Transcript
We're sitting here in Adam's house, and there's a portrait of Arthur Adams on the wall, and I thought I'd begin by just telling you a little about him, since neither of you seemed to know much about Arthur Adams. He was the dean when I came here at the seminary many years ago, very conscientious, hardworking man, self-effacing. Arthur was diagnosed with having cancer when he was about 68 years old, seemed to have a remission, then became
ill again, and it took him a year to die while he was living on a campus house near here. During that year, a woman whom he had befriended many years ago in his ministry wanted to leave him an enormous amount of money, $20 million. And Arthur wouldn't take it, and that last year of his life was spent between intermediaries negotiating about that money. He wanted to give it to the seminary, and finally, most of it was
given to the seminary. Now Arthur died two days into his retirement, and I've heard people say they get angry when someone they love dies. I've never felt angry that way with my father or anyone else, but I was angry when Arthur died, unbidden, I didn't know why I was angry, it just seemed so unfair. This wonderful servant of the church, self-effacing man, his last acts being to see that the seminary which he loved and the
church he loved should have this money, and he gets exactly two days into retirement. At any rate, a year passed, and I was sitting in this very room, and there were two young entering freshmen, students, or juniors as we call them at the seminary, we were to have a meeting here, they were a little early and I was a little early, and as young people often do, they just keep on talking and ignore an older person.
And suddenly one of them pointed to the portrait and looked over to me and says, say, hey who's that guy in the picture over there? I said, well, that's Arthur Adams, the man for whom this house is named, and they both laughed and said, oh, we thought it looked like Jimmy Stewart, and it struck me, my heavens, the reason you two guys are here is because of people like Arthur Adams, and he means nothing to you.
And that has had an effect on me, I think, for the good in relaxing about what I do and what people say about me and what achievements you may have, because you know, just like Arthur Adams, it isn't going to be very long at all if anyone even notices to say who is that guy in the picture, they won't have a clue as to who it is, it'll just be a name and a person. I'm afraid
that's to me one of those facts of life, which though it's a little distance because it's Arthur and not me, that I can learn something from that I think helps me live a bit better than I would have otherwise. But you know, something struck me as you were describing the anger that you felt at his death, that he only had two days of retirement, and it seems funny, I noticed this kind of sex message that we
have as Christians, that on the one hand we talk about how wonderful it's going to be to be with Jesus, and by the same token, how awful it is when people die and go to be with Jesus. And it seems like we have difficulty in reconciling those feelings of wanting to hang on to what is here, and talking about this being just a temporary place, that there's something wonderful lying beyond, and yet it's a horrible thing
when we leave what is here in spite of the pain and suffering that we endure while we're here. We make a lot of jokes to offset that and to neutralize it about the immediacy of the trip. It's one thing to talk about some day in retirement, but the day comes when you really get your gold watch, or the day comes when your disease is such that you really don't know if this might not be the day.
And by that time, of course, things have changed, but the immediacy of the trip is probably the thing that occasions us the most difficult. It becomes suddenly something that we're not any longer talking about or discussing as if it were someone else, but it becomes biographical. Now we're living in... George Eliot has a wonderful scene in her book, Middlemarch, about a clergyman who had a weak heart, and he has an examination by his physician, and he
tells him, anytime now, and the comment is something like this, we all know we must die, but when it is now and soon, it is altogether different. And then she tried to describe the transition some people make, and why they make that transition, so that's something like you said, but she put it like being enfolded once more as an infant in your mother's arms, but she says, Kosuban, that was the character's name, did not make that
transition. It's a very moving passage, but it illustrates her point. It's one thing to know it theoretically, it's another thing when you start living into it. But is part of that impacted by the models that we've had in our lives? I count myself very blessed because my mother, long before near-death experiences were publicized, went through such a thing with the birth of my older brother, she was 19, and up to that point she had been
a skeptic in her faith, even though a great aunt and uncle were missionaries in Thailand for many years, and then she had this experience, and she saw the light and she saw this hand reaching to her, and she felt such a sense of peace, and she was somehow able to share that in a way that growing up, even though we saw loved ones, including her brother who died in an air crash when I was about five
years old at a young age, and others, I never had a fear of death or dying, and only a couple of years ago, in fact, as my grandmother was almost 99, and was dying, my mother called me, and I had a decision, I could fly out after she had died, or I could fly out and be with her in the dying process, and I chose to fly out and be with her as she died, and it
was a very bittersweet but incredible experience because we had a chance to talk and to celebrate in a way, and it was in some respects, even though she was failing quickly and had a lot of discomfort, we spoke of it as a trip, as a time, we talked about who do you want to see when you get there, what are you looking forward to, what will you miss, there was a freedom in our conversations which was,
it was liberating, but it also made her life and her passing very special to us, and I know that that can be a very rare thing, but I wonder if there is some way that others might have that opportunity. Well, culturally, death is the enemy. It certainly is for the medical profession. I speak as a traditional person from the traditional healing, and death is the enemy, and I think we impart that to our patients. We frequently
seize on every opportunity we have to answer their questions which involve postponement of either thinking or doing about dying. Death means failure. Death means failure to us. And yet, I wonder if it was always so, because again, looking back at our family, my mother's years ago, and when the time came that she was near death, and the doctor knew it, he was close with all the family, he invited the family members in, they all said their
