“Now I lay me down the sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
In retrospect, this is an awful bedtime prayer for children. I do believe its intent was to assure a culture with very high infant and child mortality rates that the young who did not survive were beloved of God and not abandoned in limbo somewhere.
But in any other context it is just ghoulish and disturbing. Creepy.
We prayed this as children in a rotation with a few others, and my mother sang lullabies as part of our bedtime rituals. The Lord’s Prayer was also in the rotation, and became a more popular choice, especially after our father wrote a tune setting for it.
Eventually, we each developed new bedtime rituals with our mother that at least for me, lasted up to her death several years ago. The first wave of prayers had been left behind by the time I was about 7 or 8, and it wasn’t until some recent reflections on what the deaths of the Dillons have meant to me that I realized this shedding coincided with her father’s death and the subsequent birth of my brother, the youngest of us.
Dad wrote his worship music settings, and we were singing his Lord’s Prayer more often, and maybe my mother was tired of praying for even a kind and compassionate death. Both her parents were gone, and she had a new son. Maybe putting the death prayer down was intentional.
Maybe it wasn’t.
I suppose that in part because I prayed this prayer as a child myself, I’ve always considered dying in one’s sleep to be a pretty reasonable and painless way to go. A goal as it were.
I still believe that is true for the deceased, although I have a new understanding of what it means for those left behind.
In the last two weeks, two of my dear friends have gone to sleep and not woken up. The three of us are within months of being the same age, an age they now will never surpass. We three shared common loves, aligned sensibilities, a wry sense of humor, and similar hopes for the world.
My two friends never met each other; they were from completely different portions of my life. In this deeply entangled world, I know of at least one other person who did know both of them. There may have been more. For women who often attempted to shield or obscure their presence and impact, they generally failed and were as a rule, noticed.
They had very similar stories of trauma and systemic failure contributing to their deaths, and it seems as if for both of them, their bodies simply let go, gave in, and stopped fighting.
It is telling that it happened in their sleep for both of my friends, though. Both of these women were fierce fighters, and however their bodies failed, I do not believe death would have come just now were they awake.
For both of them, the aspect of death that is a release and a relief is foremost in my mind. Both suffered physically day to day, and to know that they are free from that pain is a balm to my own grief and lament for their loss.
And what a loss it is.
I am not much of a fighter. I like a good intellectual tussle but become bored with one-ups-man-ship. I prefer seduction and persuasion, invitation and adaptation to debate and point-winning. I prefer cooperative effort to acquiring territory. In short, I embrace conflict but don’t have much use for winning.
But over the last ten years, Christine and Jenn have both taught me about the virtue and value of the fight and the struggle itself.
Firstly, Christine. There is no doubt that she ‘should’ have died many times throughout her life. She suffered a great deal of physical and emotional abuse in her childhood, and her adult life was not much easier. She was plagued by a litany of chronic health problems, from severe anaphylaxis to Type II Diabetes, and was trapped in the cycles of poverty that have claimed so many good lives.
And over and over, she gave and she rescued. She scolded and she loved. She reprimanded and she taught. She held boundaries with an unyielding compassion, one of the best at it I’ve ever seen. She was committed to a journey of lifelong learning, and was well on her way to an EdD (Education doctorate) when she died. She was committed to her communities, be it the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), her workplace colleagues, or her home neighborhood.
It was in her hard and edgy and oftentimes chaotic and dangerous neighborhood that her fight was most clearly that of an epic spiritual battle. Christine was one of a long line of witches and practitioners with those forces of the universe one can see as mystical, metaphorical, or very very real, as Christine did. Regardless, I have seen it in action as she held that place through times of death and loss, famine and disease and established consistent sanctuaries in the day to day times that were often no easier than those periods of crisis.
Christine taught me about the value of the struggle in face of hopelessness, that every single damn moment held a choice. She knew well that nothing she did would alleviate the overall lives of her beloved neighbors and friends, and that every single act of compassion or love could change reality for that person. Life in that tension was exhausting for her, and I’d have given anything I had to have saved her from that, but only in that I would wish for her all the resources she could ever need. She was fed and nurtured herself by the work itself. That I wouldn’t want to touch.
Secondly, Jennifer. Jenn has never been really healthy, and as long as I have been aware of such things, has only had one kidney. Decades of work in cosmetology damaged her body consistently throughout adulthood until one day about 6 years ago, she collapsed and was rushed to the hospital.
We all thought she was surely dying then, but that was when the fighter inside Jennifer came out, slowly at first and then fierce and bright as day. At every point, the ‘metrics’ of health were against her. Morbidly overweight, she had to fight to move at all throughout her healing process but move she did, from wiggled toes to slowly lifted arms, Jenn engaged fully with every opportunity for physical therapy or movement assistance. She also lost hundreds and hundreds of pounds, again through her amazing determination and discipline.
Again, the cycles of poverty were weighing down Jenn’s life and she had lost access to regular healthcare as an adult. Now admitted in an emergency situation, her medical situation could no longer be denied, and Jenn leveraged this to access multiple tiers of health care that for a time, supported her health and well-being.
Difficult family relationships were reconciled and Jenn fought for every connection and spark available to her. (In)famous among my friends for avoiding phone calls, I found myself on the phone with her off and on over the last few years when we both had need of each other. She was one of the few people I’d ever call, as she was pretty persistent that our friendship was valuable to her even if I were sometimes hard to reach.
Jennifer taught me the value of the struggle in the face of opposition. While we her friends and certainly her family held hope and change out for her at all times, the messages from her medical communities were very different. I suppose to keep from engendering false hope (not something I really believe in as a concept), she was told over and over again that she would never recover. Never speak again. Never leave this or that rehab facility. Never paint or draw again. Never walk or gain any mobility again.
They were wrong on all counts. All.
When she died, Jenn had progressed in her physical therapy to the point of needing an electric wheelchair, and was beginning her fight with Medicaid to be approved for one. She was setting up an Etsy store to sell her whimsical crafts. She was filling journals and sketchbooks again, and looking forward to the removal of her trache. For Jenn, nothing was impossible. It just might take a little while.
Throughout it all, Jennifer was honing an acerbic and insightful wit that reminded me of Dorothy Sayers with glitter glasses. Her observations were light and deep together, and full of the Southern alchemy of loving someone into a distraction rather than a burden. Come to think of it, Chris had a great wit as well, and could have matched Jenn snark for snark, belly laugh for belly laugh.
Both women held forth great and steady light in a world too frequently overrun by darkness, doubt, and fear. Against all seeming rational argument, they chose hope and action. They chose to say no to those in power over them and take what power they had in any given time and place. And usually, it was a great deal of power.
The power of refusal. The power of choice.
My heart is broken at the loss of my friends, at their deaths. But my spirit is greatly relieved at their loss of pain, and the hope for rest, for liberation. I lift up the impact of their presence in my life, for the lights they have carried, and for the fights they have fought. Small or large, every action matters, and the lives of Christine McCormick and Jennifer Dennis inspire us who have loved them to live into a different world. I am so grateful for the chance to love them.
May it be so for all of us.