A year later, a candle, incense, an ancient prayer of mourning -- and hope

So, it's been a year since I received that call from the Cheney (Wash.) Care Center telling me my father, Robert Sr., had passed away.

On Friday, I woke up, showered, dressed and went to my icon corner. Lit candles, set incense aflame, and recited the morning prayers of the Orthodox Christian. Then, placing a portrait of Dad on the ledge under an icon of the Theotokos, I opened a booklet containing the Akathist for the Departed and began to repeat the ancient words.

For the 40 days following Dad's death on Jan. 17, 2019, this is the prayer I offered for his "repose." Though he was not Orthodox (Dad was a retired Pentecostal Evangelical pastor), I had the blessing of my parish priest to do this;  and I found in the prayer's ancient prose and, to me truth, comfort as the tears flowed then.

It was the same on Friday.

The emotions were sweeter, a year later. Oh, still grief, but with less emotional guilt baggage. Time does not heal all wounds, you see -- that's a well-intentioned lie we tell each other. But Time does lessen the pain of the scars of loss. . . and memories can flow of loving moments shared.

There were more tears of the former kind, than the latter. 

In six months, I'll be turning again to the Akathist prayer for Mom, who died six months after Dad, also at Cheney Care Center. Alzheimer's had robbed her of speech, memory and mobility long before she passed away. But there are also precious memories left to me of her better days, her loving moments.

Does it sound delusional to say I felt Dad's presence during Friday's prayers? OK, but I did, and he was like a sweet perfume born on the cloud of Light warming my heart. I glowed within as I breathed the words of devotion and petition repeated from the lips of millions of mourners, by ancestors in faith, over the past two millennia, in languages both current and lost.

I anticipate that comfort, and mystical assurance of faith, when I pray again for Mom's soul, and our future reunion.

"At Thy breath flowers come to life, the river Nile is resurrected and a multitude

 of tiny creatures awakens. 

"Thy glance is brighter than the spring sky; and Thy love, O Jesus, 

is warmer than the rays of the sun. 

Thou didst raise our mortal human flesh

 from the dust of the earth unto the blossoming of the eternal spring

 of incorruptible life.

 Do Thou then illumine also Thy servant Robert Sr. with the light of Thy mercy."

The Cruise: On countering a year of loss, with celebration of life

Death and loss had become an unwelcome companion in 2019. First my father, then three months later, my mother.

Never mind that for both -- one afflicted with severe arthritis and dementia at 96, the other with Alzheimer's and in a near vegetative status at 91 -- the end of life on this planet was a blessing.

It was still . . . death. It was emptiness, where once resided the breath of parents who had loved unconditionally for 66 of my years on Earth.

While I firmly believe we will be reunited in God's light and love, But until then,  I must live in the here and now. And now, they are gone.

So, having saved up for several years, Barbara and I booked a 10-day cruise along the Northeast Coast, from New York City to Boston, Portland and Bar Harbor, Maine, and Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, in Canada.

We chose to break the cycle of mourning with celebration of life, of seeing places and people we had never seen before.

New Jersey, New York and Boston were fascinating for all the usual reasons -- their mere size, density, skyscrapers, and historicity. And, they were confirmation that we would never want to live there . . . and underscored our appreciation for less crowded, more amiable and beautiful for raw outdoor variety of mountains, forests, rivers and deserts of the West.

I'm going to take my time recounting our cruise and excursions over the coming several blogs.

It is a time of life, and set of experiences, worth tasting in full.

Stay tuned.

A eulogy for a very good man

*This is the eulogy I gave at my father's graveside memorial on Friday in Spokane, Washington. -- BM


Growing up, one of the things the family of the Rev. Robert Mims did a lot of was pack
up and leave places. We moved from one neighborhood to another, from one state to another. 

 By the time I was 11 years old, I had been in 13 different schools.

In each move, something would get lost. Toys. Pictures. Maybe a dish, and on one move there was a loss than made my mother cry: during the move from Spokane to Wilbur, a tiny central Washington farming town with an even smaller church, my parents’ large framed wedding photo was lost.

In the past year, my son, Rob, and I moved Mom and Dad from Lilac Plaza Assisted Living to the Cheney Care Center as their health, and dementia, grew worse. Like all the moves before, this mean some things got donated to charities, others were put in storage, and a few treasured items were lovingly safeguard by family
 
At home in Utah, recently, I finally opened boxes I’d brought back. There were Dad’s collection of several worn Bibles, his notes in the margins of passages of scriptures he’d used in sermons. A pressed flower in the pages of one Bible, and in others, handwritten notes and reminders of events and people long since passed.

Then, in a box Mom had treasured, there was a bundle of letters. Love letters, it turned out, from Dad, written while he was traveling as a banjo-playing evangelist throughout the post-WWII Pacific Northwest. They were handwritten pages filled with endearments, dreams and love for the future they would soon begin as a married couple.

