This morning we went to Mass at St. Peter's, which is not our territorial parish, but is the place we go when a)we reach our limit of toleration of the music and preaching where we're registered - about once a month or b)we want that nicely-scheduled 9:15 Mass.
We always sit up near the front, on the left, one or two pews behind an older African-American couple. She was there today, with a younger man, whom I presumed was her son, but no husband in sight. I was idly thinking about the husband, who, on one or two of his fingers has unusually long fingernails. Then, at the Sign of Peace, the woman turned around, shook our hands, and said, "My husband died.." and handed us the program from the funeral Mass, held last Tuesday. 72 years old, born in Alabama, moved up this way as a boy, attended school at St. Peter's...a parishioner his entire life.
After Mass, MIchael asked the son the circumstances - totally sudden, collapse, gone by the time they got him to the hospital.
Surprising, to say the least. One more time, the truth hits you in the face. Not much time, not much time. Yes, eternity awaits, but if the time we have on earth didn't matter- we wouldn't have been given it.
Thoughts raised again by this review of a collection of columns/essays by Marjorie Williams, WaPo writer who died at 47, leaving behind two young children:
The essays in the third part of "The Woman at the Washington Zoo" were written in the years after Williams received a diagnosis of liver cancer at 43, when her children were 5 and 8. Even here, her husband manages to loop back through the theme of politics, choosing as the penultimate essay "The Doctor Factor," in which Williams puts her finger on the source of her misgivings about Howard Dean: his profession. ("Where else but in medicine do you find men and women who never admit a mistake?") But the real anchor of the section, the stunning, unflinching "Hit by Lightning: A Cancer Memoir," leaves behind the world of other people's ambition and focuses instead on her own, which was far more urgent: to cheat death, at least for a time. "Having found myself faced with that old bull-session question (What would you do if you found out you had a year to live?)," she wrote, "I learned that a woman with children has the privilege or duty of bypassing the existential. What you do, if you have little kids, is lead as normal a life as possible, only with more pancakes."
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