An interesting footnote of American history is that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. experienced a life-defining 24 hours while being treated for severe wounds he suffered as a Union soldier during the Civil War.
Convinced he was about to die, the young Holmes faced a profound choice as he prepared to step into the void: profess faith in God and thereby secure eternal salvation, as most do, or acknowledge his own personal belief – that he didn’t have the faith God existed and therefore couldn’t know what awaited beyond death’s door.
He decided on the latter – in his mind, the only honest way to die. The decision made, he noted in his journal that he then closed his eyes and waited for the end and the mysterious beyond.
As it turned out, Holmes recovered from his wounds and went on to live a long and distinguished life as a jurist and man of letters. But the decision he made at what he thought was the threshold of his own death those many years before, the decision simply to step into the void with no net, spiritually “uninsured” and untethered to a belief in the prevailing orthodoxy of his time, strikes me as a stunningly honest and courageous one.
Several years ago, my 94-year-old mother died of congestive heart failure in a dreary nursing home. During her last months, antidepressants had smoothed over the nasty spots in her demeanor. An almost childlike sweetness and compliance now replaced the anger, bitterness and cynicism that had overtaken her during her last years.
A couple of days before she died, I asked a Catholic priest if he would administer the last rites.
“Of course,” he said.
As he entered her room, my mother greeted him with outstretched arms – a sincere gesture born of an earlier time in her life. “Oh, monsignor,” she smiled.
“You’ve been promoted,” I said to him.
“Well, it’s about time,” he laughed. “Who do we have here?” He didn’t ask for her denomination, or if she even had one. I appreciated that.
“This is Aurelia Ruth Reyman,” I told him. And with that, a brief, simple and moving ceremony began in a shabby pink room of the nursing home just off of East Colfax.
Embedded in the many other things the priest said that morning, I remember this: “Ever-loving and merciful God, welcome this good woman home,” he said as he anointed my mother’s hands, eyes and forehead.
“Thank you,” she said, smiling sweetly and adoringly through the veil of her medicated awareness.
Since then, I’ve often wondered what she was thinking behind her smile, her adoring eyes and the medications. She had been raised a Catholic in a New Orleans orphanage, a strong faith she carried with her through her adult life and passed on to her two children in the form of a Catholic education and Mass every Sunday. During the last two decades of her life, however, she had increasingly lost interest in life and, perhaps most significantly, in her faith. She expressed no interest in Mass. She no longer spoke of God.
Where had it gone? Had it been supplanted by the anger and despair that often accompany aging? And when it appeared again after so many years, had it merely been waiting all along, just under the surface of her consciousness, for the simple spark of a priest or some other stimulus to reignite it? Did the medications play a role? Or was it the hard reality of approaching death that had reawakened it?
And what exactly was “it”? Faith restored? Faith as an insurance policy – faith “just in case”?
Or, as I like to think, was she simply attuned to the importance of the choice, the leap in the dark, as she faced the end?
In the years since then, I’ve come to realize that the answer to these questions doesn’t matter. As with Holmes, and with all of us, a confluence of factors – impending death, faith and the unknown – will provide a context for the choice. For Holmes, the nature of that choice would be a distinguishing one, a courageous one. But whether we make it courageously, cynically, weakened or emboldened, or because the vision of a priest rekindles something important from long ago, the mere fact that the choice will be there for all of us is a humbling thing, a gift, a distinguishing mark of our shared humanity.
And that, indeed, matters.
Chuck Reyman (reyman. charles@tchden.org) is public relations director for The Children’s Hospital in Denver.
