Trumpeter

My father, Reverend Sherman W. “Trumpeter” Swan, died twelve years ago, July 9, 2018. I felt we hadn’t finished an important conversation we were having. When my niece called and told me the news I fell into a big emptiness.

I last saw you in March of that year at a rehab center in Sebring, Florida, where you were recovering from hip replacement surgery and dying of cancer.

You shouldn’t be out when it’s like this, you said.

When it’s like what?

It is very dangerous out there. I heard someone in the next room saying, maybe it was on TV, terrible things are happening outside.

No, I was outside and everything is normal. And I wanted to see you again before we leave.

You were in the hospital bed, passing in and out of consciousness and in and out of coherence. You didn’t know if you were hallucinating or dreaming. Your roommate told me that the morphine had this effect on you, talking out of your head like this, and fearful.

I thought your visions of tribulation were projections of some spiritual conflict you were undergoing as you approached death. Your confusions and delusions drew from your apocalyptic orientation. Tribulation in the last days. Heaven and Earth will pass away and Jesus will return and take the throne. Some of us may be taken up before then, in the Rapture.

I told you that the drugs they had given you were causing you to hallucinate and that these things you were talking about were creations of your nervous system and projections of your fears, like bad dreams.

How could I have helped you with your fear? How can I reassure you about death without lying but without you dying afraid of my unbelief. How can I believe what you want me to believe? How can I show you I love you?

I didn’t know what to say to you. What did you want me to believe? What did it mean or matter?  We prayed together and I gave you a back rub. I could do that.

My father and I would often talk about the Bible. We could talk from our shared love of scripture, if not always a shared experience or understanding. My way of reading scripture comes from literature and philosophy. You and Mom read scripture every day and prayed often and tried to live righteous biblical lives. 

God is love and we are to love God and to love one another and to love our neighbor and this is how you tried to live.

Both of you believed that holy scripture is absolutely true in every sense. What the Bible says happened really happened and what the Bible says will happen will really happen and now I am thinking about how to talk to you about what the Bible says about death and resurrection and what do I really think about that?

I thought you would die any moment and this was a holy time, so we prayed and I read scripture to you.

Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth, chapter 12:

I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows.  And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows— was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.

I tell you my opinion that the mystical experience Paul described was an altered state of consciousness. He is being taken up, in or out of the body, maybe a dream body, like in Tibetan dream yoga, a spirit body, taken up into the third heaven where he heard things he is unable to put into words, but he is transformed by whatever happened to him. I think Paul’s revolutionary mysticism began with an episode like this in which he believed he encountered the resurrected Jesus, called Messiah.

I read 2 Corinthians, chapter 15. I always read that at funerals, you said.

Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

My idea was that when Paul was caught up into Paradise he was “raptured” — he had an ecstatic experience — a state of unitive consciousness that eludes the nets of language and logic, into the Infinite, and beyond life and death.

Have you ever had such an experience? you asked.

Twelve years later, I still work on my reply.

elephant

Lori quoted Dr. Seuss sometimes:

“I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful one hundred percent.”

I can see her saying it and hear her.

This is a message from her.

She is stating that she tells the truth and the truth is that the virtue of faithfulness exists, that faithfulness can be found and is possible and is good.

I am not having a seance.

I am sitting in the dark and gazing into an electronic screen, not a crystal ball, and reading messages from my memory, not from The Other Side.

I don’t remember how many times Lori said the Seuss quote, but more than once, and I can’t recall what the context was, even once, but I know how she looked and how she sounded when she said it and I can see her saying it and hear her.

It is the kind of recollection that sneaks up on me and makes me cry.

This crying would happen in what I call seizures of grief. Grief seizures that belong to the shock of the loss and remind me of my loss and scare me. I read C.S. Lewis’ book about his grief and he said it is much like fear and I thought, no, grief IS fear, isn’t it?

We fear that which would make us grieve.

We fear the loss of our well being and the loss of what we treasure and we fear pain and the grief seizures are painful. What is called the grief process is a period of great pain that unsettles us with the loss of our world and with the reality of death as an Absolute condition of life and conclusion of life.

I recall Lori looking me in the eyes with her sincerity and saying it with her profound inner child:

“I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful one hundred percent.”

As if, How dare I even question her sincerity?

The faithfulness of the elephant is an Absolute.

Yeah, it made me cry, but the pain has changed, because the memory is a joy, and the message is true. The message that we loved, that love exists, love can be found and is good.

The message that the truth of our love is Absolute.

So of course I cry for the loss of love but — this is going to sound wrong — but, the Absoluteness of love maybe narcotizes the pain away — with joy?

Yesterday there was a sudden cloudburst that drenched the city in an instant. Did you get caught in that? — people asked for the rest of the day — or told a story about being caught in it — it was a super-soaker of a storm and I heard there was a rainbow. 

I am inside when that storm hits. I quickly shut the windows before too much water comes in and see how, despite the rain, bright it is outside. 

White midsummer sun shines through the clear curtains of water like through glass.

And I thought I could use that to describe what it’s now like when I cry.