A Rooster’s Crow

A little while ago I got off the phone with my sister, and much of our conversation today involved reminiscences of our mother, the magical Mary Martha. It is not infrequent that we invoke her name, or a story about her, or one of her many aphorisms that regale our family, but today is different. Today is two years since my father called us and told us she had slipped away.

Elizabeth said to me, “The day she died was such a sunny day—there were so many rainy days that month, and she left us on the most beautiful day of all—and on her own terms.”(I wrote about my mother in depth on a November 27th blog entry in case you want to go back in the blog archives and read it.)

At her funeral, several people made a point of telling me, “She was such a fighter.”
I appreciated their sentiment, of course, but I have never really liked that imagery of warfare when people discuss disease. “He lost his battle with cancer,” is an oft-heard phrase when someone dies after enduring a disease such as cancer. For our family my mother’s MS forced us to live in the meantime, and we rarely dabbled in that imagery of warfare when speaking of MS. As I think about it, my mother never construed her multiple sclerosis as an enemy. I try not to judge others who thoughtfully do choose it, for whom “fighting” may be a helpful stance and attitude. On the other hand, I’m critical of the media when, without genuine thought or analysis, it routinely declares in its death notices that so-and-so died after a long battle with cancer. Why does it have to be a battle? Why must it be that the person lost that battle? Are folks with cancer good fighters if they win? Bad fighters, failing falling foot soldiers, if they lose? Can they be heroic only in triumph? It is never an issue of defeat or victory—we are, all of us, going to die. Why not use the imagery that acknowledges how one experiences living, or experiences dying?

As my father composed the death notice for the newspaper he included the words, “Mary Martha was a 49 ½ year survivor with MS.” I thought about his choice of words. He chose the word, ‘survivor,’ yes, but more remarkable to me is that he insisted that it read ’49 ½ .’ If you know how newspapers work, you know they charge for every iota of type, and it ain’t cheap. My father, a man who wears the label ‘frugal’ with great pride, paid for that important ‘1/2.’ He didn’t have to—but as he wrote about his dear Mary Martha, he wanted her to have every bit of credit coming to her: she had incurred this disease as a young woman, and had survived for 49 ½ years. Every moment was a miracle. Whatever that cost, it meant something for my father to convey that.

Suffering a physical sickness is to experience the effects of breakage in the body’s significant relationships. Our family understands that well. But one of the multitudinous things we learned from our Mary Martha is that sickness is not an enemy. Indeed, as we witnessed through her, sickness is a rooster’s crow, calling us to the truth about ourselves, and to the precise condition of our relationships—God, family, society, nature. In a perverse way the MS accomplished a number of blessed things for our family: over the years we realized that the MS provided us with those coveted Our Town moments—the opportunity to reconcile ourselves before time ran out.

That concept of warfare has become for our society so common a means to comprehend so many things: war on poverty, war on terror; we battle for ratings, for grades. We fight, with huge war chests, for victory in elections. Fightin’ words everywhere we look…more and more of our experiences are bounded by battlefields. We haven’t grown much, have we?

Our family grew, had to grow, to accommodate the MS in our midst. While attention spans seem to get shorter and shorter all the while (umm…whatever happened to thoughtful letters? Brief emails suffice; lengthy phone conversations have become instant messages and texts; politicians respond to complex issues with 10-second sound bites. Hmmm…) Mary Martha taught us to patiently look for what is both hidden and present. She loved the bible story about the faith of the mustard seed, that teeeeeeny seed that requires time. As the MS consumed more of her time, she never abdicated that faith. In fact, that faith offered her more clarity and sustained her.

In March, 2006, in what would be my last visit with her, one afternoon she and I looked back together on earlier days spent at the American Baptist Assembly in Green Lake, Wisconsin. We went there every summer until I was in my high school years, and my mother loved the rigorous bible study and provocative challenges in trying to tackle world missions projects. Her speech was not very strong during that rainy March visit, but I reminded her of a study she had enjoyed one summer, maybe back in 1978. It was a simple psalm, and a deceptively simple commandment: Be still, and know that I am God. I reminded her of the minister who led this, and how he led a 60-minute bible study on those few words of the psalmist. Years and years after that study had come and gone, we talked, just mother and son, about those powerful words, and the challenge in those words. How often she and I have not been still! We are talkers, without a doubt, but what a profound challenge to be still—the activeness of that quieting command, and then the profound leap of faith to know God.

Mary Martha had an ability to understand that even after 49 ½ years with MS, she was not beyond the reach of God’s love. In fact, perhaps because of it, she knew even more matter-of-factly the reach and dimension of that summit.

This afternoon I went to visit my friend Randa in the administration building for a little bit. Randa and I are the same age, and almost three weeks ago her mother passed away here in Amman. We sat, this afternoon, 10-month old friends, holding hands and remembering the reach of a mother’s love.

It has occurred to me on more than one occasion of the timing of those events two years ago. It would be just a few months later that word of an exciting new school in Jordan would cross my radar screen. I have wondered if my mother had been alive if I would have given that opportunity more than a passing glance: I had always thought that it would be wrong to leave the United States and be so far away from my mother. Of course, she would have loved to hear all about what I have seen and heard and done these last 10 months. She would have had the biggest smile of all.

Maybe my loss that day was just the rooster’s crow I needed.