ED
He taught modern dance, jazz, tap, and everything else except ballet, which was his wife’s domain. So it was he, free in the anteroom of their dance studio, who greeted me every week as I brought my daughter to her ballet lessons. He loved jokes, bad jokes, old Irish jokes, gags, all of them; and he told them as if he were on stage (which indeed he had once been).
One day it was raining, and he had a sign: “Free car wash” it said, then in parens below, “Top only.”
I used to try to remember his jokes, and I sure wished I could tell them as he did, with the pauses and the emphases just right. Instead, when I tell a joke, I get nervous, I don’t say things just right; and the difference between a funny line and one that falls dead is often just a half-second pause. Still, although a sort of lapsed Catholic, he respected me as a priest. He seemed to consider that we were in similar occupations, both involving a degree of showmanship; yet I sensed he knew that what went on in church was deeper.
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Until she went to college, my daughter took dancing lessons from his wife. The year after that my wife and I moved away, as I took another appointment. And a few years after that, not many, we got the word that he was dying of cancer.
There were emails from his wife. I wrote back with promises of prayer. And finally, we got to speak by phone. He had a joke to tell me. I told him how much I always loved his jokes. I think I said a thing or two about New York City, where we were then living. There was nothing serious in my talk; it was on the same light level it had always been.
And then he said, “Father, you know I’m dying.”
I did know, of course. But I had said nothing about it. Worse, I had said nothing to it, nothing about the meaning of coming to the end of life. I didn’t know what to say.
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There I was, a priest for two decades, talking by phone for what was likely to be the last time, and I didn’t know how to talk about death. I felt like a fraud. He and his wife had been very good to us, had been with us through Susan’s brain surgery and the years that followed, had often done special things for our daughter through that time. And at the end, I was flummoxed. I was too bashful, too shy, or just too reticent—unable to know what I believed, what I wanted to say, what was possible to say, to a friend on the other end of a phone conversation who had cancer and was coming to the end.
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Today I wish I could go back to that conversation. I’d like to say to Ed: You know you are going to meet God. You will see Jesus. There are things you can do in the meantime. Have you told your wife, your children, all your family that you love them? Is there anything you would like to say to any of them that you’ve found it hard to say? This is the time.
I’d like to tell him, Please pray for Susan and me.
And then maybe I’d say, When you see St. Peter, tell him a joke for me, can you?
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Out & About: I am to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas the next two Sundays, Aug. 10 and 17; the Eucharists are at 9 and 11:15 a.m.
The days are already getting noticeably shorter, and soon the Good Books & Good Talk seminars will resume. Our first discussion will be on Nicolas Diat’s lovely account of his visits to various French monasteries, A Time to Die. Monks preserve older understandings of caring for each other at the end of life—and of what happens at the moment of death and thereafter. I highly recommend this book to everyone, even if you cannot join the conversation on Sun., Sept. 14, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral.
The subsequent seminars will be Oct. 19 on Dr. Wortle’s School by Anthony Trollope, and Nov. 9 on Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot.