A Song in the Night (19 page)

At the business school I once tried to break out of the mold of class ethicist, just to see what it was like. We were discussing the problems of a men’s cologne that was declining in popularity. I raised my hand and said, “It’s all image and air anyway, so let’s capture that air with a campaign built on the most expensive sort of snob appeal.” The professor looked startled. “This from a man of your background?” The class laughed. I still don’t know whether he meant it as a compliment or a reproof. In any case, I never again recommended something I didn’t believe in.

As time went on I got to know the students better, and the more friends I made, the more I suffered from a dilemma. I found many of my section mates to be truly charming and thoughtful people. Despite the competitive pressures, mathematically gifted students willingly helped those who were struggling with numbers. When a student’s mother and a professor’s father died during the school year, the outpouring of emotion and donations was immediate and genuine. Some people even found time to participate in volunteer activities, such as becoming a Big Brother or organizing a blood drive.

I benefited all through the year from many people’s friendship
and assistance. One classmate picked me up and drove me to school for several days after I had hurt my knee. The night before the accounting final, another spent an hour with me on the phone and cleared up some of my questions, thereby enabling me to squeak through. And I was delighted when a dozen classmates from almost as many denominations formed a little Bible study and fellowship group. We met every Tuesday for lunch and talked about our backgrounds, our beliefs, and our doubts.

Some of my classmates offered me the opportunity to minister to them in moments of personal distress. One woman described her painful separation from her husband and daughter; another man told me in moving detail about the death of his father. On a few occasions people burst into tears as we talked, pouring out fears about their futures and frustrations with the relentless pressure of school. Over time many proved to be warm human beings, genuinely concerned about my well-being, and true friends.

Yet however thoughtful and kind the students were in private, in public they could sometimes be surprisingly unwilling to raise ethical objections to any business practice. During one case series, we studied a cold remedy that introduced no new medical features into the marketplace and whose advertising budget would represent 60 percent of its retail price. I decided to keep quiet and see what people would say. After the second day, nine people came up to me separately to inquire why I had not yet objected to this “piece of crap.” I encouraged them to speak up, but they looked embarrassed. Even one professor
remarked, again privately, that the product was terrible. But in three days of class discussion, no one openly objected.

And thus the dilemma: privately and personally the students were caring people, but publicly they became aggressive, even callous. In the fall we saw a movie on the coal miners’ strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, and the sight of the overweight miners’ wives brought wave after wave of cackling derision. When, in a discussion of textile workers in England, it was revealed that a woman who had sewn for twelve years for $2.50 an hour might lose her job, most of the class felt that she deserved to be laid off, since she was being paid too much.

Moreover, all day long the students talked about money. Discussions about money in such courses as managerial economics, control (the business school’s term for accounting), or finance always had a clinical quality, as though money were a force with its own properties and principles, like electricity, rather than an instrument we use to express what we value. People forgot that the whole idea of exchange on the basis of price depended on a prior definition of possession; one could not sell what one had no right to own. And, as it became clearer to me over the years that followed, one often placed no value on things that had no price.

The most demanding and moving part of my job as a part-time pastor was visiting the seniors who could no longer come to the church. I had twelve such “shut-ins,” as they were known, and I tried to visit them all every four to six weeks. This was
a challenge, because I was living in Brighton at the time and it was a forty-minute commute before I could reach any of their homes. Yet I set aside the time to do it, and it was a profound and moving experience. I would study the map, drive to a person’s residence, and carry in a little packet with a Bible, perhaps a small gift or a bit of food, and the necessary equipment for home communion. I would climb the back steps to the kitchen entrance, which was usually open. Once inside, I would call out the name of the person I was visiting and advance carefully through the house, not wanting to startle or wake anyone. Usually the person was in the same place, often a comfy chair in the kitchen, dining room, or living room. If the television was on, I would ask if I could turn it off, unless the person was completely enthralled with a soap opera. And then we would simply talk.

At the beginning all I noticed were the superficial aspects of each home: the memorabilia on the walls and mantelpieces, the decaying furniture, the uneaten containers of food, which I would often clean up and move into the kitchen trash. Some homes also had a strong and unpleasant smell, since many residents could not control their bladders or make it to the bathroom in time. I remember one cheerful woman who sat all day in her kitchen in a huge comfy chair that was soaked with her urine. She could reach everything from her spot—her radio, her refrigerator, and her cigarettes. She was always delighted to see me and received both news and communion eagerly. After such visits I often called the city’s social services to request a professional evaluation of her needs. I thought she
could not remain in that situation for long. People occasionally came by and cleaned her up, but then she sank into the chair again.

One couple in their eighties had not left their home for twenty-five years, and they had assembled a network, now dwindling, of people to pick up their groceries and other items. One day when I was visiting them, I saw an elderly woman vigorously vacuuming the dining room. When she finished, she took a mop to the floor in the kitchen.

