Hello In There 6 comments

By Andy Whitman

We had an apartment in the city,
Me and Loretta liked living there.
Well, it'd been years since the kids had grown,
A life of their own, left us alone.
John and Linda live in Omaha,
And Joe is somewhere on the road.
We lost Davy in the Korean war,
And I still don't know what for, don't matter anymore.

You know that old trees just grow stronger,
And old rivers grow wilder every day.
But old people just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say, "Hello in there, hello."

My church is full of young adults and young children. At a grizzled 54, I qualify as the Resident Ancient Dude (RAD), an inscrutable non-pierced, non-tattooed, non-shaved-headed fixture in a sea of Jesus-loving hipsters. And then there are the men. The hipsters do what many people their age do. They start their careers. They have babies. And when the babies arrive, the Emergency Meals Coalition, or whatever it calls itself, kicks into gear and organizes deliveries for the newly stressed and stretched moms and dads. They do it well, and the proud parents usually don’t have to worry about where dinner is coming from for the first month of little Viking’s or Lulu’s life (yes, these are actual hipster baby names).

We, as a church, know how to welcome in new life. We just don’t know much about death. And we surely don’t know much about how to care for people who are caught up in the struggle between life and death.

Audrey, if she were still around, would readily affirm that.

Me and Loretta, we don't talk much more,
She sits and stares through the back door screen.
And all the news just repeats itself
Like some forgotten dream that we've both seen.
Someday I'll go and call up Rudy,
We worked together at the factory.
But what could I say if he asks "What's new?"
"Nothing, what's with you? Nothing much to do."

You know that old trees just grow stronger,
And old rivers grow wilder every day.
But old people just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say, "Hello in there, hello."

There was no way to really know. I tell myself that. Probably many of us tell ourselves that. Audrey was a private person, and she didn’t share much about her struggles. And she didn’t really fit in.

She was a typical, stoic, Midwestern farm girl in the midst of a sea of creative oddballs. While everybody else was founding non-profit social service agencies and making films and booking time in recording studios, Audrey sat in the back and knitted.

We knew she had breast cancer. We knew it was serious. It always is. But nobody thought to notice when she wasn’t at church for a couple weeks. Nobody called. It should have never reached the point where the first phone call was a request from the family to help with funeral arrangements. But it did. There was no Emergency Health Coalition at her bedside. There was no one at all at her bedside. Not one single person.

So if you're walking down the street sometime
And spot some hollow ancient eyes,
Please don't just pass 'em by and stare
As if you didn't care, say, "Hello in there, hello."
—John Prine, “Hello In There”

John Prine was a young man when he wrote that song. Now he’s 63 years old, and he’s survived a bout with throat cancer, complete with the requisite side courses of chemotherapy treatments, nausea, and exhaustion. But he wrote that song in 1968. Maybe you have to be a songwriting genius to exhibit that kind of compassion and insight at age 21 or 22. Or maybe you just have to be awake. Maybe you just have to look around, look to see who’s not sitting in the back of the church.

There is a sermon there somewhere, and it’s probably already been preached. I am as culpable as anyone. Every week we hear a variation on a theme. Our call is to engage suffering wherever it is found. And we do. We don’t own a church building, but we own two orphanages in Cambodia and Thailand, and several times per year twenty or thirty people from our church visit our kids, and hug them and wrestle with them and read to them and inoculate them against diseases.

Our inner-city church is home to the homeless, the addicted, the battered, the unwanted and unwelcome members of our society. Everyone is welcome.

We just forgot about the shy and the invisible knitters.

The needs are overwhelming. They noisily clamor for our attention. It’s a church I love dearly, and it’s a wondrous, healing place for the broken, the conflicted, the messy, those who don’t remotely claim to have it together. But it’s apparently no place for self-effacing, quiet people who don’t draw attention to themselves.

“Don’t worry about me,” Audrey told me a few months back.

And nobody did. Nobody stopped to say, “Hello in there.” No one was around to say goodbye.