Two Women. Two Deaths. Two Cancers.
This past weekend I attended a family funeral.
Ann was my second cousin, had lived well into her 80s, dying of a particular type of thyroid cancer that is quite difficult to treat. The funeral itself became a sort of family reunion with people gathering that had not seen each other face-to-face in quite a few years. I walked alongside my also-octogenarian mother, saying “hello” and “it’s been too long” and “what are the children doing” and “where are you living again?”
Ann and her late husband, Jack, had been gospel musicians with Ann playing the piano and Jack crooning out “One Day at a Time”. And while Jack dressed in a blue leisure suit with a wide colorful collar, Ann remained beside him, dressed conservatively, a “proper Southern woman”.
Those eulogizing Ann on Sunday used phrases such as “a real steel magnolia” and “Proverbs 31 woman”. This was undoubtedly true. It is also true that what is typical of most Southern women is that they put on a brave face, even when there are challenges. Think about Scarlett O’Hara: “I’ll think about it tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day.”
Then on Tuesday, we received word that a dear member of our church had died, unexpectedly. The death was unexpected even though Anya had been undergoing treatment for metastatic inflammatory breast cancer on and off for years. Anya was not Southern, but had made her home here in Middle Georgia as a teacher at a local college. She taught as she also wrote honest poems about cancer, about death, about the place of God in the midst of suffering.
Her funeral will be on Saturday.
My own emotions have been conflicted in that this first death reminds me of my own father’s death, again of two rare types of cancer after a long illness. It reminds me of the age and health of my own mother. There are fewer of these aunts and uncles, older cousins, forebearers. They are leaving.
There is the ache of slow, plodding, inevitable loss.
And then there is the leaving of this one who is a contemporary, who leaves a husband and son. The son is my own son’s age.
This one brings an anger, a confusion, the questions of “why”.
With my own spirit, I approach both of these. We cannot avoid. We cannot wait for tomorrow. Death is here. Death is real. The pain of it is real.
And while I see the value of the “stiff upper lip” of the older generation, there are times when that feels avoidant to me, where the “hope of heaven” ignores the hard reality of the present. We cannot be so focused on this other world that we ignore the hurting in this world.
One thing that I admired about our friend is that she was a deeply faithful soul and was also willing to be angry, to be furious as her friends would die, willing to loudly curse to the cancer that was taking them.
As for me, this is where I end up too. I have always had much more of a Good Friday sort of Christianity, the sort of faith that stares directly into the pain, acknowledges death, that sometimes screams “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
I know that there is Easter, that there is resurrection, that the emergence of life out of death is a part of the faith too. But in this moment, I can only acknowledge the pain of death. There is a “one day at a time” quality to that. And perhaps that is why I can still hear Ann playing that song, with Jack bellowing out “sweet Jesus”. And Anya shouting at Death as it took her too.
