This is a tribute to my dear friend
Miss Jane. You can read Part 1 here, and all
the other parts follow.
Now that she is gone I’ve
discovered something shocking: I struggle to remember the stories she recited
over and over again. It’s not because I didn’t hear them enough times. She kept
a couple dozen old stories polished and ready to show off to all her friends,
and many of us knew them so well we could finish her sentences. But thinking
about those unwritten stories now is like trying to recall the details of a
dream. It’s like if someone had asked me to tell about my vacation to the
mountains and then added, “Please don’t use any verbs when you talk about the
hiking.” All I would have left are impressions. I’m finding that so true now:
it is easier, now she’s gone, to tell you I respected her than to tell about
the last time she took Mary and I out for ice cream.
Even so, here at the last of my
tribute to my friend, I’d like to try to put into words a rather elusive
quality about this charming old woman.
She was happily odd everywhere she went, but you couldn’t imagine a scene without her.
She disapproved of dice playing, but still attended Ladies’ Bunco Night.
She was rigidly formal about everything, yet casual enough to go out in public wearing her pea green pajama shorts and over-sized t-shirts from ‘90’s church events.
She wouldn’t stoop to call Grant’s guitar a musical instrument, or that his worship band even played real songs, but she never missed an opportunity to join his band with her organ (often inviting herself), as though the Tortoise and the Hare got handcuffed together.
She believed in progress but resisted technology; every time I saw her use a cell phone, she would shout into it like a can on a string.
She treated the internet with the ritual and detachment of an enemy during ceasefire, like when she would call me and ask things like, “Young man, would you please ask The Internet a question for me? I would like to inquire if It knows the exact date and starting time of this year’s Christmas Cantata downtown. I’ll wait.”
She made waves everywhere she went, yet she tried her best to exude the calm of an un-rocked boat.
She was of a
different substance than the world around her.
I’ve seen a phenomenon that will
help me describe this. Imagine a single tree out in the country on the edge of
an old hay field. Around the field is an old barbed wire fence, and the tree
has grown into and absorbed the fence so that they’re stuck together for good.
She was the old tree, and all the world around her was that rusty old wire. The
two elements are alien to each other, but neither can escape the other ever
again. Yet their union has created a new and better beauty, tragic but
complete, so that they mean more together than they would ever have meant
apart. Indeed, to divorce them would ruin them both. Miss Jane was like that.
The entire modern world intruded her space daily, and she walked with ancient
friction against anything that wasn’t doing what it should be doing. But the
tension itself made her all the more alluring to those who called her friend. She was a chunk of
salt, and the world became far blander when she left it.
************
The last time I saw Miss Jane was
December 21, 2013, almost 6 years to the day we first ate lunch together at Big
Bob’s. I drove my moving rig to her Sunset Manor Senior High-rise to sit down
with her one last time before leaving Decatur.
It was a tender parting: we spoke of the Church, we mused of Heaven, I told her
the route I planned to take to Florida,
and how long I expected to be on the road. She smiled the whole time, and said
very little. And then I left. I think we both knew it would be our last sight
of each other until the Resurrection.
Shortly after New Year she suffered
another dose of bad health which landed her back in the hospital, and then back
into the nursing home. We spoke by phone just a few times after I left, and
each time we spoke she was in great pain. She would ask me, as I’m sure she
asked everybody why the Lord wouldn’t just take her Home. Oh my, how she longed
for Home, and she prayed for it with begging.
That prayer was finally answered
March 15, 2014 while she was at the nursing home. I’m told the nurses were a
little surprised it happened the day it did, because she had seemed cheery and
talkative that morning, and they said she was sitting up in bed and eating
breakfast with some energy. They expected she was on the rebound. Then after
breakfast, she simply requested to recline for a late morning nap, and then she
was gone in her sleep. Why did she pass on the day she seemed not to be in pain? Well, I’d like to offer
an interpretation of her last events. She often told us that Jesus came and
stood at her feet on painful nights, speaking comfort and patience to her,
gently holding her socks. I suspect He may have been with her the night
before, and perhaps whispered a clue that she’d be coming Home in the morning.
So I think that’s why she met her last day with repose and a little glee. That final breakfast of nursing home
eggs and oatmeal was received with the appetite of a bride at her wedding
banquet. She savored the toast like the sacramental Body of Christ, and she
sipped the orange juice like Wine. Her hospital bed was the royal litter borne
by the angels of God, and, knowing her, I think she realized all these things
that morning. She was usually happiest when she felt she had a good secret. And
I know she didn’t mind the ratty hospital gown, because she was already robed
in the Righteousness of Christ, which was the only Garment that ever meant anything
to her in the first place. Thus, ushered into the halls of Heaven, she was, at
last, perfectly satisfied in Jesus of Nazareth, who is the Christ, Miss Jane’s Lord and
Savior.
She was, in a word, herself.
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