Memories. Memories Mom and Dad lost, temporarily I believe, as their worlds shrank both physically and mentally over these past couple years.

As I have prayed about their situation, seeking wisdom for each decision came about their care and well-being, I wondered what happens to those memories, when we … forget.

“Nothing is lost in Me,” was the thought impressed on my mind. Love is not lost, nor are our loved ones. The ripples of blessing we start with each act of compassion are eternal; so are those comforting touches or embraces we give or receive, the wisdom we gain and share, and certainly the faith we live  and sacrifice for.

Mom and Dad didn’t need that wedding photo, as treasured as it was, to remind them of their love, nor their bond as man and wife, father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, and co-workers for the Kingdom of God.

You don’t need “stuff” to keep those good things of past. We will always have our yesterdays, even when we forget them in this earthly life.

I know this: even if our memories fade with the weakness of age and loss of cognitive function, on that Last Day, Our Lord will restore those memories to perfection – and that will be a perfection that is no longer distorted by the false concepts of past, present and future we wrestle with now.

In the eternal, uncreated light of our Lord, we will have a God’s eye view. Nothing of love is lost. Nothing committed to Christ is ever gone.

So, I know where Dad is today. And, I believe he knows all about us, here, as we honor his earthly years, and we ourselves glimpse Eternity. I pray for him, and he is praying for us.

And Dad today knows as tangible truth what we believe by faith here: The perfect, infinite love of God includes, sustains and restores His children, as the prayer goes, “both now and ever and unto ages of ages.”

In our sentimental memories -- those photos, videos, letters, old Bibles, the contents of cedar chests and dusty boxes -- we have our yesterdays. But in Christ, we also have our tomorrows.

A winter of discontent, a spring of hope and new life

When my wife, children, aunts and uncles and cousins gather Friday in Spokane, Washington to remember and bury my father, lilacs and other spring flowers should be in early bloom under a partly cloudy sky pierced by the rays of a freshening sun.

Saying goodbye to Robert Mims Sr., who died January 17 at age 96, while holding the hand of his wife, 91-year-old Katherine, will seem so much more appropriate as springtime unfolds rather than in the depths of winter, when his sojourn here ended.

It has been a tough year. Lost a job I loved, at the Salt Lake Tribune, after a mass layoff ended 20 years at the newspaper last May. Depression, a frantic search for meaning and purpose, followed. But gradually, buoyed by faith, family and friends, I once more began to move forward.

Then, Dad died. Not unexpectedly, but . . . still. 

This farewell comes after 40 days of the Akathist to Jesus Christ for the Departed prayer, as is the practice of my new Orthodox Christian faith. Dozens of candles have been lit for him, joining other remembrances of beeswax, wick and flame in the narthex shrine of Sts. Peter and Paul Church, adding their light to those lit for other beloved and mourned. . . their light flickering off the shiny surfaces of that "great cloud of witnesses" Paul wrote about, the saints, or at least their icons adorning the walls and ceilings of the temple.

Mom won't be at the memorial. In a wheelchair, on oxygen, unable attend to the most basic physical functions, her memories, ability to speak or understand have long since been robbed as late-stage Alzheimer's disease ushers her toward an end in increasing unconsciousness.

Neither will my "big sister," barely able to walk due to her age, cerebral palsy, and unable to comprehend Daddy's death so directly, given cognitive abilities of a 3-4 year old child. Dad is "with Jesus," my sister Carolyn knows, and that is enough.

I will see them both, my mother and sister, before I fly back to Utah. Likely it will be a final goodbye to the shell of what my once-vibrant, sharp-witted and quick-to-laugh mother was, yearning for a second of recognition. Regardless, she will get my love, a caress, a kiss and a prayer.

In college, I briefly wrote poetry. A professor liked it enough to give me an "A." A collection of those poems, scribbled on white lined paper and stuffed into a three-hole punch binder, have long since been lost, likely tossed during one of many moves over the past decades.

And while I have no delusions about reprising any abilities in that form, here, however flawed, is an attempt, for Dad's sake:

We live, we die
We give, we fly
Leaving in winter
Returning in spring
Flowers and resurrection
We bring

Grief in short
Mourning long
Death comes in ice and snow
Life rides equinoctial song
Memories precious, bitter, sweet
gathered in time short, and long

Father has passed
Buried in soil
Dad is immortal
In dreams nocturnal
A being of love and light
Memories eternal

----------------------------------------

A simple truth: For a developmentally disabled older sister, Daddy's death is not complicated

How do you explain Daddy's death to your" big sister," who has the intellect of a 4-year-old due to oxygen deprivation in the womb?

Keep it simple. And, keep it true.

The alleged "simple of mind" recognize truth, perhaps better than the rest of us. I have become convinced of that.

You see, ego plays no part in their judgments and acknowledgement of reality.

