When death is OK and not OK

“It’s OK son, you can tell me.” Those words have haunted and comforted me for 22 years.

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Pastors are often the spiritual “first responders” called upon in times of tragedy. The victim of the car crash was just 16. Her only family was her 18 year-old brother who was now being asked to make the decision of whether to remove life support for his brain-dead sister. I was called because the hospital chaplain was unavailable. I remember little of what I said that day, only the pain and confusion of a young man faced with the unbearable.

I remember more of my conversation with a senior member of my congregation, though I wish I didn’t. His son had called me 20 minutes earlier to ask me to go to his father’s home and to be there when he called to tell his dad that his daughter had been shot and killed by her estranged husband. How long would it take me to get there? Ten minutes, I said. The next ten minutes was a most agonizing, casual conversation about trivial matters as I knowingly and he unknowingly awaited the call that would devastate his life.

The call from the new young father was filled with joy. His wife had just given birth. When I stopped by later that day to offer a blessing, the joy had been replaced with overwhelming grief. “We are so glad you came,” they said. “Our baby didn’t make it and they are preparing him for us to hold and say good-bye. Would you please stay to say a prayer?”

No death is easy to bear, but tragic deaths that come without warning are especially hard and raise some of the deepest questions on the meaning of life, the existence of God and fundamental questions of good and evil. My theological training helped me with some of those questions, experience helped even more, but neither was of much help when the tragedy struck home.

The call came shortly after 11 pm. “Dan, your cousin is in the news and they say he killed a woman in your Aunt’s home. Is Marie OK?”

“Francis, I can’t talk, I have to go.”

I drove my VW van as quickly as I could to my Aunt’s home as I spoke with the 911 operator on my newly purchased “bag phone”, the precursor to today’s mobile phones. The unidentified woman they found I told them was not my aunt. She was staying that night with her sister. The two sisters were teenagers when their ten year-old brother, Charlie, was accidentally shot and killed by a neighbor shooting at stray dogs. Their mother’s grief was so overwhelming that she could not function for some time. So the two sisters became surrogate moms of the twins, aged 5. My mother was one of the twins.

Mom’s bond to her sisters was as deep as it was long. For reasons none of us quite understood, she had a particular bond with Marie’s oldest son, Forest. As kids we just knew Forrie, as we called him, as our crazy cousin. We didn’t fully understand how sick he was until he got into a fight with a policeman, took his gun away from him and shot him, fortunately just in the leg. After his release from the psychiatric hospital many years later, he had nowhere to go and so came to live with his mother.

Mom got her Ph.D. in psychology later in life. She used her training to work with Forrie on many occasions. She felt she understood him and could connect with him when no one else could. And so it was just after Labor Day when Marie called in a panic because Forrie was acting more strange than usual, that Mom dropped everything and came down to Eugene. After spending a night in our home with her grandkids and the day working with Forrie, getting him back on his meds and witnessing the conflict between him and his mother, she sent her sister away so that she could work with her nephew without her sister’s interference. It was Mom, I told the operator, lying on the floor of my aunt’s home.

The Sheriff’s deputy met me at a road block down the street. How could I be so sure, he asked, that it was my mother? (Fortunately they would not allow me near the house.) They could not find any ID for the deceased. (We later found her purse in the dishwasher, whether put there by her for safety or Forrie for some odd reason we’ll never know.) My sister was the one who figured out how to make a positive ID. “Where is Wicket?” She asked. “Find Wicket and you will find mom.” Wicket was the Lhasa Apso mom adopted after my daughter was born. Mom said that she needed something to cuddle for her own. Wicket may have been cuddly as a puppy and clearly was devoted to Mom, just about anyone else, however, was “the enemy” in his bulgy eyes and not to be trusted. The stories of his fierce growling whenever Dad came to bed to find him next to Mom are legendary in the family.

“Did you find a yappy, little dog,” I finally asked the deputy. “Oh yes, that little bugger was fiercely guarding the body and we had to get animal control in to take him away before we could get close to her.” “His name is Wicket,” I said, “and we will want him back.” It was for love of Mom that Wicket spent the rest of his days at Elkhorn where we spread Mom’s ashes in the Little North Fork of the Santiam and where, sadly, my sister’s home has now been reduced to ash as well. (Fortunately our youngest sister has room in her home for the Bryant fire refugees, horses and all.)

From the Sheriff’s road block the time came to call Dad. He answered the phone and all I could choke out was an anguished, “Dad.” A career of the spoken word and in that moment I could not speak.

“It’s OK son, you can tell me.” There are some things in life one should never have to do. Holding your deceased baby, making the decision to turn off life support for your teenage sister, telling your father that his wife of 49 years has been murdered by your cousin. And yet, facing tragedy and overcoming it is part of what makes life so meaningful, even when that meaning is hard to bear or understand. With those words my father gave me the strength to tell him the unthinkable.

