Forgive, and Be Forgiven

Unexpected deathbed meditations

I’ve sat down to write this letter to you today, Monday, not having had the chance to write and schedule it last week as is usually my rhythm. Last Tuesday afternoon, our family packed up to drive to Indiana to be with my aunt in her final days. After twelve years of dialysis and a host of other medical issues, she had finally elected for hospice care. She would die at home, and if God willed, we would be there.

There had been long silences between me and my aunt, this younger, only sister of my father, who died when I was eighteen. There were reasons for these silences, for this relationship that satisfied neither of us: fault, hurt, life’s extenuating circumstances. The previous week, before the call came about her decision to receive hospice, I thought of her at least twice–and did nothing to respond to what seems now like a clear prompting of the Spirit. I don’t like to admit this, of course, but it’s true I have felt unusually stretched in this season of life as I care for my mother with Alzheimer’s. This responsibility is not an excuse for not having cared more actively for this aunt married three times without children, though it is perhaps a little context for the failure to call and visit. Still, trust me when I say this: when you’re the one signing off for transport of the body, after death, you get a little clearer on what your “next of kin” responsibilities are and might have been.

I come to this letter today with complicated feelings. I have been journalling in my spare time since traveling on Tuesday, sitting vigil until Friday when my aunt passed peacefully, then working to clean out her apartment before leaving mid-afternoon on Saturday. This is what I do when I’m knotted up inside, nursing grief and guilt, hurt and pain. I talk to myself in the presence of God. I write. It’s the practice of the kind of prayer like we see in the Psalms, when people are trying to move from fear and anger to trust and forgiveness, to surrender and peace. When these journals are finally found and read by family members after my death, it’s going to be clear to them that I needed to say a lot of words to face life’s difficult tasks. I’m not ashamed of this but simply grateful that journalling has become a lifegiving, maybe even lifesaving practice.

Most of all, I am grateful that God is God, bending his ear with such eternal patience.

In my journal pages from this last week, which I look over now, I see that I’ve reported the address of the Airbnb, where we stayed the first couple of nights before Ryan and the kids drove home, none of us sure of what the remaining days would hold. When I moved into a hotel after they left, I wrote the name of that hotel, too. Each entry is dated, and it’s to say that in my journal, I’m locating myself in space and time, answering the first question God put to humanity in the garden. Where are you?

The answers are, at first, very material. I’m in South Bend, on N. Esther Street. I’m in South Bend, at the Inn at St. Mary’s. But this kind of factual reporting soon gives way to deeper heart realities: of the certainty I feel about our urgency in coming, about the deep sadness I feel about my own family’s history. This history includes the divorce of my paternal grandparents, which was precipitated by a violent episode that threatened my grandmother’s life. Story has it that my father jumped in the car and drove straight to Kentucky to help her pack her bags after his father had held a gun to her head.

In my aunt’s wedding album, which I find on Saturday, I see that my father is standing in for his father in the picture of the bride, groom, and parents. Robert Pollock was long gone by then, and the only time he reappeared, in our lives at least, was the day of my dad’s funeral, when he strode in and demanded to be included in the family’s private viewing. It was as strange to me then as it is now to think that all those years of absence had suddenly given way to urgency. But maybe that’s what my aunt thought of me when, after my own long silences, I showed up at her bedside three days before her death.

“You came,” she said, her eyes wide with gratitude and surprise.

I mused in my journal about the forgiveness made possible by a deathbed. At a deathbed, you are in the presence of frail humanity winding down like an old clock. What hurts can be held, what bitternesses rehearsed? Remember that you die, Benedict advised in his rule, which may be another way of saying: forgive.My aunt had her own confessions to make, and I received some of them as I sat beside her those three days. As I sensed the agitation of guilt and shame, I read aloud a prayer to her from Every Moment Holy, Volume II:“A Liturgy for Seeking Amendment & Reconciliation,” and thought how it might as easily be a nightfall prayer of examen as much as a deathbed prayer.

I would not leave this life

still saddled by bitterness,

nor would I leave being yet the

cause of unsettled hurt in another.

Under the tutelage of your Spirit then,

I would in this season take sober stock

of any unfinished business—any fruits

of my imperfect stewardships . . . (52).

To be human is to be complicated and contradicted. It’s to seek and spurn love. It’s to wound and be wounded, then to wonder why the world is so bruising. Forgiveness is the greatest reality of the Christian faith: that a multitude of wrongs can be covered, not with our imperfect love, but with the steadfast, eternal love of God demonstrated for the world in the giving of Jesus. Forgiveness is what makes possible God’s great acts of repair, and when we rehearse all the slights, we are cutting ourselves off from the streams of mercy that make fertile the lonely wildernesses of our lives.

Remember that you die, as Benedict says. Forgive.

I watched my aunt take her last breath on Friday, just after 7pm. I watched the clock of her heart wind down, then stop, and I was glad to be there. The next day, I wrote in my journal that I was grateful she was not alone, as she feared she would be. And it wasn’t just me who was there. There were people from her church, people from her building, and other gathered friends. Still, I was sad, knowing that the love she longed for was not entirely felt. “Isn’t this the human condition,” I mused in my journal, “to want from this world what it cannot give?”

Remember that you die, Benedict wrote. Which seems another way to say: forgive and be forgiven.