The S-word is out of the closet

 

 

 

When I was a kid in the 1920s and 30s I never heard any adult say the f-word or the s-word. The s-word was suicide, an unspoken word, kept at the back of the vocabulary. After I became a newspaper reporter I learned that it was seldom written about. I worked for one daily that reported the death of a prominent local official without mentioning he had shot himself in his hospital bed. I worked for another paper whose publisher suppressed the suicide of a family member.

 

Maybe that’s why I was so impressed by the candid talk about suicide on an Internet forum for folks who have MSA – multiple system atrophy – or who are their caregivers. How long, a newcomer asked, should a parent with the incurable disease be expected to last? Others spoke of deliberately departing if the last stages became too much, too much turmoil for the patient and too much distress for others.

 

Suicide in 2013 is still a touchy subject, just as it was in 1930, but the online discussions have been thoughtful, appropriately emotional, unapologetic and inquisitive. Disagreements, some based on religious convictions, are set out in friendly terms, often punched into a keyboard by disobedient fingers, one chosen or one unchosen letter at a time. This sharing of anxieties can be enormously beneficial to people who live far apart from each other, who may never be able to talk face to face with another MSA person. My guess is that it stimulates hope and builds faith in life.

 

I am not one of those who’s thinking about an early departure. In a few days I’ll turn 88, and I’m claiming that as a lucky number.  Whatever it is that made me nosy enough to become a journalist makes me want to know the rest of the story. Unjournalistically, I seldom leave home. I drink my hot coffee through a silicon straw and whip around my condo in my power chair and my skull is stuffed, I think, with jumping beans.

 

My family puts lots of smiles and satisfactions into my life with OPCA/MSA. Someday I hope to find out why Someone allows fear and pain to clutter up His universe . Or Hers. But I can wait.

Life is more than ashes

Death ends the chapter,

but Life is the name of the book

(A recollection on Ash Wednesday)

 

A. E. P. (Ed) Wall writes:

 To refuse to die would be more than a social

impertinence. It would throw off the scientific

rhythm of the universe. It would toss a monkey

wrench into the apparatus of the galaxies, and

challenge the very mind of the creator.

 

Death is designed as an inevitable consequence of birth,

providing needed closure for each of us. It is the kind

of closure that marks graduation from high school,

which is required before the graduate moves on to

higher education.

 

Death and eternity are mysterious, not mysteries

invented by Conan Doyle and not the

mysteries of gene and cell exposed in laboratories

like prisoners of undeclared wars. There’s the kind

of death that’s examined on an autopsy table, fixed

in time and place. There’s also an eternity that’s for

discoveries in space and hopes about time. Jesus

and Einstein speak a common language.

 

There could be no death without life. Life could reach

no conclusions without death. The system may be a mystery,

but it is part of the genius of creation. Suspense is necessary

to mystery, but fear is not. Nobody remembers being

born; nobody is told that birth is the leading cause

of death, inevitable rather than incurable, because

it is not a disease.

 

Life and death can be exciting. We are conditioned to

make the most of life and death, or to fear them.

Many never speak of death. Others deny death.

 

I was in my teens when I first heard someone deny

the permanence of life. An older woman said she hoped to

God — her phrasing —that there would be no life after

death. Her family, her education, her faith were all ad hoc,

she hoped,  and would vanish as she would vanish.

I wonder where she’s living now.

 

During my years in Hawaii I knew many

Buddhists, whose friendship included invitations to

speak at Buddhist celebrations and services. I

learned to appreciate Buddhist ideals and even

Buddhist controversies. Buddhism has its

denominations, even as Christianity and Islam and

Judaism have sects and denominations. Buddhist

concepts of life and death, of reincarnation and

transmigration, appeal to many. I’ve known

Roman Catholics, Episcopalians and other

Christians, including clergy, who believe in

reincarnation.

 

My belief in God, the Eternal, the Holy, the

Triune Creator, Love itself, gives meaning to life

and death. Not everyone who is offered this gift

has unwrapped it. Christ Jesus gives of himself. As

newspaper carriers used to call out when they had

an armload of Extras to sell: Read all about it.