“Who is that?” I asked Mr. Green, the husband.

“That’s my aunt Maude,” said Mr. Green, who was in his mid-eighties. “She comes to clean house every week.”

“And how old is she?” I continued.

“Ninety-five,” he said, without the slightest surprise. She had been cleaning up for him for decades, and he didn’t find it unusual that she was still doing it.

My oldest parishioners told me amazing stories about growing up at the turn of the twentieth century. One of my favorites was Ruth, and though she had an occasionally sour view of the world and was as skittish as a cat, I could sometimes make her a cup of tea and get her talking about Somerville when she was a girl, around 1904. When she got going, she painted the picture of a bustling city, full of young men and women making their way in the world, shopkeepers and delivery boys chatting in their stores, politicians shaking hands, girls chasing hoops, and children sledding down snowy side streets. Her parents would send her at the age of five to the corner store, where she bought a quart of milk for seven cents and a loaf of bread for five.

Once while returning from such an errand she came across an ice man flogging his horse. Ice men dragged huge blocks of ice on sleighs and deposited them door to door through a special hatch built into the side of each house (our home still has one, now sealed off). In the absence of electric refrigeration, this arrangement kept food cool for days. The horse pulling this particular load was failing from the weight, the cold, and age or illness. The vendor, not wanting to lose his shipment, flogged it harder. Eventually, right in front of Ruth’s eyes, the horse simply lowered itself to its side and died. Recounting the story more than eighty years later, Ruth relived it through a flurry of tears. “He was dead!” she cried in the tone of a horrified girl. “But still that man kept whipping him and whipping him! And there was nothing I or anyone could do!” She wept for five minutes. I sat there murmuring “I understand,” watching the soul of a wounded child come flowing through the fragile and failing body of a very old woman perched like a bird across from me on a chair.

I also tended to the sick and the dying. I would learn through a phone call that someone had taken ill, and even though I lived forty minutes away I would head over to the hospital. Sometimes I made a mistake. Once Mrs. Green called just as I had come in the door: Was there any chance I could come soon to visit her husband? I would be happy to, I said, perhaps the following morning. Certainly, she said, though her voice lacked conviction. When I arrived at her home the next day, I discovered that Mr. Green had died; in fact, he had been dying
when she was talking to me, and all she had wanted was for me to be with him at that moment. I felt I had let both of them down badly.

Death came month after month. Some were long anticipated and could be understood as the end of a long and rich life. I performed one funeral for a man from Newfoundland who had taken a job as a teenager on a North Atlantic fishing boat. On his first voyage, his captain received the call to go pull the frozen bodies of those who had died on the
Titanic
out of the ocean. There were also sudden tragedies that threw families into despair: car crashes, heart attacks, industrial accidents. One woman, who was tremendously overweight, had a fatal heart attack as she was preparing to go out with her family to celebrate her twenty-eighth birthday. At her service in a funeral home, the volume of tears from her friends and family made it almost impossible to finish. I tried to visit people whenever they were in the hospital. I knew as well as anyone how disorienting and frightening a hospital could be.

As my congregation aged, my visits changed. I was spending more time visiting people who were slowly dying of all the complications of old age. I memorized the location of all the pay phones on the street corners of Somerville so that I could call ahead to check with patients or their nurses. I came to know the parking lots, coffee shops, and wards of every hospital and nursing home. My job was simple but important: to offer words of comfort and encouragement to people who knew that they had started down the long exit ramp of the world. Some were resigned, some were terrified, and many were surprised,
because their lives had moved so quickly. They wanted to tell me their stories, talk about why they wished they had talked to their parents or sister or husband one more time before some great separation, and told me about their fears of the medications and doctors that were slowly filling their lives like an incoming tide. I listened, and sometimes I brought them up-to-date on the news of the parish or gave them communion. I always prayed with them, which I quickly realized was not about my skill at finding the right words but about reminding them that there is nothing wrong or frightening about laying our desires, hopes, and fears before God.

I had six or eight people, mostly women, who shrank into drier and drier husks. They stopped moving and eating, they turned away from nurses who offered medication, they slept through most of our encounters. Sometimes they would wake and grab my fingers with striking power, as though they wanted to hold on to a few more minutes of life through my hand.

And then, one by one, they died. Sometimes, through some miracle, I was actually there, standing at their bedside while their breathing melted away and the room suddenly became filled with a dense, immovable peace. More often I would get a call that someone was failing, often at night, and I would do my best to put on my clothes and head out. When Kay Emerson’s husband, Al, collapsed, I arrived just a few moments after his death. She was quiet but devastated. The doctors and nurses, having tried to save him, were wrapping up and stowing their equipment.

Al lay flat on his back, in the pajamas he had been wearing when the ambulance went streaking over to get him. Kay kissed his amiable face and shiny bald pate, and she tenderly stroked his cheek. When I held his hand, he was still warm, which does not last long after death.