Keeping Up Appearances

Yesterday when I got dressed, I put on a tee shirt that was Dan’s. I pulled it from a pile of his clothes that our younger brother Bob had brought back when he and our sister had closed up his apartment. I’d been in Spain with my son Chris, and so Bob had done the work of the closest brother. Despite Dan’s penny-pinching, he’d bought darned good clothes, and so even after five years, the shirt is holding up, letting me put on his memory, letting me wear him on sunny, perfect days so he can feel the warmth of the sun, or on days when I’m not quite sure where I’m going, and I can, as so many times as adolescents together in the bigness of downtown Chicago, rest in his gift of always finding his way to get to our destination.

If Dan had not died, I’d have been able to call him yesterday on his birthday, his 65th, and wish him happy Medicare. I’d have been able to tell him that now he could maybe take better care of himself. But Maybe I’d actually need to say I’m sorry, that whatever kept me from getting from Detroit to St. Paul…but I’d told him I was sorry, and he’d brusquely shoved it away, didn’t want to hear it, got angry as he did when I ….

When someone dies, the distance between us becomes infinite and at the same time diminishes to zero. We can’t reach them physically, but somehow their memory becomes a part of our mentality, our thoughts changing forever like the center of gravity of a little boat changes when a second passenger gets in. Often, as with myself and my big brother, there can be a disturbance in our thinking, a guilt or regret that plays a flat note that turns the harmony of our memory to a minor chord, never quite resolves.

Again and again Jesus appeared to those with whom he had lived. And often, the first words that he would say would be “fear not”. Regardless of your belief, the stories that are told in Catholic Masses these days can be of interest to those of us who have lost someone suddenly, without resolution of regret or guilt. In today’s (click for a link) http://www.usccb.org/nab/readings/040910.shtml one reading describes the life of the friends left behind, and another describes one of these after-death appearances of Jesus, in which he worked to help them relax with his presence by feeding them fish and bread as he had done in brighter times. I smile as I think of this as comfort food.

Bob called yesterday, and I asked him what it had been like to be with Dan’s body, after they had re-started his heart but his brain stayed dead. He told me how he decided that Dan wanted him to leave him, so that Dan himself could let go of this useless body. As he was driving west across the river from Minnesota into Wisconsin, Bob took a wrong turn and ended up off the highway. He thought of how Dan always had this sense of direction, and relaxed into that Dan moment, and soon enough he had found his way back to the highway. Just as he mouthed the words “Way to go, Dan!” his cell phone rang and he got the news that Dan’s heart had finally stopped.

How do we find comfort with the unresolved memories of those who have died? As in life, this Jesus character seems to know in his appearances after his death what we need, what holds us back from freedom, from being our truest selves. He reaches back to a time when he knew we were comforted, calmed, when we let him give us the gift he had, when we let him help us find our way, when he would help us let go of the past and bring us to the present. Fear not. Let’s eat.


 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.