Because of that gift I believe in the seen and

unseen. I believe in the human body, ocean waves

and printed words. I believe also in gravity, radio

waves, thought, love and eternity. I recognize a

desire for a good life and its companion desire for

a good death.

 

Jack Wall, my dad’s brother, was born in the

1890s with a form of paralysis that was to end his

life when he was in his early teens. My dad and

another of his brothers have each told me this: The

family was gathered in the garden of their

Liverpool home. Jack, cheerful and much loved by

everyone in the family, was on his father’s lap.

Suddenly he said, “Listen. Can you hear them?”

No one heard anything unusual as Jack said,

“Can’t you hear them singing? Listen to the music.

They’re coming; they’re coming for me.” He

slumped dead on his dad’s lap. Other families have

similar experiences.

 

Maybe it is because I’m a writer that I think

of life as prose and religion as poetry. The

holiness in holy scripture is poetic. That’s why

myopic literalists don’t notice God’s bigness while

they squint at scripture with watchmaker’s loupe

and tweezers, magnifying some words and

plucking at others, like links pried loose to

disconnect a chain.

 

Death clobbered me when I was 10 years old

and living in my grandparents’ house. I was called

home from school, no reason given, and was

barely off the streetcar when I spotted the hearse

parked in front of the house. The place was

swarming with people and I headed for the privacy

of the basement to try to sort it out. My beloved

grandma, I knew, had died while I was choosing

true or false for a history teacher. I was numb, but

not at a loss for words. A memorized poem was

there for me,” The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not

want…”

 

When I heard about William Cullen Bryant,

a newspaperman who wrote poems, I was already

primed for his “Thanatopsis.”

 

So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan, that moves

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,

Like one who wraps the drapery of the couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

 

Thanks, Miss Rector, Mrs. Bracken, Mrs.

Humm, Miss Featherstone, Mrs. Routon, Mrs.

Peters and all you who taught restless teenagers

with smiles and a beat.

 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson grabbed me as a

teenager when one of those teachers opened the

book to “In Memoriam” and especially to “Crossing the Bar.”

 

Sunset and evening star,

  And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

  When I put out to sea,

 

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

  Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

  Turns again home.

 

Twilight and evening bell,

  And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

  When I embark;

 

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place

  The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

  When I have crossed the bar.

 

And then there was (and is) Walt Whitman:

 

At the last, tenderly.

From the walls of the powerful fortress’d house,

From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the

   keep of the well-closed doors,

Let me be wafted.

 

Let me glide noiselessly forth;

With the key of softness unlock the locks—with a whisper,

Set ope the doors O Soul.

 

Tenderly—be not impatient,

(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,

Strong is your hold O love.)

 

We who love life embrace it with enthusiasm.

We know that death is an element of life,

if not its fulfillment,.

 

Jesus died. Jesus lives. Way to go, Jesus!

 

 

Posted on Ash Wednesday 2013—

 reprinted from a 2005 edition of Wall’s Paper.

 Except for the quoted poetry, © A. E. P. (Ed) Wall.

 

 

About those 33,000 yesterdays

I’ve been asking God why on earth I’m here. In the huge mass of uncounted and unaccountable created beings, why me?

God is eternal love, a constant presence, creative mind, everyone’s father and mother, giver of all life.

So why, one March day in 1925, did God give me life and turn me loose?

God is the great healer, and still God allows fevers, fractures, wounds and burns to challenge medical scientists. God is the great provider, yet there’s hunger, homelessness and wretched poverty. Maybe it has something to do with God’s vocation as eternal mentor and teacher, patiently waiting for s learners to appreciate God’s texting. The password is Christ.

Now, after more than 32,000 days of this life I ask God why all the fuss? I think of the endless hours people have given me. Mom and dad were there, clergy and relatives, friends and school teachers, employers and co-workers, doctors and dentists, they and teams of others were there.

Why?

God, who doesn’t need a wristwatch or even a calendar in the realm of timelessness, let me wait a long time before answering my question. God has given me almost 33,000 days so far, and let me discover that the most important one of all is always today.

Now I know I was not created for spiritual or intellectual triumphs, but with biological intent. Having abandoned the rib method, God used me as a factor in the birth of three remarkable children and six grandchildren, also remarkable. God needs each one of them, and that’s why they’re special. And they gave, with their spouses, whatever meaning there is to my years.

