sorrow, steadfastly.

For the sorrow that is according to God worketh penance, steadfast unto salvation; but the sorrow of the world worketh death. 2 Corinthians 7:10

My dear wife told me that this verse had come to mind many times lately, and yesterday was pleased to note that it began the epistle reading.

Tonight my paternal grandmother, Georgia Katherine White, lies in a hospital bed dying. She has suffered from Alzheimer's for some years now, and it is now her time to complete what has been a long and unpeaceful death. I remember her as a lovely and charming Southern lady, who was always kind, gracious, and caring toward me. Her husband, my grandfather, told my mother when her father died earlier this year that he wished it had been him. My paternal grandparents were persons of some means, both having grown up in relative wealth, who retired in their early 50s to spend nearly thirty years golfing in Naples, Florida. My grandfather is now physically unable to enjoy golf or many other of his former leisurely pursuits. There is, therefore, nothing more to do, and thus life, as he apparently sees it, is as good as over. As my father drove my grandfather back to the assisted living center from the hospital today, having just learned that my grandmother would not ever be going back with him, my grandfather again stated that he wished it was him that was doing the dying. The sentiment was not that of wishing to stand in my grandmother's place, but rather that he might see his end sooner rather than later. To his credit, when my grandmother first began to loose her mental faculties, my grandfather greatly restrained his many decades old drinking habits in order to better care for her. But in the last couple of years she became too ill for him to manage and thus he lost even that reason for living, as my grandmother began to receive round the clock professional care.

Despite my paternal grandparents' affluence they lived difficult lives. My grandmother suffered from anxiety attacks throughout her life and was given electroshock therapy for severe depression on multiple occasions. My grandfather's elder brother, the favorite son in the family, enlisted in the RAF before the U.S. entered WWII and was killed in Europe when his bomber was shot down. His memory became a mythology that my grandfather could never live up to, and thus he turned to drink. He was never the businessman that his father was, or his brother would have been, so the story goes. My grandfather was an atheist until he saw the Grand Canyon for the first time, then he seems to have gone back and forth between optimistic agnosticism and the most distant of deisms. I think that it is breaking my father's heart to see his father hopelessly long for death the way that he does, in the way that our despair seems to hurt those who love us more than it hurts ourselves.

As my father was for years a Baptist pastor, I spent many hours in nursing homes during my youth. They were bad then, they are even worse now. Of all those rendered collateral damage by the spirit of our age, the long loneliness of our put away elderly make them perhaps the anti-icons of our age, well, if one can forget for a moment images of the slaughtered unborn little ones. Let me die with my family near me tomorrow rather than spend a decade drooling in front of daytime TV. Yes, modern medicine has allowed most of these old ones to live longer than they otherwise would have, but this really has no bearing on our culpability for having discarded them into institutions, and engaged in a social order which often leaves us no choice but to do so. My parents both work, and at least for the next few years, they must do so. There has been no home for my grandparents to go back to, no place to be cared for by loved ones, no real place to die. Instead, McDisney death, or a cheaper version with cockroaches on the floor and abusive staff, in either case highly medicated.

I am not sure if it is just a matter of a man settling into his temperament, or a change in focus since having children, or a growing weariness of this world, but I find that in recent years I increasingly cannot muster to give the slightest damn about professional sports, the latest movies, teenage trends, popular vacations like Disney World and Myrtle Beach and cruises to the Bahamas, chain restaurants, American Idol or any other aspect of celebrity culture, Republicrat politics, or any of the other things talked about at workplaces, churches, and nearly everywhere else these days. The nursing home is where all of that leads. We live the life of entertainment acquisition during our years of earning an income and, if we are "lucky", our few years of active retirement, then we are off to the manicured death factory, and there if we are fortunate very occasionally we may have a visit from younger kin who are in the entertainment acquisition phase of life. What meaninglessness.

Save the coming of the Day, we are going to die. Most of us will die with no or few loved ones present in a sterile, bureaucratic death camp facility. But the experiences of our day to day lives before that last stretch of life will ignore that dismal end. We will live as if that end does not exist. And when we can no longer live that way, well, it was a good gig while we could get it. This is nonsense, Nothing, Satanic delusion of the highest order. If there is one thing the saints teach us it is to constantly keep our deaths in mind, to live with a fierce awareness that we are mortal and weak and, save the Life of Christ, dust. Man's life should be ordered around his end. Any contrary order is demonic. Of course, Man's true end is in Christ, and not simply when breath leaves his body (for it will come back to him), but the breath leaving the body will be for the vast majority of us a part of our recapitulation of Christ in us, and we should, as much as we are able, be aware of this temporal end. If we were to live our lives with this temporal end in sight, what order would we seek? What way would we live in order to best attempt to have the peaceful death for which we Orthodox continually pray? Well, at the very least, it would mean having our family and friends near us, living lives of stability and rootedness in place and people, and giving ourselves to Christ and His Church as much as we are able. It would mean holding loosely or not at all to things which are of no import in God's Kingdom.

Our death is in some way connected to Adam's sickness, which all of those reading and writing this have on many occasions embraced, the writer, no doubt, more than his readers. There is a right sorrow in recognizing this. But to recognize it also begs the question, "Who is the God whom I have deludedly forgotten?" And when in Christ we begin to remember, that sorrow can go to work, it can bring about a godly cadence in a life, to bring order where there was chaos. For to repent is to be recreated, God is always making new out of nothing, even Nothing, bringing life to the dead, even in Sheol. In contrast to this, the world offers ever more past times on the way to oblivion. Thank God that there is a joyful sorrow in the false world's stead.

I often wonder if I will have enough time to repent before I die. I also wonder what sort of image of repentance my grandfather could comprehend before he dies, so late in life. My paternal great grandfather, on his death bed, shouted as his last words "go gas up the Lincoln boys, we're gonna run!" My uncle, who heard this, asked my grandfather what it meant. My grandfather told him that when he and his brother were teenagers, they would sometimes travel with my great grandfather on business trips. My great grandfather was a traveling salesman at the time, yet to make his fortune, and he would spend nights in boarding houses while on the road (this was in the 1930's). From time to time he would have his sons go gas up the car and pull around the corner, while he snuck out the bedroom window in order not to have to pay the boarding house fees. I suppose this offers me some hope for my grandfather, as God does not always require a lengthy time of repentance from thieves. If you think of it, pray for my grandfather, soon to be my last living grandparent. His name is Paul.

**the photo is an Edwin Smith which I saw on the Telegraph site this morning, promoting Evocation of Place: The Photography of Edwin Smith. The Amazon book description reads:

Hailed by the poet and architectural historian Sir John Betjeman as "a genius at photography", Edwin Smith (1912-1971) was one of Britain's foremost photographers. At the time of his death he was widely regarded as without peer in his sensitive renditions of historic architecture and his empathetic evocations of place. The recurrent themes of Smith's work - a concern for the fragility of the environment; an acute appreciation of the need to combat cultural homogenization by safeguarding regional diversity; and a conviction that architecture should be rooted in time and place - are as pressing today as when Smith first framed them in his elegant compositions.