goodbyes, and then he gave, this was before Dr. Kevorkian, he gave her a shot of morphine, and he lay down on the bed with her, and he was there with her as she passed, and the family saw it as a victory, and so this was a model so that as her daughter died, and my mother caring for her daughter was with her, she wanted my grandmother to share that same kind of a victory, that where it
was not something to be feared, not something necessarily to be hastened, but something that could be accepted and even on a certain level rejoiced in maybe. It may seem a strong word. I guess that's where you get the jazz tune when the saints go marching in, played as a funeral procession in New Orleans. I've always wanted a funeral like that. I've had no experience of anything like you're describing at all. We don't talk about it particularly
ever in our family, then or now, so it does seem to be something of which we're silent about, and I don't know what effect it would have if we weren't. In your case, it seems to have made a big impression. Tremendous. Tremendous. I guess our family probably sounds very strange and very morbid, but another experience was when my first husband's mother passed away. She was a Jewish woman who was meticulous towards the end. She had a
terrible time, a number of health problems, and invariably the paramedics would be called, and they would save her at the last minute. I can remember one such time she was quite upset because they had not only not allowed her to die because she was ready, but they'd stolen the money out of her purse. She was quite distraught, but the time came when she finally did pass that she had her hair done. She had a wonderful dinner
with a friend. Everything was in place in the house. Everything was easy to find in terms of the papers, and my mother and I had made her a promise since her sons were, again, very afraid of death, that we would be there at the end for her. So we found a rabbi who was one of my models for ministry, actually, and he was able to bring a family that was full of anger and full of fear
and full of conflict together in this situation. It was not your traditional Jewish funeral service by any means, but we planned it all together. There was a place that she loved off the Jersey shore where she used to swim and had fond memories. She was cremated, and we took the ashes after the service along with the red roses that she loved. It was an unusual day in that ordinarily the waves were very turbulent in that area,
but that day they were calm. We shared some memories about her, and we distributed the ashes on the water and the roses and saw these roses gently bobbing out to sea. Now again, it sounds odd, but my mother and I frequently think about Sally, and we think about the promise that we made to her, and we think about that time of sharing memories and of celebrating a victory, something that transcended. What you're talking about, though, involves
a whole lifetime, because I could imagine that being a morbid experience if people's attitude in such a family changed only at the lateness of the hour, it would be frightening to everyone. But the fact that she had lived such a life made this a normal ending for it, it seems to me, and I find it not at all morbid. But it requires an attitude that you can't put on at the end, something that's a part of
that person. I guess that raises the issue of where are these attitudes formed, and whose responsibility is it, or who is it that can be helpful? Does it have to start at the home, and if in the home, as in your case, it hasn't been modeled, then where is that modeled? And if it's something that we don't feel free to talk about, and if in the medical profession it's the enemy, then how do we raise this
issue? How do we share? How do we let people know that death does not have to be something that one fears? Well, in the first place, death, the fear of death is a human thing, but it is something that we have elevated to crisis level with our human attitude about it. In nature, life and birth are parts of existence, and are accepted as such not only by animals who apparently don't think a great deal about it,
and I know there are animals who seem to. But the hunter seems to have a different attitude, and I'm speaking of the real hunter, I'm not one myself, but there is an inevitability. Audubon's life was filled with his feelings about the inevitability of death, and many of his pictures contain injured, wounded, struggling birds, but again, he was a man who as a child had just been born on an island off our coast where there was a
bloody revolution and escaped there just in time to get to France for the big one there, and so he had seen life and death as a part of life, and I think that his was a more natural attitude than we have today where we kind of try to hide not only death, but pain and suffering and except for in the media in times of war, gross acts of violence which today have become commonplace. Do you think
that part of that is related to our getting away safe from the farm life? I say this because when my children were small, we lived on a farm, and I had sheep and horses and other animals, and I quickly realized that you don't live in that kind of a setting without being exposed to the cycles of nature and to life and death on a rather regular basis, and you can't do anything to stop it a lot
of times. A few years ago, a fellow named Russell Staples, who had been a missionary in Africa, did a dissertation on death and its significance here for us, and what was revealing to me in that was the African folk, of course, can't escape the realities that are so immediate to them too of pain and death, but the reason death was so lamented and why you have such long rituals and rites with death is that death threatens
the entire community's economic viability. If you lose the breadwinner at an early stage, it's not only the immediate family but the whole community suffers, and when death is frequent, it doesn't mean just Bill or Sam goes. In our society now, with heavy insurance and state support and all of the rest, even the most important person who dies in the United States is only a matter of an hour or day of observation by the whole nation, but
life just continues on. The most important person in our community could die, and Princeton continues to operate. Now, that's why death has a significance depending on the social setting heavily, and why death is so feared is if it threatens the entire life of a community. Now, that was common. We forget in Europe that most children died at birth and infancy. Children used to have the same name appear in a family again and again and again. Why?
Because when the child died, you just named the next one with the same name. I knew two sisters that had the same name because one was thought to be dying when the other was born, and they gave the name and she pulled through. These are Moravians who had this custom. So I think a great deal of, we're so layered with our common corporate memories here that we don't talk about very much as you say, Joyce, and
because of that, these things are all conflicted, moving in different directions inside of us, so we're very confused ourselves. So that it's not good enough only to say, I believe in Jesus Christ, the resurrection of the dead. That's got to compete with a lot of things we don't even know are in us. All jumbled together.