James 24:7

Many people in the corporate world dread the annual performance review.  As the appointed day draws closer many managers and employees feel an ache in the pit of their stomachs.  The face-to-face of it, the inherent judgment involved in the process, the knowledge that someone’s livelihood is on the line and a host of other factors contribute to the anxiety of conducting the annual review.

The common wisdom in the world of Human Resource Management (another horrid phrase that) is that the anxiety associated with the dreaded day could be lessened if the importance of performance, the criteria by which performance judgments are made, and the actual performance of the employee was made a matter of regular discussion rather than being pushed off to one anxious day of the year.  Making the topic of performance a regular subject of workplace conversation helps to lessen the anxiety on the big day.

Parents dread having “the talk” with their children…you know the one about “it”.  The thought of having to sit down with their child to describe the “birds and the bees” is almost more than some parents can bear.  (Indeed, it is a topic that many never bear because they never have it!)  More than a few children learn about sex through the process of “working on mysteries without any clues”. 

Not a few educators suggest that the reason parents find it so difficult to talk about sex with their children is that they push the topic off to one “big day”…one big dreaded, nerve wracking day.  Contemporary advisors suggest that if bodies, in all of their wonder, were more a matter of daily discussion, actual talk of sex between parents and children would be less an occasion for the ingestion of benzodiazepines.

The principle applies when it comes to the discussion of death.  We would all find it easier to discuss death and dying if that inevitability was more a matter for regular conversation.  If the topic of death and dying came up more regularly in our families we might find it a little easier to discuss “final preparations”.

I have to give credit to my mother on this score.  While there were many things she was not prone to discuss, death was not one of them.  That made life a lot easier for me after she was diagnosed with leukemia in 2001 and given only a few months to live.

I remember one day in particular after I had taken her to Emory Hospital to meet with a leukemia specialist.  He did nothing to soften the initial diagnosis.  Without treatment she might last three months, with treatment she might last eight months.

As were driving to my house, I asked her if she understood what the doctor had told her.  In a matter of fact way she said, “I am going to die”.  There was no fear in her voice, no anxiety, no trepidation.   “I am going to die.”

I have thought a lot about those four words and that conversation since that moment.  How was it that my mother could be so matter of fact about the impending inevitability of her death?  And how was it that we could have such a matter-of-fact conversation about  it?

Certainly part of her calm could be laid to her Christian faith.  She believed that death was a step into the next phase of life.  However, I do not think that her peace was only because of her faith.  I think it was because death was not a stranger to her and therefore not a stranger to us.

My mother had some advantages that most of us do not have.  For one thing, she grew up in a farming community.  Although her family did not own land, they farmed cotton fields and grew their own crops.  When they needed meat for supper, my grandmother would walk into the dirt yard, snatch up a chicken, and wring his neck.  In the winter they would slaughter a hog, a bloodbath if there ever was one.

Funerals were a way of life.  Having a large extended family within walking or wagon distance meant that death was often only a mile or two away.  Feeling sorrowful was a way of life as some great uncle or great, great grandma or second cousin was always standing on the banks of the Jordan casting a wistful eye.

Circuit preachers washed down death in the precious blood of Jesus.  The threat of hell was only a taffy pull or dance away.  Dancing led to sex and sex led to death and death led to hell.  (My mother often commented that had she come home pregnant when she was a girl, her daddy would have killed her.  See the connection?)

She brought those country values into town.  I remember her sage comment when I was a little boy, weeping over the death of my little Easter chick: “James, these little deaths will prepare you for the big ones.”  (That sounds funny to me now, but I think it’s true.  How we are ushered through the little losses of life prepares us for how we navigate the big ones.)

Every morning through my elementary and high school years I awoke to the sound of droning organ music and the “Obituary of the Air” on WLBB radio.  While the station’s Wurlitzer moaned “Rock of Ages” in the background the solemn announcer would say, “Mrs. Sally Johnson of Roopville passed away on Tuesday.  She was a life long resident of Carroll County. She is survived by her children.”  And my mother would say something like, “I grew up with her.  She could run fast.”

On an annual basis she and I would visit the cemetery so she could remind me where all of the relatives were buried.  On days I would visit we would take a ride out "into the country" to find someone who had been misplaced over time.   Only four days before she died she walked my brother through the graveyard for one last visit before she joined that beloved band.  (I think to her the thought of being forgotten was a far more fearsome prospect than dying.)

Of course we had to get through our own obituaries and funerals.  Great grandfathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, great aunts and uncles, and cousins.   I grew up between the fact of death and grief in the old ways and the contemporary obliteration of it.  Given the distances between us, I barely know my relatives outside my immediate family.  Chicken comes in cellophane and nobody but nobody talks about death outside of mob movies and horror flicks.  To visit a funeral home is to visit a Chevrolet showroom.

It seems to me that these important discussions, which we must have, would be made much easier if we quit pretending that death is not inevitable and that its arrival is altogether shocking.  My mother and I could honestly face her end because we were not strangers to the topic.

More next time…