review, when changes are made more easily. Families can reconcile or break apart. Often, emotionally wrenching decisions have been made. Atul Gawande, in his book “Being Mortal,” talks about people weighing treatment options. How much pain are you willing to endure to add two months more of life? Medicine can prolong technical life for so long – what measures do you want them to take? How do you decide? How much does being at home matter to you? Who do you want to talk to? Do you have any regrets you want to take care of, if you can?

Some people’s thoughts have been mostly of the people they were leaving behind. They worried about how they’d get along. Some people get right to the point of dying and they haven’t made any plans, any arrangements. Everyone’s been talking to them about “fighting,” and no one has just gone on and asked what they would like to have happen at the end. That’s sometimes the minister’s job. “What do you want for your memorial service?” You might ask. It’s good to give it some thought, that way you get to pick readings that say something about you, songs you like. No one who is crazed with grief has to figure all of that out.

I’m asking you to think about these things. Talk about them with your family before you get sick. Take care of your relationships so you won’t have any regrets that could have been fixed. Practice accepting help so you will be graceful to your caregivers, rather than surly. When you’re angry at having to be helped, your helpers have a double job of helping you and reassuring you, or helping you and enduring your surliness. What questions do you want to ask your medical team? How can you communicate to them what things are important to you? Think about that now. They will want to extend your life. What do you enjoy in your life? What do you want to hold on to? Write them down and stick them in your freezer, or email them to me. I have a file I’m keeping of people’s wants and wishes for their memorial services. I have a form you can fill out if you’d like, that I can send to you. Me, I want the song Skylark at the beginning of my service. It’s a sad song, and it’s going to be a sad time. At the end, “Blue Skies.” And I want people to cry. Dying is scary, but we are brave, and we can talk about it together.

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