Two Men and a Woman Show Up In Heaven...

…It’s no joke.

I heard the voice of Jesus say come unto me and rest

Lay down thy weary one lay down, thy head upon my breast

I came to Jesus as I was, weary and worn and sad

I found in him a resting place and he has made me glad.

Weary.  That’s the only word that came to me in this church song going through my head as I lie awake this early morning considering yesterday’s cohort at the pearly gates.  Yesterday morning I got an e-mail that had been sent to everyone at the university.  Kathy Bush had died.  When I went to Goodwill Inn to prepare to serve dinner to my homeless friends, I found out about Josh.  And late last night we got the call about Teddy. 

I thought of a “cohort”.  Blame the esoteric word (funny – esoteric means something understood by only a few insiders, an “inner circle”) on Kathy Bush’s work at UDM, where we would study the progress of groups of students who came in at the same time, tracking their progress toward graduation.  These students who came in together and shared the process were called “cohorts”.  I wanted to shake the technical word from my head as I began to write this blog about three hearts lost to us, two of them suddenly.  But then I looked it up and found that it was very good. 

Cohort comes from the Latin hortus meaning “Garden”; like the more common word horticulture.  So a cohort can be seen as people who are in a garden together.  Since I don’t know what heaven is I’ll accept this verdant vision, and tell you about these three neophyte gardeners.

Kathy Bush was, like me, a lifer at UDM.  She was one of those people who could walk a mile a minute to get from one task to another, but smile at you and look you in the eye and greet you as you passed and make you feel refreshed.  Maybe it was the smile, her own unique recipe of warmth and wit that reminded you of some joke she once told, and at the same time some kindness that she performed, each done with equal efficiency and then left to walk on its own as she went briskly on to the next thing.  But there was this way of hers, that change in her face when you were in trouble, or afraid, or maybe just lost a friend. Her cheerful/busy/wise guy face would soften into one of the world’s greatest nonverbal “poor baby’s” ever known.  She was all empathy, all eyes and ears.  She also had a B.S-O-Meter with batteries that never ran out, especially with students who mistook that poor baby face for gullibility, and tried to take her for a ride.  There in her office next to her semi-cluttered desk was a prie-dieu, better known as a “kneeler”, one of those things you see in a church in front of a statue and a bank of candles.  Kathy called it her “appealer kneeler”, for the use of students who choose to get on their knees instead of just getting off their butts, which is what she was really after.  This diminutive white woman was vexed by no one, including the non-diminutive, not-white, non-woman gifts to God called Basketball recruits who considered themselves above it all.   B.S. is B.S., and in Kathy’s office, when it came to appealer kneelers, one size fits all.

About a year ago, the word went out that Kathy had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, seen generally as a death sentence.  This happened at about the same time as I had been told that my heart had a dangerous and potentially fatal flaw, a bulge that could burst.  I had become acquainted with the idea of early death, prepared for it, accepted it in a way, even as I explored with my doctors how to evade it.  My prognosis became better and better with time, but in the calm early acceptance of it, I had called Kathy at home.  Newly diagnosed, between tests and the start of chemotherapy, she wanted me to know she was OK with the whole thing, that she saw her life as very good, though likely shorter than she had anticipated.  She considered herself very lucky to have spent her life at the university, and to have been taken as a patient at Detroit’s Karmanos Cancer Institute, where she’d have the best possible chance of getting through it.  Her only burden, she said, was the sadness her mother would go through.  “I’m not a mother” she said, “but I know that no mother should have to watch a child go through this.”  She closed our long-distance phone conversation as she did her history classes and her meeting presentations and discussions in her office.  She summarized.  “I’m fine with this, John. I want everybody to know that.”  My subsequent calls in the following months did not get through to Kathy, and I admit feeling some relief, able then to cling to that image of Kathy Bush, the fine with this Kathy Bush, feeling lucky, working the plan, no regrets, thankful for her life so well spent in such good company.

If I were St. Peter, I’d set her up with an office up there, maybe even an appealer kneeler.  Josh and Teddy are promising recruits that need some work.  They’re both tall; both have shaved heads and charisma, or what you might call “presence”.  They’re hard to ignore.  But they’re hard for me to know, too, looking at me with one-way eyes that seem impossible to penetrate.  So they end up as characters in the lives of some of us who shared their circle, characters who never seemed to come out of role, and we never got to find their dressing rooms, where we might see them as they really were.  Maybe even they didn’t know who they were, or never came to like who looked back at them from their make-up mirrors.  Josh took his life, just weeks after moving from the shelter into a place of his own.  Teddy’s heart stopped what he couldn’t, the endless uphill climb of a life that seemed never to level off.  It stopped while he was helping one of the many friends that were drawn to him, as so many were drawn to Josh. 

I don’t know what heaven is, but I see these two guys, two big guys with shaved heads.  They’re sitting on this stone garden bench, each of them regaling the other with stories of goofy things they did, concerts they went to, bosses that really sucked.  They’re waiting their turn with the new Intake Specialist, K. Bush, with that funny kneeler-thing next to her desk there among the phlox just coming into bloom.  Watch out, boys.   She’s tougher than her size might suggest.

But the curtains draw to a close on my celestial imagining, and my heart wilts for these three newly to heaven, arriving so weary, worn and sad.   And I rely completely on the God that is with them where I can’t see.  I rely completely on his breast, on the rest that they will, all three, find there in the garden of His love, there in His inner circle, inhabited not by the most noble, but the most weary.  May all of us here – Kathy’s mom, Josh’s friends, Teddy’s family – feel that same comfort.

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