There’s a different and equally satisfying experience for those who are not parents, by choice or not by choice. Not everyone becomes a parent, but everybody starts out as a child, and according to words millions revere, each one is a child of God.

  

Cranking out bias

　

　

The first time I saw my grandma cranking her telephone, which was mounted on the kitchen wall, and then talking to an invisible operator I knew something amazing was going on. That was in the early part of the year, before 1929 became shorthand for panic on Wall Street. The manufacture of hand-cranked magnetos had a high-profit future, except that all of a sudden neither phones nor Fords needed cranks.

When my grandpa lathered up, fortunes could be made in selling straight razors and razor strops. My first cold earned me a mustard plaster on my chest and a raw onion in the room to attract the germs. It efficacy was established when the onion eventually turned dark with, presumably, dead germs. Mustard plasters and leeches and other medical favorites had short commercial lives.

At school every student desk had a built-in inkwell, and nothing was brighter than the blue ink business. Wooden pencils were sharpened away by the millions, and millions more had to be made.

When I landed my first newspaper job in 1942 every desk had a paste pot and typewriters were purely mechanical, responding to the force of fingers, not electricity. Building a future on the sale of typewriter ribbons almost guaranteed lifetime success.

But there’s more than matchbooks and amateur night at the movies to shrug off. I was about 14, already a Lincoln enthusiast, when I visited a segregated black school in the South. The principal showed me textbooks which had been discarded by white schools, giving me a teenage attitude that led eventually into life membership in NAACP.

Some writers today, like temporarily lapsed liberals, ridicule white men with the mindless fervor of crackpots.

Certainly they are not referring to the white Supreme Court justices who gave judicial certainty to civil rights, or to the white journalists who kept the issues alive, or the Union soldiers dying in the Civil War to clear the way for the emancipation proclamation. They cannot be referring to the white church members, legislators, teachers and artists who are committed to racial justice.

The tools of communication, justice and education are reinvented and rebuilt almost constantly. We can use the tools without cranking them in rebuilt bias.

　

What were the generals thinking?

          Generals are in the news. David Petraeus, who resigned as CIA chief, and John Allen, who denies any inappropriate behavior, confirm the plain fact that emails are not private. The military heroes stimulate our thinking as we ask, What were they thinking?

          God is Mind, many priests and philosophers affirm. God is Mind, not Brain. People need brains (and feet and fingers and the bodies to which those things are attached). God doesn’t. Mind is reliable. The brain isn’t, even though it provides a place for the human mind.

          We approach God, Mind, Father, Spirit, Mother, the only way we can, through prayers and other thoughts. We don’t always recognize Mind’s answers. We pray for good health, and don’t notice that God has already given us the wholeness of loving friends and families.  
          Sometimes we make deals. I was invited to dinner at the home of a physician, his wife and their teenage children. The wife’s knife and fork stayed in place, because she ate nothing. Years before she had promised God that if one of her children survived a frightening condition she would deny herself the pleasure of sharing dinners with her family for the rest of her life. The deal concept is familiar to students at exam time.

          The mom who gave up dining with her family kept her promise, but many deals with the Almighty evaporate in the mist of resolutions, diets and exercise plans.

          Christians have offered a trillion promises to forgive others the way they want God to forgive them. It is right there in the heart of the most famous of prayers: Our Father who art in heaven…forgive us…as we forgive.

          Having lived a long time, and having offended many, I have a substantial stake in the way humans think about forgiveness.

          Accounts I hear are not reassuring. Forgiveness is scorned in families, where you might think it would have its greatest strength. Think of the moms whose unresolved anger leads them to keep their offspring away from grandparents who love them. Think of the brothers who have not spoken to each other for a decade. Such folks have immersed themselves in icy mindlessness, mocking God and committing perjury each time they mumble the Lord’s Prayer.

          Forgiveness is an enabler of reform. Cheaters, stealers, liars, gossipers, killers, persecutors and predators challenge religious believers especially to show them ways to reform and renewal. Forgiveness of offensive behavior does not erase it, but it does encourage rewriting it.

