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A very good friend of mine took his own life last Wednesday. He had struggled with depression for several years, but I’m sure that the isolation of COVID-19 contributed. How could it not? He had been a multi-site department manager in healthcare, but had lost his job a few years ago, and never was able to shake that loss or shame, never found that “what next?” moment in his life after that. I tried to get together with him a number of times, but now I feel as though it was not nearly enough times for me to feel OK. I tried, but not enough. How I wish I had made even one more effort to reach out to him, have a beer, a coffee, anything. He was tremendously talented and a smart guy in areas that I know nothing of. He always seemed to gregariously attract helpers for any home project or tree cutting adventure, and was quick to lend a hand in return. I don’t think any of us realized, or at least were willing to admit, that he was churning inside so deeply.

A second friend, a fellow who is even a few years younger than me, is holding unconsciously onto the last threads of his life while having been in hospice for the past two months due to a genetic neural disease that has dragged at him for years. I learned so much from him over the years of working together. He had been in the Peace Corps in Ecuador and had a great understanding of Latin American cultural perspectives, absolute advanced command of Spanish, and a love for the benefits that dairy cows and farms can bring to families in developing countries, just as I do. He married later in life, and leaves behind a wife and 14-year old daughter. He was so proud of both, always popping up his latest photos when I’d see him, and telling me how smart his daughter was in school. What a wonderful mentor and example.

A third friend posted on LinkedIn that he had seen his first COVID-19 death notice of someone that he knew, and shared how it hits a person differently, cuts through the arguments, when it is someone you knew. I think that’s true whether it’s COVID-19 or any other cause of loss.

Three friends suffering. Three friends in need of connection. We need to stay connected, especially with the folks that we know in our heart of hearts need help. Just a call maybe, until we can get together.

Moments when we need connection. Moments of Grace. 

In the subdivision where I spent my earliest years growing up, there were several dozen kids within five years of my age, and we all spent summers outside of our houses, often cruising the neighborhood in large groups on our bikes. Simple riding could turn into races once in a while, and my first summer with my new “racer” was an exciting one. It was a rebuilt older single-speed bike, but one that had the skinnier 26″ tires than some of my counterparts who had fatter tires on their bikes. Amongst all the kids, only my oldest brother had a 3-speed. So we started a round-the-block race, which in our case were not city blocks – the subdivision had a cross street only about every 12-15 homes. At the first intersection, we came to a “T” in the road, and the group headed right while I turned left at full throttle. I was looking backward over my shoulder, yelling at my brothers that they were going the wrong way (while I must have been the one going the wrong way, as everyone else turned right). The next thing I knew, I was on my back, looking into the face of a truck driver who had a terrified look on his face and tenor to his voice. As I had turned left, I had ridden my bike full-tilt right into the hood of a Jewel Tea truck. At that time, Jewel Tea trucks delivered small quantities of household goods, consumables, etc. to homes in the neighborhood. Sort of a low-tech Amazon delivery service. I had hit the truck and sailed over the hood, across the entire street, and landed on my back on soft grass in the ditch on the opposite side where the panicked driver was offering me, then all the kids, candy, gum, anything he had that kids might like. He kept saying, “You rode right into me! You rode right into me!” I think that he wanted to confirm to all of us kids that he hadn’t driven into me, that I had ridden into him. Funny, I realize now that we never got his name or his license info or anything. I had to limp my “new” bike home, frame bent and unable to roll the back wheel. The much greater injury for me was that when my dad got home from work, I got punished in the worst possible way – he refused to fix my bike until I had learned my lesson. Six weeks with no bike in the summer.

Someone was watching out for me that day.

Our little St. Peter’s Church had beautiful stained glass windows. It had a small organ, small choir, but we made good music. Our pastor always believed that we could do big things, even if our congregation was small. Even though it was a task that should be performed by a deacon, he taught me how to sing (chant) the Great Litany during Lent, and it remains one of my favorite service elements of the church year. The significance of The Great Litany is deep: It is the oldest original English language rite, dating to 5th century Romans, it is all-encompassing and focuses prayers for ourselves and for the world, and it is the strongest way to begin “keeping a Holy Lent.”

