We Baby Boomers tend to think about death a whole lot more than we did a few years ago. I am reminded of that in some recent communication with one of my older brothers to whom I am very close and who is in his final days.
For a little background: I left home at 16 in not-so-great a manner. I happened to leave from Myrtle Beach, S.C., with no money or any idea where I was going or what I was going to do. I had “borrowed” my cousin’s car (I have since been forgiven) but ditched it outside of Wilmington, in fear of being found.
After a few hours of hitchhiking, I somehow wound up in Raleigh. I thought my dad might have the cops looking for me, so I figured it was time to call my brother who is 11 years older than I am. He was always there, always one to calm me down, help me see the light and try to keep me on the straight and narrow (although that didn’t work so well!). I told him what had happened, where I was, approximately where I had ditched the car, and made him promise not to tell anybody my location but to let my folks know I was OK.
By day’s end, my brother had transformed my shabbily impulsive flight from one of sheer lunacy to something else entirely. He was then teaching political science at the University of Miami. He actually prepaid for me to get on a plane and come to where he and his family lived in Miami. The rest is history. I finished high school down there and lived with my brother and his family for extended periods a couple of different times. Needless to say, he remains one of my personal heroes.
And now, a little more than 50 years later, he resides in Jensen Beach, Fla. A cancer is metastasizing, and he is preparing himself for the end. After responding to a text from me with the complimentary comeback: “It’s ‘your’ words, my dearest brother, that are so inspirational to me. I take them to heart, and they help lead me in this last journey,” he texted a couple of paragraphs to my other brothers and me.
He called it “the easy way home.”
I presume that most people who are blessed to have Christ as the integral part of their dying process would agree with me that we are taking the easy way home.
All I have to do is glance at my crucifix to remember this. He actually went through pain that I’ll never have to experience, and He went through it twice. Just imagine His agony when the Father showed Him in the garden what He was to endure. What a teaching moment for us! Christ’s human nature pleaded to have this unbelievable pain removed. His love for me, however, by accepting this long and agonizing death, makes it easier for me to accept my “blessed discomforts” to show my love for Him.
I’ll never turn down prayers, and God knows I need them. Just imagine, brother, if I were facing this without my faith, without hope and without Christ’s love for me and mine for Him. So, when you pray for me, please add a prayer for those who do not know Him or even care to know Him. Pray that they will somehow learn to take “the easy way home.”
I have since visited and been by my brother’s bedside. I still can’t imagine him not being on the planet. I hope the notion of the Communion of Saints becomes even more real for me when he goes. I wrote a poem once that pictured the Communion of Saints not so much as a thick red theatre curtain separating all of us in the seats from those on stage, but rather a thin veil, perhaps of Irish lace, so that the closer I get, I can almost feel a loved one’s breath upon my face.
Engaging the Communion of Saints can make the way home easier for all of us. But I still can’t fathom consciousness in the afterlife. I just don’t know what it looks like, what it feels like, because I am so very tied to this earthly flesh. But as the end nears, I think my brother is beginning to witness bits of a different scene; he’s beginning to feel the warm waves of paradise. When we were alone together, I asked him if he was afraid, and without missing a beat, he said, “No, brother, I’m not.”
And I believe him … and that may have been one of the most important statements anyone has ever made to me.
The great Victorian writer George MacDonald said, “Beauty and sadness always go together.” Although I do understand that many people at death’s door do not have the physical capacity to engage a choice, my brother is fortunate enough to be able to choose to embrace the beauty, to surrender to God’s will in a way that surpasses my feeble attempts.
I constantly choose the hard way, the way of reason. The Irish poet W.B. Yeats said, “By reason we die hourly, by imagination we live.” It seems that if my brother’s imagination can take him to the garden of Gethsemane to hover over the suffering Christ, it can take him to a thousand other meaningful and helpful places.
Perhaps these sojourns of the heart and soul are the rewards of a life of faith, experienced even in the last moments.
My brother is beginning to understand things that might be revealed only on a deathbed. He is feeling something that those of us going about our daily routines in the workaday world do not feel. He is at peace. My hero approaches the end of his life by accepting and welcoming the strong but graceful arms of his God reaching down to carry him off. And as of right now, he actually finds it easy … the easy way home.
Fred Gallagher is an author and editor-in-chief with Gastonia-based Good Will Publishers Inc.