life, death, and unclehood

Note:  This is a chapter from the book that I am trying to write.  It’s just a rough draft.  Any feedback is welcome.  Oh yeah, and, this is all copyrighted and stuff.

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           It’s not that I’m a perfectionist, but I really hate it when I mess stuff up.  I’m an above-mediocre musician.  I’m not great, maybe not even “average.”  I mean, average is somewhat tough to define.  But, I’m better than a lot of the guys you hear at your local bar or coffeehouse. 

            It’s weird.  I expect to mess up.  And, I’ve messed up so many times when playing in front of people; I have no fear of making mistakes.  And, most of them really don’t even faze me. 

            But, when things go wrong, I get really mad at myself.  Especially when I think that I could have prevented it with a little bit of preparation.  The truth is, I know better.  I also know that most people are a lot more forgiving than I am.  I mean, I don’t hold people I hear to the standard that I hold myself to.  But, perhaps my “perfectionism” makes me a better musician.

 

            I bring it up, because there was this one particular performance that was going horribly wrong.  I mean, I was playing everything right, and I was even hitting the right notes.  But, there was this one string out of tune. 

 

            Most of the room probably didn’t notice it.  In fact, it may not have even been all that badly out of tune.  But to me, the flat note was so loud it was deafening.  And, it was distracting.  When a performance goes this badly, I get really nervous and start to sweat.  But, I’m not sure if that was the case this time.

 

            And, the truth is, if there ever was a time that I didn’t need a distraction like this, it was this performance.  The truth is, I was already exhausted and had a lot on my mind.  Plus, my whole family was there.  I was emotionally a mess.

 

            This particular performance was at my grandfather’s funeral.  And, I think it was fitting that I was playing at his funeral.  I’m not sure that he would have liked the particular song that I was playing, but I didn’t even pick it out.  My dad picked it, and I was doing it for him and my family as much as anything.

 

            I have yet to ever perform a funeral, and being a campus minister, there is a good chance that I never will be asked to.  I’ve talked to other ministers who have never performed one either, and most say that they would have a hard time doing one, especially for someone that they were close to. 

 

            I’ve always disagreed with this.  I think I would have an easier time getting up and speaking rather than just sitting there listening.  For me, it would be a form of sublimation, where I could channel that energy from my wound up emotional state.  And, playing at my grandfather’s funeral was kind of like that for me.

 

            I think he would have wanted it that way.  Early on, when I first started playing guitar, I would always take my acoustic with me at family gatherings, be it Thanksgiving or Christmas.  Part of that was simply the fact that I would take it on just about any trip that I went on.

 

            But, at some point, the guitar became extra luggage to me, so I quit bringing it everywhere, including family gatherings. But, each time we got together, my grandfather would ask me if I had it with me, and I would have to tell him no.  He would always tell me that I should have brought it, since “the kids,” meaning my younger cousins and second cousins, like it when I played.  But, none of them ever seemed to say anything about it to me.  It wasn’t until it was too late that I realized that it was actually him who liked it when I played.

 

            I wish it had occurred to me sooner.  It’s become one of my life’s regrets that I didn’t take my guitar with me on the holiday’s every year.  Sure, it’s not one of those regrets of not attempting to mend a strained relationship, but it is more akin to not saying “I love you” enough times. 

 

            Fortunately for me, I did say “I love you” to him every time I would leave his house after a visit.  And, those were the last words I ever spoke to him.  But, the thing about my grandfather and me is that the generation gap was quite pronounced with us.  It’s not so much that there was any tension and friction because of it.  In fact, we got along quite well, and we were even close. 

 

            But, the thing was, we didn’t have a lot in common.  We had a few common interests, such as politics and religion, but we had very different views on them.  Ironically, he was a conservative Democrat, and I a liberal Republican.  And, he never once heard me preach, and honestly, I don’t think he would have liked my preaching style, based on some comments he had made about various preacher similar to my style.

 

            One thing we did have in common was music.  Of course, we had very different musical tastes.  But, there is a good chance that I inherited my musical abilities from him.  He gave me my only harmonica lesson years before I actually began to play harmonica. 

 

            It was an area that bridged the generation gap.  But, lacking wisdom at my younger age, I just didn’t pick up on this.  But, it was fitting that I did get to play for him one last time. 

