We were more than a little leery of attending, but, masked, we went to church last week to attend the funeral of a relative, a woman I knew only a bit, who'd died without our knowing, really, of her medical condition.
Funerals are not rare in our lives these days; in less than a month, I'll be 73. I'm doing just fine, so is my spouse; but the obits in the local weekly inevitably include people we know, some of them of our years--four score and ten, etc. But Covid has kept us away from funerals. In the last year, friends--good friends--have been buried in private ceremonies--no old friends allowed, only family, close family at that. I don't know how long it had been since we'd attended one, at least a year.
This cousin did not die of the virus, but a whole lot of folks have and do. Right here in the county, 59 have succumbed, 4532 Iowans, and somewhere in the area of 433,000 across the nation. Nobody in-the-know makes claims we're on the other side of the horror either. Last year the President of the United States made a habit of saying it, but that President no longer is.
The stories are legion. A woman I know, who happens to be Navajo, lost both parents in just a few days. The toll of victims on the reservation was and is so immense that her individual suffering was only one story of hundreds, so many that individual stories get unceremoniously lost. When she and her siblings went to the funeral home, the director told them that simply scheduling a funeral was rough--there were just so many deaths.
The hospital staff set up a SKYPE for the family when it was clear her father was not going to make it. His daughter claims she barely recognized him--he'd been under care and out of their sight long enough to grow a beard. His children said appropriate last things. “I told my dad ‘thank you’ for taking care of me and my family and my mom," she told me. "I told him Jesus was waiting for him. ‘You can go,’ I said. ‘We’ll be fine. We’ll take care of each other.’ We told him he’d done a great job—that’s what we told him.”
And then, she says, she heard this odd sound in the background, a muffled sound she slowly recognized. The nurse holding the iPad was crying.
That nurse is a hero, a blessing, an angel.
Now read Ms. Dickinson's #138 again.
This cousin did not die of the virus, but a whole lot of folks have and do. Right here in the county, 59 have succumbed, 4532 Iowans, and somewhere in the area of 433,000 across the nation. Nobody in-the-know makes claims we're on the other side of the horror either. Last year the President of the United States made a habit of saying it, but that President no longer is.
The stories are legion. A woman I know, who happens to be Navajo, lost both parents in just a few days. The toll of victims on the reservation was and is so immense that her individual suffering was only one story of hundreds, so many that individual stories get unceremoniously lost. When she and her siblings went to the funeral home, the director told them that simply scheduling a funeral was rough--there were just so many deaths.
The hospital staff set up a SKYPE for the family when it was clear her father was not going to make it. His daughter claims she barely recognized him--he'd been under care and out of their sight long enough to grow a beard. His children said appropriate last things. “I told my dad ‘thank you’ for taking care of me and my family and my mom," she told me. "I told him Jesus was waiting for him. ‘You can go,’ I said. ‘We’ll be fine. We’ll take care of each other.’ We told him he’d done a great job—that’s what we told him.”
And then, she says, she heard this odd sound in the background, a muffled sound she slowly recognized. The nurse holding the iPad was crying.
That nurse is a hero, a blessing, an angel.
Now read Ms. Dickinson's #138 again.
To fight aloud, is very brave -
But gallanter, I know
Who charge within the bosom
The Calvalry of Wo -
Who win, and nations do not see -
Who fall - and none observe -
Whose dying eyes, no Country
Regards with patriot love -
We trust, in plumed procession
For such, the Angels go -
Rank after Rank, with even feet -
And Uniforms of snow.
That very nurse in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is at the heart of a poem written by a reclusive little woman from Amherst, Massachusetts, 160 years ago, a poet who scribbled her lines on individual slips of paper she rolled up and left in a chest, gifts for all of us. That nurse is there in #138, along with hundreds of thousands of others these days, almost anywhere.
Amazing, in every way.
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