It was enough for my 67-year-old sister, Carolyn -- a group home resident in Washington, with the intellectual age of 4, and crippled by cerebral palsy -- to know that Dad was "with Jesus, and praying for us."

Indeed, that sums up Orthodox Christianity rather well, too. And, it sums up the Pentecostal/evangelical faith we were raised in, too (in my case, prior to my conversion to Orthodoxy last year).

Today, through shared tears, it was enough for my big sister, Carolyn. And today, that was all that mattered.

Daddy was dead, but like always, he was watching out for us, his children.

Well, of course he was.

After all, what would make more sense?

You don't have to be a genius to grasp such a simple truth, however complicated your metaphysics may be.

Suicide: The challenge to the faithful, and faithful survivors

It was little more than 10 years ago that I lost my best friend, Ken, to suicide.

It happened one bright spring weekend. The day before, knowing he had been uncharacteristically out of touch, I tried calling him, no answer. I went over an knocked on his door, rang the door bell. Left phone messages. Emails.

He loved action movies. Let's go out and see a flick, I offered. You know. Escape life's stresses and worries for an afternoon. Laugh, like we always did. Talk, sometimes about deep things, other times just memories.

Ken had some great stories. Stories so great, you would wonder if they were apocryphal . . . until you learned from someone else that, "Yes, he did take on four guys in a park and sent them running." Or, "Yes, he did break a sack of cement over the head of an obnoxious boss once."

He loved practical jokes. Me, too. We victimized each other from time to time, and he always bellowed that deep laugh of his, and grinned widely . . . even as his eyes told you, "You're next, bud."

He was a big man. Big tall, 6-foot-4, and big physically, a man mountain. When he laughed, people noticed.

But there was no answer from Ken that March day in 2003. Finally, the fire department arrived. They found him in his bedroom, dead, from a massive overdose of over-the-counter sleeping medications.

He had gone to several stores to get enough; the empty bags and cartons and receipts were nearby.
In the days and weeks that followed his funeral, we learned of his dark, abusive side. It was a hidden horror his family had endured.

Those times came in cycles, at first rare, but as his mental state deteriorated, more frequent. I remain convinced to this day, that he finally decided to end it, at least in part to protect his family -- before one of his black moods ended in bloodshed.

Nothing, of course, is ever so clearly defined. Some suicides are plain acts of selfishness, a desire to punish from the grave. Others come at the precipice of hopelessness, grief. Yet others are unexplainable, brought on by psychotic breaks with reality, desperation to end the hell of perception when reality flees and gives way to madness. And some are all these things, and more.

In my current role as a public safety reporter, hardly a week goes by where there is not a murder-suicide. The most recent was an elderly couple. She was in terminal, failing and painful health; he wanted her pain to end, and his own.

That almost seems understandable. My own parents, one in the late stages of Alzheimer's, the other enduring painful arthritis and failing eyesight, might be such a couple but for their enduring love for each other and trust in God. Faith sustains them, helps them endure, and trust that their time will come when it supposed to -- by His hand, not their own.

To this day, I am convinced Ken could have been helped. But in the sad equation of his life, he refused to do the therapy, take the drugs, and he had lost faith. Perhaps he was not capable, at that point, of reaching out for help. I don't know; and I will not judge.

But I still miss my friend.

This year, suicide also touched the life of internationally known pastor Rick Warren, of the Saddleback Church and "Purpose Driven Life" fame. His youngest son took his own life.
How this man of faith, along with his remaining family are dealing with this at Thanksgiving time is poignant, and faith- and life-affirming. In a piece requested by Time Magazine, we wrote in part:

"This year became the worst year of my life when my youngest son, who’d struggled since childhood with mental illness, took his own life. How am I supposed be thankful this Thanksgiving? When your heart’s been ripped apart, you feel numb, not grateful.

"And yet the Bible tells us "Give thanks IN all circumstances . . . ." The key is the word “in.” God doesn’t expect me to be thankful FOR all circumstances, but IN all circumstances."

Warren goes on with this list what he is thankful for this season. Here are some of them:

I’m thankful that, even though I don’t have all the answers, God does. In tragedy we seek explanations, but explanations never comfort. It is God’s presence that eases our pain.
 
I’m thankful for the hope of heaven. I won’t have to live with pain forever. In heaven, there are no broken relationships, broken minds, broken bodies, broken dreams, or broken promises.
 
I’m thankful for my church family.  ... in our darkest hour as a family, they gave all that love back in a split-second, the moment Kay and I returned to speak after a 16-week grief sabbatical.  We can handle anything with prayers and support like that.

I’m thankful that God can bring good even out of the bad in my life, when I give him the pieces. It’s his specialty. God loves to turn crucifixions into resurrections, and then benefit the whole world. God never wastes a hurt if we give it to him."

To read Pastor Warren's article in full, click on this link.