 

 

  

Billy Graham didn't need to advertise

 

 

            Billy Graham’s decision to buy full-page ads supporting the Republican candidate for president stirred  interest in the role of religion in partisan politics. The ads ran in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Chicago Tribune and other newspapers shortly before the election of November 6, 2012—one day before the famed evangelist’s 94th birthday.

            The ads backed Mitt Romney in his soon-to-fail campaign to replace Barack Obama as president. This coincided with the removal of Mormonism’s identity as a “cult” in a web site of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Assn.

            When Billy Graham gave me  couple of hours for a depth interview in 1965 he radiated the assurance of an evangelist sharing the power of the cross of Christ. We talked in his suite at the Royal Hawaiian in Waikiki, where he was preparing for a week-long Honolulu Crusade. He had recently drawn 2 million New Yorkers to his Crusade in Madison Square Garden.

            In those long-ago times he ran a mile and a half every day, played golf, swam at every opportunity. Now he’s at his long-time home at Montreat, near Asheville, N.C., at a cool elevation of 4,000 feet. He was born in Charlotte, N.C., on Nov. 7, 1918, and lived on a small farm. His parents called him Billy-Frank, but at school he chose to be known as Billy Graham.

            He has been a widely-circulated newspaper columnist, world-famous author and preacher, confidant of presidents and a noted figure on television. He didn’t need to run those ads.

 

A black Lincoln in the White House?

 

          It was a few years ago when I wrote a column about a newcomer on the national scene. The column ran in The Orlando Sentinel. Years have passed, and it all came true. The face is the same, sort of, but some of the pixels have rearranged themselves. Read on:

 By A. E. P. Wall

Special to the Sentinel

           When Barack Obama was a schoolboy in Hawaii, I was managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser, unaware that a major figure of the next century might have been surfing nearby. In the Hawaii I remember, racial identify sometimes required several hyphens (Filipino-Chinese-Hawaiian or Caucasian-Korean-Japanese). The boy with the soul of a Martin Luther King and the heart of an Abraham Lincoln might have been known as Black-Caucasian, the son of a black African father and white American mother.

          Americans are often on the move. The one-time Hawaii resident ran for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, where he won by a wide margin. Obama now serves alongside the venerable Sen. Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii.

          Obama would have qualified for membership in the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in Honolulu in the 1950s, when men with names like Ohata, Okada and Okino were welcome participants in annual corned beef and cabbage events.

          Anybody who heard Obama’s address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, his hymn to democracy and the integrity that makes it work, may have wondered whether this man might make it to the White House. It took about 180 years for a Catholic to be elected, and no woman has ever been elected regardless of her race, religion or political party.

          The first African American to be elected president will be Obama or someone very much like him, someone who is proud of his race who wants to lead an interracial nation, a country in which everybody belongs to some kind of minority – the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed, the Catholics, Jews, Muslims, even the Cubs fans. He’d have to win enough votes from Americans of European, Hispanic, Asian and other ancestries to get there.

          Spirited words by Sen. Obama, delivered in Springfield, Illinois, at the dedication of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, were recalled by Jeff Zeleny, national political correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in an article June 26. They received less attention than they merited at the time because, Zeleny reported, the senator had barely finished speaking when the election of a new pope took over the front pages. Here’s some of what Obama said about Lincoln:

          “At a time when image all too often trumps substance, when our politics all too often feeds rather than bridges division, when the prospects of a poor youth rising out of poverty seem of no consequence to the powerful and when we evoke our common God to condemn those who do not think as we do, rather than to seek God’s mercy for our own lack of understanding – at such a time it is helpful to remember this man who was the real thing.”

          The papal election may have grabbed the headlines at that moment, but it stirred memories of Pope John Paul II. His Polish ancestry was a joy to him, and he met with men and women of Polish ancestry wherever he traveled in the world – but he was not the pope of the Poles. He was everybody’s pope. Obama can be everybody’s president.

          When I was a first-grader, 75 years ago, my hero was Lincoln. The first book I bought with the first half-dollar I earned was about Lincoln.

          When I see Sen. Obama on my TV screen I see a bit of Lincoln. That’s before the beard, of course.