Advertisement
Holy Week resources and reflections

A visit with Mary

My 92-year-old friend and I were visiting. She had terminal cancer, and the discussion turned to her final wishes.

Mary was a child psychologist by profession, a retired professor whose pioneering work with children at Minneapolis’ Children’s Hospital is a quiet legacy, a kind of permanent monument to her life and work.

Raised in a conservative Calvinist Christian tradition in Michigan, her soul long ago turned to other wells of a different sort of spirituality — the psalmist’s “still, small voice” listened for in the silence of a Friends (“Quakers”) Meeting; the naturalist spirituality of St. Francis of Assisi; and of American indigenous spiritualities that see the sacred in the cirrus clouds, the fluttering of a leaf, a chickadee at the bird feeder, or the circling of an eagle overhead.

When her husband died three years before, the family gathered privately to inter Doug’s ashes in a small opening in the woods.  The family marked the spot with four stones pointing North, East, South and West — the “four corners of the earth.” Early the next morning, the day of the public celebration of Doug’s life, one of their daughters walked out to the opening in the woods to be alone with the father she had loved. As she came upon the small opening in the woods, she stopped dead in her tracks. A bald eagle was sitting in the middle of the stones above the remains.

I asked Mary at the time what she made of that. After a long respectful pause, she said something to the effect that native peoples seem to be in touch with mysteries that elude the rest of us. “I don’t know,” she commented. Her statement struck me at the time because in our talks about death and dying, she had always indicated her sense that life is lived between the boundaries of birth and death. The bald eagle sitting on Doug’s spot in that small opening in the woods didn’t seem to change her view, yet, at the same time, she indicated a respectful agnosticism — a suspension of final knowing — about the universe and our place in it.

Now, three years after Doug’s death, we sit together over lunch. Her daughter Missy asks Mary whether she has told me her plans for her service when the end comes. There is a long pause as she goes away to some inner place, some wooded glen where no one else can go. The look in her eyes is distant, dream-like, sorting through her long spiritual journey to fetch the words out of the forest of 92 years of memory.

Finally … she speaks quietly.  “I want you to do the prayer and I want the benediction.” “What kind of prayer?” I ask. “Something classical with the gravitas of tradition?” “Yes,” she says. “Blessed are the peacemakers.” “And music, what about music?” “Oh,” she said, “Bach, Beethoven,” and she wanders off into that most personal space where no one else can go.

Ninety-two years of wisdom summed up in four words: “Blessed are the peacemakers,” from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, a distillation of spiritual journey from beginning to end.

She is growing weary now. It’s time for her afternoon nap. It’s time to go. We say good-bye. I leave this sacred place of Mary’s world, get behind the wheel, turn on the radio, listen to the news, and wish all the world’s leaders  could have lunch with Mary or take a walk into the wooded glen where the American bald eagle sat very still above Doug’s grave.

 

Gordon C. Stewart is honorably retired, living in Shoreview, Minn.

LATEST STORIES

Advertisement