When It’s Time to Say Goodbye

Maybe it’s just that time of life: Death has tapped me on the shoulder three times in the past two weeks. Twice our family has driven at least eight hours over the course of a weekend to pay our respects, all the while talking about why a God who loves us would allow a horrible thing like Death to enter the world.

What I’ve come to realize is that dying is not the worst thing that can happen. Or should I say, “becoming dead.” Dying can actually be painful and scary as much for the loved ones looking on as for the one who is dying. Honestly, I don’t know how those without faith endure that particular experience.

Even with faith, the forceful separation can be hard to bear. As I stood by my uncle’s casket, hugging my godmother as we looked upon the man she had loved for 53 years, I thought about how she had spent her entire life making a home and caring for the needs of her family, including extended family. Now she was free: her children and grandchildren grown, her parents and his no longer needing her care, now her husband no longer needed her. Yet she didn’t look free. She looked lost. Later, at her home, she called me into a room where medical supplies lined the wall, floor to ceiling. “These were his medical supplies for this month. They are coming for them tomorrow.” She looked at the boxes and shook her head. He no longer needed them …. but oh, how she needed him.

A few weeks ago I drove to Chicago to attend the funeral of a friend’s mother. She had been a devout Christian, as were her children (including my friend). Her children spoke of the reality of purgatory, and how what we experience here can be a kind of anteroom to this purifying process. Right now I’m reading Purgatory: and the means to avoid it, by Martin Jugie (Catholic Books, 1949), who explains that the fires of purgatory are in fact the purifying fire of perfect love:

…venial sins and vicious inclinations disappear on the threshold of Purgatory, with the engulfing of the whole soul in the virtue of charity — queen, mother, and nurse of all the virtues. For charity is the nuptial robe which instantly imparts its many-coloured glory to the spouse of Christ. No longer is there spot or wrinkle in her: all is perfectly ordered, pure, holy, immaculate. From the moment it gets free play in the soul, Charity destroys the least disorder, the least imperfection…. after death one cannot merit, one cannot make progress, one can no longer better oneself. The degree of charity to which the soul has reached at its last breath, is the eternal degree of its charity. It marks, as it were, the eternal temperature of our soul, its place in the hierarchy of supernatural values, its diapason in the chant which the elect sing around the throne of the Most Holy Trinity. (p.8)

A bit later, Fr. Jugie describes the three phases of purgatory: (1) the humiliation of seeing ourselves by the light of God. “On earth these poor souls drank sin like water: now they have a loathing for the sins they see scored up against them…” (p.10). (2) a second illumination, by which they see at a distance the true beauty of God, and they are overcome with longing “to the point of utter ravishment.” They remember how he pursued them, and they disregarded his approaches in favor of “a bauble, a mere nothing.” And so they suffer “a suffering which purifies and leads on to love.” And finally (3) they experience true contrition. And it is in this state of perfect contrition, clothed in the robes of pure charity (the light lost by Adam and Eve, leaving them naked in the Garden), by which they enter the wedding feast of the Lamb.

It is this thought, which CS Lewis touches upon briefly in his classic The Great Divorce, where he observes that for those who go “up the mountain” (enter into that Beatific Vision), every experience on earth becomes merely a preparation for that moment of bliss — and for those who embrace the Gray Town, and choose to remain there, every human experience up to that moment is a continuation of hell. I’m paraphrasing of course (probably badly), but I think these things are related. And for those of us who are witnessing the struggle of life and death, up close and on an intimate level, there is a kind of consolation here.

This weekend I stood beside our 12-year-old Aussie shepherd, Maddie, who had been seizing all weekend. Finally I took her to veterinary urgent care, and stroked her head and tried to calm her as the vet pushed the plunger on the needle. Her eyes never closed, but the crying mercifully ceased … and the vet hurried from the room as I burst into a torrent of sobs. I had not cried at the other two funerals … but at this I was undone. Craig was with the kids at home, and so I stood there alone and tried to feel relief that the pain she had been in was over. But inside there was a gaping hole. I straightened my shoulders and pushed the button so they could remove Maddie’s body and put it in an “angel bag” to take up to the cabin. Then I drove with her the five hours to East Jordan, to fulfill my son’s wish that she could be buried there. It was the least we could do. As the rest of the family drove up and met me there, I binge-watched the remake of Mad About You and found that the Buckmans were in a highly relatable state of life: daughter leaving home, friends remarried, dog replaced, both of them looking at each other and wondering, “What’s next?”

There will be more, and soon — my own parents, most likely. For the past three years I’ve done my best to care for my mother, and watch her painful and slow decline has not been easy. Yet I know love is never wasted. The virtue of Charity, in this life and the next, is intended to make us most truly the people we were meant to be all along. All the struggle. All the toil. All the suffering. It is a passing invitation to lay aside the “snares that so easily entangle us” and to recognize that we are being prepared for something infinitely better, both in our own suffering and in the suffering we witness and accompany. (At the risk of contradicting my seminary professors, I’d wager that even Maddie’s suffering is not without purpose, and that I can entrust her back into the hands of the Creator who made her, whose eye is on the sparrow and whose very nature is to preserve all that is good and true and beautiful.)

And in that knowledge, we can all rest in peace.