After the service on Palm Sunday, one of our traditions was to strip all the vestments from the altar, and cover all the icons in the entire nave and sanctuary with purple drapes, to be lifted off on Easter. Our parish was very “Catholic” in a sense – they had a very visible Mary shrine, with many votive candles below her. It is believed that sometime the night of Palm Sunday, one of the purple cotton drapes fell from Mary, and onto the burning candles below. It smoldered and smoked, filling the sanctuary with smoke and keeping the fire as a slow burn. Eventually, the fire slowly spread to the floor and first pews near Mary, but continued as a slow fire, almost like coals or embers, they would say later. The heat within, though was so great as to have melted and distorted the brass candelabras standing on the altar nearby. Late that night, a person who lived nearby was passing by the church and noticed what they thought were some low lights on in the church, and when they peered in a window, saw that there flames near the floor in the corner. They called 911, and the firefighters described the blaze as amazing that it was so hot, yet so muffled by the smoke itself, and they were able to contain it with mostly foam, avoiding lots of water damage, but they had to break out a single stained-glass window by the Mary shrine to get at the source. Opening a main door would likely have caused a huge backdraft and immediate spontaneous combustion explosion. In the end, there was lots of smoke damage, several pews and the floor caved into the basement near the Mary shrine, but a lot less structural damage than the firemen expected to find.

The Mary statue hung on a standard plaster and lath wall, not a brick wall, and immediately on the back side of that plaster wall was the sacristy, a small anteroom where some of the nicest ones of the pastor’s vestments were kept in big, flat drawers, and on top of those drawers, just lying on the top of the table, were the candles set up in preparation for the upcoming Easter services following Holy Week, basically directly behind Mary. Remember that the sanctuary was hot enough to have distorted and melted brass candelabras. Behind a simple wood door and plaster wall, the Paschal Candle lay unblemished. Not melted, not marked, not damaged in any way. We held our Easter Vigil and Easter weekend services at a neighboring church down the street, and we used the Paschal Candle that had been prepped the week before.

Thank you, angels.

My dad did, too, but that’s another story. My mother was what you would call an extremely hard-working, high-achieving champion of her beliefs and her family. I am the 3rd son born to my parents, and after I was born, my parents started adopting. They didn’t stop until they had adopted 13 more – 5 from Korea, 3 from the Philippines, and 5 mixed-race from the U.S. All considered “hard-to-place” kids. Both of my parents were highly involved in the equal rights movement of the ‘60’s in Milwaukee, taking us to picket for our first time when I was only 5 years old, protesting the prohibition of black membership in social clubs like the Elks. She took us all along as kids while she taught English to migrant worker families (some of whom ended up lifelong friends), but most of all, our parents taught us to appreciate other cultures, foods, music, people who didn’t look like us or talk like us. It shaped us all, and I didn’t really appreciate that for many years. She also taught us to live thankfully, with gratefulness simmered into our sauce, and with a song on our hearts and a smile on our face.

Our family gathered recently and we buried the ashes of our parents, together in the same container, after they had both donated their bodies for medical research. It had been 6 years since our dad’s passing, and 2 years for our mother’s ashes to come back to us. Neither of them wanted to be recognized or remembered in any special way, but we knew how important family was to them, for us to help each other to have connections, to find connections, to make connections. Generations of relatives and their memories attended and now surround them in the cemetery where we placed their cremains. One of my favorite sayings is that “Children are a message we send to a time we will not see.” If that’s true, well, they sent a whopper of a message. Our parents were inspired by so many people in their lives: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Harry and Bertha Holt, Pearl Buck, each other, people too numerous to count. We as their children had them, Skip and Becky, mom and dad, to challenge us, to inspire us, throughout our lives with them, and even after they’ve gone. They saw their purpose as way beyond their beginnings, and I believe they challenge us all to continue that tradition, to spread our wings and make the most of the time we have with each other, at home, and in the world around us, and to be grateful every day for the wonderful experiences we are able to enjoy. It is the core of the table prayer we all learned and prayed together: “GIVE US THANKFUL HEARTS, AND KEEP US EVER MINDFUL OF THE NEEDS OF OTHERS.”

I don’t think that was by chance that they taught us that.