 

            But, that darn string seemed so out of tune to me.  And as I said, I just didn’t need another distraction. 

 

 

            It had been quite an ordeal even getting to this point.  I was at the grocery store the previous Sunday evening buying some drinks for a movie night I was having with some friends.  My phone rang, and it was my Dad.  I knew it was an update about my grandfather.  He had been diagnosed with cancer a few weeks prior, and my Dad would call every Sunday night after he got home from visiting him over the weekend to give me an update.

 

            Of course, it turned out that this would be the final update.  Papaw had passed away.

 

            I decided not to deal with it just yet.  I did mention it to my friends in the van as we drove to the house where we were going to watch the movie.  I decided that this would be a good distraction, a chance for the news to sink in before I started dealing with the logistics of my now wrecked week and the emotion of a lost loved one.

 

            And, the logistics were going to be tricky.  I had to figure out how I was going to travel the 200 miles without a car.  I had to make arrangements at work.  And, I had 24 hours to finish a test for an online class I was taking.

 

            I went to work at 10 am that Monday, not sure what the funeral arrangements were going to be.  But, I talked to my boss, and he said whatever time I needed I could have.  So, that’s one detail.  But, it wasn’t until I got off work at 7 pm that I learned of the arrangements. 

 

            I found that visitation was Tuesday afternoon, and the funeral Wednesday.  So, I find that I have very little time to do everything else.  So, I get home around 8, and book a greyhound ticket that would get me within about 70 miles.  It left Cincinnati at 4 am.  Fun stuff.  Next, I had to cancel all of my plans for the week, and call and leave a message for my boss. 

 

            So now, it’s 9 pm, and I have to start on my test.  That took me until close to midnight to complete (which was the time it had to be emailed in).  It was recommended that I show up at least 2 hours early to the bus station.  I decided to just stay up until time to leave, and maybe try and get some sleep on the bus. And, I did manage about 45 minutes.  Due to a layover, I reached my destination at 8 am.   My mom picked me up and drove me the rest of the way. 

 

            So, long story short, I’m exhausted by this time.  And, with the whole family coming in and out, I found it difficult to sleep when I got there.  Every time I would start to doze off, someone would interrupt me.  They meant well, and it was good to see them.  But, I was a wreck, and was starting to get quite annoyed.

 

            Then, just before noon, I was interrupted again.  On the verge of snapping, I look up, and my brother had just arrived.  He just walked in without saying a word, and dropped a baby in my lap, and walked out.

 

            The baby was his son, my nephew.  He was ten months old.  And, all of the sudden, I was neither tired nor annoyed.  It was like a second wind.

 

            Life is truly a miracle.  One of the things I like about the ending of the movie “Saved” is after Mary has her baby, she is just in awe of the miracle that she just participated in.  She notes that it is simply impossible that our existence is not random.

 

            Life is a miracle, and babies are our constant reminder of that.  I think, in part, that is the reason we have such a fascination with them.

 

            Ten months earlier, I was sitting in Hebrew class, and my phone began to vibrate.  It was a call that I was expecting.  Thanks to the marvels of modern medicine, we have the technology to plan when a child is born (although nearly two years later, my niece proved that we can’t always pull that off when she decided to be born about 5 days early).  So, when my phone began to vibrate, even though I was unable to answer, I knew that I was an uncle for the first time in my life.

 

            When I got home that night, there were some pictures in my email box.  It’s weird.  I sat there just staring at these pictures for the longest time.  This kid captured my heart in a way that no other kid ever had.  But, I had never even met him.  In fact, I had never been in the same state as him. 

 

            Still, I was totally taken in by him.  I showed his picture to my friends and coworkers.  I put him up on my blog and my facebook profile.  I was as excited as I had ever been.

 

            Finally, two weeks later, I got to meet him for the first time.  As I held him for the first time, I just sat there and stared.  And all he did was sleep.  And it was the most amazing thing I had ever experienced.

 

            Love really doesn’t make sense a lot of the time.  And perhaps that is what is so intoxicating about it.  I mean, people do stupid things over what they believe is love.  And the real thing doesn’t make much more sense.

