Requiem

Last Wednesday, late afternoon, my wife got the call. Her father's number, but not his voice, “Are you Karen's daughter?” Yes. “Well, I'm very sorry to tell you, but she's died.” My wife had spoken with her just the evening before: small talk, without foreshadowing.

We were on next available flight. Her father had been swept into Texas's adult protective services. We'd spend the next three days canceling inessential services at their house, and getting him released to my wife's custody. We flew back with him on Sunday, and had him admitted to a trusted assisted living facility nearby. He's only asked a couple of times about his wife, who he loved and protected fiercely for fifty years. In the last few years, their roles had reversed, and she'd become his caretaker and his protector, a constant companion as he slid unsteadily into dementia. Alzheimer's is a terrible disease, which stole him from her, and her from him.

Karen lived big in her own way. She was passionate about country music and line dancing. She was a constant ambassador for a lifestyle and a set of values that often left me feeling like an anthropologist in my own country, perplexed but curious, “What are the natives doing?”

They grew up Protestant, conventional and unfervent in their faith. They were not church people when I knew them, yet they raised daughters who are rocks in their congregations, one Lutheran, one Catholic. Her funeral will take place in the context of a Catholic mass, courtesy of her son-in-law the deacon. He'll become a de facto member of our faith community, and again be receiving the body and blood of our Savior, as he did in his youth, as if the intervening decades of love and loss were but a dream. And the Bible that has rested on his nightstand since his confirmation rests beside him still, dog-eared and tattered, next to a photo of him and his vibrant wife, who now rests in peace.

Peace