Hearing the Melody 11 comments

By Andy Whitman

My baby sister Libby is dying. She hasn’t been a baby for a long time now, of course, but the memories of her arrival home from the hospital, a tiny bundle of pink helplessness, remain fresh in my mind. In the intervening four decades she’s acquired a handful of college degrees, a husband, a daughter, a new home in California, and suddenly, alarmingly, a batch of tumors that have spread throughout her body.

She’s battled breast cancer for the past ten years, but this latest bout has arrived with a particularly egalitarian viciousness; no organ left behind. She has mere months left to live, and those months will be painful in every way that pain can afflict a human being.

Libby has been the yin to my yang throughout her life. We both grew up in the same turbulent household. I left as quickly as I could. She stuck around and internalized the madness and developed ulcers at the ripe old age of 15. I was the obnoxious Born Again evangelist and moralist; Libby was a willing listener and my first convert.

Remarkably, she’s stuck with it now for thirty years. I was the quintessential rootless liberal arts student; Libby was the dedicated and focused science geek. I lost a lot of my hearing and somehow, inexplicably, became a music critic. Libby became one of the most renowned experts on childhood hearing loss in the world. We’re very different people, but it doesn’t take a genius to see the outlines of our intersecting paths. And now, in some sort of cruel parody of that wretched Footprints poem, there will soon be only one set of footprints on the path.

Words cannot express how much I hate this.

In the midst of this, I pray. I used to pray extemporaneously, winging my little spiritual improvisations like a jazz musician. But my solos were often flat and hesitant. After a certain point I didn’t even bother to solo at all because the notes never really took off and went anywhere.

And so, for a good long while now, I have stopped several times per day and prayed the prayers that nuns and monks and other spiritual eccentrics have prayed for many hundreds of years. At least three times per day I say these words: “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.”

And I trip over those words every time. Because what I want to do at that point is solo fast and furiously, squeeze off a sorrowful blast of helplessness and rage and heartache and disappointment. So sometimes I do that too. Sometimes the solo just has to be played.

But I always come back to the melody: “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.”

This is the oldest theological conundrum in the world, of course, the boundless love of God and the horrific prospect of untimely death; as ancient as the story of Job, as contemporary as my 14-year-old niece, newly minted as a misunderstood adolescent Goth, confused and angry and utterly unprepared to face the world without a mother. These are the kind of juxtapositions that can leave one wide awake and staring at the ceiling at 3:00 a.m.

I don’t pretend to have an answer to that conundrum. I’ve never had an answer, and the well-intentioned answers I’ve encountered in the past have always struck me as nicely, coolly reasonable and utterly insufficient to deal with the realities of the disinfectant smell of a hospice room and morphine drips and pain so searing that the strongest medications in the world have no impact at all.

But I do have a hope. I have a hope that senselessness is not the end, that love has the final word. I have a faith that I will see Libby again, that we will walk down another path where the footprints never diverge. And I have a prayer, a classic old melody that Christians have been riffing off of for a couple millennia now: Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy. It’s a tune that never gets old. It’s a good one to come back to after the improvised screams. It’s okay. But no, it’s not okay.

In a couple weeks I’ll be flying out to San Francisco to visit Libby and her family. No one has said it, but everybody knows what is at stake. It would behoove me to make it a good visit. Everyone goes through this, usually many times. I’ve attended half a dozen funerals of close relatives in the past few years, and by this time you would think that I would be a pro, a grizzled, wizened veteran of love and loss. But I am not. I’m lousy at goodbyes. I hate them.

In the awkwardness and pain of such moments, few words are really necessary. I love you. I’ll miss you. Those are good ones. There probably aren’t many others that need to be said.

It strikes me that Libby and I have spent our lives straining to hear, or helping those who strain to hear. The melody is all too often indistinct, garbled, drowned out by a thousand competing voices, as it is now. We are two responses to the same command. God said “Listen,” and we have tried to help others do what we have been called to do. I’m so thankful that she’s helped me to hear the melody in a thousand different, unrepeatable ways, as only those we love best can do. And I’m looking forward to hearing it again.