 

            Twenty-two months later, as my niece was about to be born, there was no chance I wasn’t going to be there for that.  Again, thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, her birth was scheduled conveniently two weeks before I was to move to Iowa, but inconveniently during what would be my last week of work.  Luckily, I had hoarded my vacation time, and made it all work out.

 

            But, as I mentioned earlier, my niece decided to mess up all of our plans.  So, I received word at around 6 pm on a Thursday night that my sister-in-law was in labor.  So, by 7pm, I was all set to embark on a 5 hour journey to see my new niece.  Somewhere in the six hours that it took between my getting the word and my arrival at the hospital, she was born.  So, not too long after I got there, I got to hold her for the first time.  She was only a couple of hours old, literally the youngest person I had ever met. 

 

            Life is a miracle, and a beautiful one at that.  I think that’s why we are so fascinated by babies, but I also think that is why death is such a painful thing for us.  It’s as though a miracle is lost. 

 

            And so, it was quite the paradoxical moment, sitting in the bed dealing with the pain of death while holding the miracle of life in my lap.  Here was a kid who couldn’t empathize with my pain or offer any words of advice or sympathy.  And yet, he was the person who, more than anyone else in the world who helped easy my pain at this time.

 

            At this point, I had given up all hope of getting any rest before visitation, so after playing with Jaxen for a while, I passed him off to someone else (I mean, I didn’t want to be one of those dreaded baby hogs).  But, I now had a problem.  I was asked to sing “I Can Only Imagine” at the funeral the next day.  I was glad to do so, but, as with every other family gathering over the previous years, I had failed to bring my guitar with me.  A couple of my cousins who lived in the same town owned guitars, but they told me that they were not playable.  I didn’t know how to proceed.

 

            But, it didn’t matter, because the family visitation was coming up in a short time, so it was time to get ready for that.  I suppose that it speaks to how fortunate I had been in the previous 29 years of my life (I turned 30 just a few weeks after the funeral) that I had no idea what a “family visitation” was or that such a thing even existed.  But, I learned that the family is allowed in an hour or so before visitation is open to the public.

 

            Family visitation was one of those definitive moments in my life.  I can picture bits and pieces of it in my mind.  I can barely remember any of the words spoken or the sounds.  What I will always remember is the emotion of the moment.  I don’t know if I would call it “tragically beautiful” or “beautifully tragic” but I think both words are apt. 

 

            There is something paradoxical about a family grieving together.  It’s a hard and painful thing to go through.  And yet, there is something about going through it together that teaches you lessons about love and family that you wouldn’t learn otherwise.  The moment the funeral director opened the casket was perhaps the single most difficult moment of my life emotionally.  And seeing the tears of my family made it even more difficult.  And yet the hugs and the pats on the shoulder were some of the most loving moments that I have ever experienced.

 

            One of the great ironies of life is that the highs and lows often happen simultaneously.  And I’m not really one who thinks that things balancing out is the reason for that.  Really, it’s more that we aren’t really able to comprehend one extreme without the other.  You can never experience healing unless you are hurt. 

 

            However, once you add an emotional high, a lack of sleep, and a couple of hours of sitting in a funeral home, you experience a kind of crankiness that not even the most amazing of nephews can cure.  Plus, I still had to sing tomorrow, and I had nothing for accompaniment, and I had yet to even practice.

 

            Amazingly, I found a karaoke track at Wal-mart.   And, one of my cousins offered to let me into his church so I could practice.  As I got into it, I found the key on the track to be just a bit too high. So, panic set in again.  Desperate, I decided to try it on piano. 

 

            I took nine months of piano lessons, which oddly enough is more than I took for guitar, bass, or harmonica.  Yet, I consider myself to be competent at the instruments that I had not learned, but I was not all that competent at piano.  Still, I gave it a shot, and though I didn’t feel great about it, I felt that it was at least passable, and given my exhaustion, I was ready to get some sleep.

 

            I stayed with my cousin who let me into the church.  When we got there, I found that his brother had gone and bought a guitar that night.  So, that was all taken care of.  On top of that, instead of making me crash on the couch, my cousin offered me his room, and in one of the great ironies, the bed I was sleeping on that night was one that I actually owned (it’s a long story).