Dad’s strength was the dependable glue that always held our family together. One of my earliest memories was of Dad leaving our home in St. Helens each summer to harvest wheat in eastern Washington where he served his first church and where my two older siblings were born. I was the middle child, born in Salem. Two younger sisters, “little girls” we called them then, were added while Dad served the church in St. Helens and worked to finish his undergraduate degree in Eugene. His vacations were spent harvesting wheat each summer to augment the income from the church. How he did it all I will never know.

The summer after my first grade we loaded the family of seven in the Valiant station wagon pulling the sum total of our worldly possessions in a U-Haul trailer, and headed for Iowa where we would spend the next three years. Dad served two small congregations 14 miles apart, preaching in both each Sunday and spending Monday through Friday in Des Moines 75 miles away where he attended seminary. None of that of course would have been possible without the amazing abilities of my mother, who in addition to caring for her five children as an essentially single mom during the week, also worked as a traveling saleslady for McNally products and filled in for Dad as needed at the church.

Before all that we had to get there and that almost didn’t happen. Somewhere in the Great Plains the trailer had a flat. We pulled off to the side of the road as lightning flashed and ominous dark clouds approached bringing a wall of water. With no spare, the only option was to abandon the trailer and drive into the nearest town. The trailer’s weight on the hitch, however, was simply too much for Dad. Drenched from the rain and very frustrated, Dad got back in the car as we sat on the side of the road, watching the water slowly rise around us and waiting for the rescue that would never come. Unsure if the rain would ever stop or if the expanding lake around us would soon engulf us, Dad got out of the car one more time. The safety of his family was at stake. Somehow Dad found the strength to lift the trailer’s tongue. We returned the next day to our water-logged possessions and finished the journey, just in time to see our first tornado. With the help of those gregarious Iowan farmers we did more than survive it all to return to Oregon three years later.

Dad’s strength helped me once before in a time of tragedy. In the spring of my junior year in high school I befriended Mark Lauer, the son of our Associate Regional Minister. I was a secret admirer of Mark. I once got to listen to the broadcast of his high school football game with his father at a regional youth event. Mark was the quarterback. I wanted to play football but gave it up in 9th grade when it became painfully obvious that I didn’t have the physique to compete with my peers who saw me as nothing more than fodder for tackling drills. And by painful, I do not mean psychological. Incredibly handsome as well as athletic, Mark was living my dream, complete with the beauty queen from the senior prom.

Mark and I were elected to lead the Oregon youth of our denomination and were headed that summer for a youth conference in Kansas City. But on his way to his grandparent’s home on the McKenzie, a drunk driver forced his VW beetle off the road. The car landed on it’s top. Mark’s three friends crawled out, bruised but OK. Mark, however was pinned and his neck broken. Doctors said he would never walk again, but Mark didn’t get the chance to try. The damage done to his internal organs was more than doctors could repair.

The long conversations I had with Mark’s girlfriend late at night, sitting on the steps of the stairwell outside his room at Sacred Heart Hospital, were my first real attempts at trying to make sense of God and evil and why bad things happen to good people. After that week’s long vigil, I awoke at 6 a.m. on Wednesday morning. I had a final to take in my social studies class but my mind was in Eugene. When I arrived at the hospital at 7, I relieved Mark’s aunt from her place keeping watch overnight by Mark’s bed. An hour later a nurse came in and after checking Mark’s vitals, told me that I should get his parents. I returned with them a short while later and left to give them some private time with their son. When I returned to the room he had just given his last breath in this life. It was my first experience of death, up close and very personal.

Later that morning I came across a student at Northwest Christian College (now Bushnell University) next door to the hospital who asked me how Mark was doing. I told him that he had just died. The student, meaning well, said that an athlete like Mark wouldn’t want to live in a wheelchair and he would be better off now. This was God’s will. I am sure I replied with something polite, but my inner voice was screaming: NO! You think now is when God intervenes? Where was God when that drunk came driving down the highway in the wrong direction?! Already then, before I had any formal theological or biblical training, I knew such a notion of God was illogical and certainly contrary to anything I believed.

That afternoon I showed up late for my final. My teacher, knowing what I was going through, was ever so gracious. I just needed to watch a film and write down any reactions. It was two reels. After the first, the teacher kindly asked if I was able to follow the film. No, I said, not really. That’s OK, he said, why don’t you go home and we’ll call it good. I wouldn’t call it good, I call it grace. I experienced more from that teacher than anyone’s theories about how God “calls” someone home when they had so much more life to live. That Mark was united now with God I could accept, that God willed it so I could not. Either that, or God is not a loving God.

