Wednesday, June 15, 2005
No More
I was more like a pastor to the Harley riders of the world, than the Type—A crowd. I can relate. I’m from that side of town. So was the man in my congregation who taught me how to say, “No more.”
My friend wheezed in the throttled pipes of his throat and rattled in his lungs as if he had a pebble in his hubcap.
And I’d go over and pull a chair up close to the hospital bed in the living room, which is always a strange sight. A bed of any kind doesn’t seem to belong in a living room.
But my trips to his house were like reuniting with my grandfather who passed away a few years ago. He was in his seventies. Old school. World War II tough. Faded tattoos covered his forearms. An eagle spread across his chest.
Under one of his nipples, was written the word, “sweet.” Under the other, was “sour.” I roared that night in the ER when I saw it as they were working on him. “Love it!” I’d said. And I did. I love reckless abandonment, any push away from being politically correct.
But those days were over for him. He’d turned his life around. He was more sweet than sour. He had a gentleness to him that drew me to his bedside. He was the Last John Wayne in this Town. In a real sense.
My friend wheezed in the throttled pipes of his throat and rattled in his lungs as if he had a pebble in his hubcap.
And I’d go over and pull a chair up close to the hospital bed in the living room, which is always a strange sight. A bed of any kind doesn’t seem to belong in a living room.
But my trips to his house were like reuniting with my grandfather who passed away a few years ago. He was in his seventies. Old school. World War II tough. Faded tattoos covered his forearms. An eagle spread across his chest.
Under one of his nipples, was written the word, “sweet.” Under the other, was “sour.” I roared that night in the ER when I saw it as they were working on him. “Love it!” I’d said. And I did. I love reckless abandonment, any push away from being politically correct.
But those days were over for him. He’d turned his life around. He was more sweet than sour. He had a gentleness to him that drew me to his bedside. He was the Last John Wayne in this Town. In a real sense.
●●●
My friend died on a weekday. It could have been a Tuesday or maybe it was a Friday. I can’t remember. But he motioned for a pen, as he grimaced in pain beneath an oxygen mask.
Then he wrote in a jittery scrawl, “No more.” Then he raised his hands as if someone had pulled a gun on him. He’d probably never surrendered to anything in his life. Not in the war. Not in the street. Not even to God until a few months ago.
He even waved bye at one point. He was exhausted, so weak, so caved-in, so hyped on oxygen that death was not coming.
Is there a set time, a set day, a certain place? Do we have an appointment with death?
I held the hand of my friend while he took his last breath. I watched his spirit go, and I’m none the wiser.
No special effects. Real time. Just a green thin line and an indifferent doctor who listened to my friend’s chest in-between sweet and sour, and then opened his eyes and shined a tiny flashlight inside the darkness of the retina.
He took three steps away from the bed, as if he was distancing himself from the emotions of death, and said, “I wish we could have done more.”
That was it. Life became the lone pipe of death in Van Gogh's chair. The lone pipe of him to remember, to write about, because I can tell you something happens in the moment of death.
Something leaves. Where it goes exactly, I have my beliefs. Sometimes I have my doubts. I am the man crying to Jesus, “I believe! Help me with my unbelief.”
Somehow I want to believe that his giving up that day was that final realization that he was safe in the everlasting arms of the Father. Maybe that was what he was saying when he wrote those two small words—“No more.”
Maybe when he raised his hands, as if surrendering, he was showing us that he'd seen the Father's arms, arms that may have been open and ready to receive him.
I don’t know what he was saying, if he was saying anything. Probably the most it proves is that he had a final realization that everything was going to be all right, that he could let go.
And I put those two words, “No more,” on a Post-it note and stuck it on my desk. It is here now. Just in front of me.
Hopefully, it will continue to remind me: No more struggling with the darkness. No more worry. No more fear or doubt about eternity. No more judging. No more living in the past. No more playing it safe. No more wishing I had someone else’s life. Just—no more.
If, like me, you don’t happen to be a saint yourself, then you know, like me, that it’s frightening to think about death. You know that there’s no way you can adequately explain the problem of pain and evil.
But I don’t know what else to do but keep moving, believing God has defeated death, because I don’t have the strength or the wits to defeat it myself.
I can only hope that God will come to my rescue. I can only keep breathing for my last breath. But who wants to take it?
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Something New. Read one of Robert's novels in progress. It's a sweet and tender love story that appeals to the romantic in all of us. Click the link: http://ablogofregrets.blogspot.com/
© 2007 by Robert Stofel