 

            The next morning, yet another cousin let me into the church where the funeral was to take place (it seems that my family has a lot of keys to a lot of churches).  Being a newly purchased guitar, there is no telling how old the strings were, or what kind of condition they were in.  And, predictably, I was having trouble getting it into tune. 

 

            This was a problem.  The funeral home was about 30 minutes from the church.  So, I would have to tune, leave for a couple of hours, come back, and play.  Plus, I was a casket bearer, so I wouldn’t have any chance at all to come early and tune. 

 

            And so, throughout the visitation and procession, this was what I was most worried about.  At least I had been able to get about 10 hours of sleep.  But, I was a bit of a mess throughout this.  And looking back, it seems odd that I would worry about that kind of thing, given the circumstance.  But, it’s amazing the extent to which life goes on even in the face of big tragedies. 

 

            In a strange way, I should have found some comfort in the fact that I was worried about the condition of my guitar strings on my way to my grandfather’s funeral.  In a time where I didn’t realize something else could matter, something else did matter.  Sure, it was trivial.  But I think too often we fail to grasp just how complex we really are.  In a time of an overwhelming emotional event, we are still able to feel countless different emotions to countless different stimuli all at the same time.

 

            Yet we feel that this is a wrong response.  Somehow, we think that it is wrong to feel anything but grief at a time like that.  We cheapen our very experience when we do this.

 

            We fall into this trap a lot.  We don’t understand that we can both love someone and hate them at the same time.  Sure, it’s a bit of a paradox, but the thing is, love and hate are not opposite emotions, they are simply separate emotions.  We are capable of love and hate, grief and joy, and worry about the mundane all at the same time.  It’s when we lose that capacity to feel multiple and contradictory emotions that we are truly in trouble.

 

            And so, finally, the funeral starts, and I’m playing.  And after all I had been through over the previous days, my fears are confirmed to be accurate and my guitar is in fact out of tune.  Interestingly, like everything else over the previous couple of days, this was another paradoxical moment, not so much at the time, but in looking back at it.

 

            To me, this was the most important musical performance in my entire life, even bigger than when my high school choir performed at Carnegie Hall.  It was my moment of sublimation during the funeral.  It was supposed to be a blessing to my family.  It was the last time I got to play for my grandfather. 

 

            But, it went all wrong.  If this was the biggest performance of my life, then this was my biggest failure in my life.  Perhaps that is in reality a bit of hyperbole.  But still, it just felt like an opportunity wasted.

 

            And yet, my family was still blessed by it.  See, that’s the thing about family.  Fail all you want, and they still come through for you.  And in every way I may think that I failed my grandfather, the reality is, I know he didn’t see it that way.  The fact is, bad string or not, I had indeed given the greatest performance of my life.

 

            That was lasting memory number two from this week.  Number three came at the end of the funeral.  Due to the way we were seated, all of the male grandchildren were the first to leave.  However, we were all of the casket bearers, so we had to stand with the casket as everyone walked by to say their final goodbye.  Literally everyone. Starting with friends, and ending with the family, we had to watch the people that we loved the most say goodbye to their great-grandfather/grandfather/father/husband. 

 

            One of my cousins had made a card for our grandfather during Sunday school the day he died.  He never got a chance to give it to him, so it was placed in the casket with my grandfather.  And, as I walked to the back of the room, I lost it.  And then, standing there with my cousins, watching aunts, uncles, and cousins pass by was a lot to take.

 

            The last two people were my dad and my grandmother.  I have yet to mention her in all of this.  They were just over a month away from their 55^th wedding anniversary when he died.  Obviously, she was the one we all felt the most sympathy for.  But she was so strong through all of this.

 

            And, the final lasting image of this week is one involving her.  The following morning, my dad, my brother, my sister in law, me, and my nephew were the last ones remaining at my grandmother’s house.  While we all of the adults were running around packing up our stuff to leave, my grandmother was sitting out in front of the house with m nephew. 

 

            As I saw that, there was something in that image that comforted me, gave me hope.  My oldest living relative with my youngest.  A woman who had lost her husband being comforted by a baby who could neither empathize with her nor offer her words of encouragement of comfort.  All he could do was be him.  A reminder of the true miracle that life is, mixed in the pain of the loss of another miracle.

    It was the most beautiful paradox I had ever seen.