Home is where I learned and experienced God’s love most of all. A few days after Mark’s death I was sitting at the church’s IBM Selectric typewriter, trying to find words for a column I was writing for the church’s youth newsletter. Dad’s office was next door. He came out and handed me a letter. It was to Dick and Doris, Mark’s parents. He spoke of his sorrow and offered his prayers and support. He said nice things about Mark and I suppose he might have quoted some comforting scripture. I don’t remember much from the letter except what he said about me. Through this terrible loss, he wrote, he was drawn closer to me, watching as I worked through this tragedy. He didn’t know he could love his children any more than he already did, and yet, his love for us had indeed grown.

After Dad’s death one friend wrote to us, “Wayne was such an eloquent speaker, and his sermons were very intellectual. But his greatest achievement was his love for his family and his commitment to them.” We have always known that love and in it, I have come to know God, the one who weeps with us in times of our greatest sorrows and laughs with us in our greatest joys, like my father.

My siblings didn’t get to attend my wedding and so they missed the inevitable moment for which we Bryant men are known — trying but failing miserably to hold in our emotions. Three ministers stood on the chancel in front of Judy and me: Martha, a good friend who was there in Berlin to see us fall in love; Howard, the minister of Judy’s home church not far from the home of our President-elect; and my father. Dad was reciting 1 Corinthians 13 from memory. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude…” At that point he looks up and there is this pregnant pause. Howard, standing next to him, quietly offers the next line. The emotion in Dad’s voice on the recording is pretty clear as he chokes out, “That’s not the problem!”  He did better reading that same passage at my daughter’s wedding 37 years later. I, on the other hand, losing it only once in the homily, kept the Bryant tradition alive. Something I may have done once or twice over the past 29 years preaching from the Eugene pulpit. (Would you believe once or twice a year? No? A month maybe?…)

Dad liked to say, “Two of my children became preachers. Fortunately the other three turned out alright.” My sister Katherine, the oldest of the five, is still preaching, currently doing an interim in Texas near her grandchildren. I often feared the day when I would have to preach after my father’s death. Doing so after Mom’s murder was incredibly difficult. Dad was always my role model. What success if any I had as a minister was inspired largely by him.

One of my greatest privileges was to serve next to him for several years on the board of Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon and eventually following him as President of the Board. In that role with a handful of other faith leaders from EMO we met with the Governor to ask him to stop a pending execution. (He did not then, but did issue the capital punishment moratorium later that is still in effect.) We were standing at the first tee of the Springridge golf course when Dad told me that the head of the National Council of Churches told EMO that they should hire him as their interim director, which they did. During that time we worked together to support the successful struggle of farmworkers to have their union recognized by growers, among other good works. Another privilege was sharing our pulpits and attending church conferences together.

The greatest privilege, however, was to preside with my sister at Dad’s wedding on New Year’s Day, 2000. Did I choke up at some point, pronouncing Dad and Dorothy as husband and wife? Perhaps. All I can remember now are all the wonderful memories of these past twenty years and Dad’s good fortune to be so happily married once again. As my fifth grade daughter said when we announced the news, “Yay! I get a grandmother again!” Indeed, the last 20 years has been a blessing for all in the family.

Dad’s death was difficult for us, but fortunately swift and peaceful. At 90 his health had been a bit up and down. A stroke earlier this year scared all of us, but his recovery was looking good and we were able to celebrate his 90th birthday together. The pandemic made it a family event rather than the large affair such as we had for his 80th. It was a delightful time together nevertheless, an appropriate last meal as it were in our family tradition of a crab boil on Labor Day weekend, though delayed due to the fires and the loss of my sister’s home at Elkhorn where we normally gather.

We spent one last day and night together in the hospital. Dad was in a coma after hitting his head in a bad fall, but it still gave us the chance to tell him once again how much we loved him, and for that I am thankful. This is how death should be if it must be at all, after a good, long life of love and joy, grief and laughter, and hope for the future. (Yes it is true, on the night of Halloween there in ER, I told Dad that Biden won the election. I figured if he could hear me that he didn’t know how long he had been there and the good news might give him some encouragement. So if the election was rigged, maybe that explains it!)

I was on my way to the hospital earlier that evening when my sister called to say that he was stable in ER and looking good. It was late in the evening so I decided to turn around with the intent of returning in the morning. The second phone call 10 minutes later was much like the one I made that night to Dad about Mom. “It’s bad,” my sister cried. Swelling on the brain would be fatal if they did not intervene. Dad, however, had a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) that was very clear and intervention could leave him an invalid or worse. The decision was clear and unanimous among those who loved him most, though not easy. I turned around again, arriving a bit before midnight. Through the tears I kept hearing his voice, guiding me through that night on the drive and next to his bed. “It’s OK son, you can tell me.” And so it was on All Saints Day I said goodbye to my father and I told him one last time, “I love you, Dad.” I do not call it good as much as I call it grace. And it is OK.

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Photo: The Bryant family, Christmas 2004