It’s All Saints day. Softened by a surprise Southern snow, this day for remembering our dead snuggles with me on the couch and watches red leaves swirl onto frozen white ground. What a metaphor.
Remembering outweighs mourning today, although some memories bring a tear. The warmth of the tea cup in my hand reminds me of the warmth of my husband’s hand at the close of each day. We would hold hands and share our day over a glass of wine. He was always late for dinner but never late for wine. Our slow decompression in the evening is one of the things I miss the most. His aristocratic, Southern way of savoring time calmed my excitable nature. He was very good for me in that way.
All the older folks in my life said, “You need to marry him.” To a person they told me that. Not “should” or “could” or “ought to” but “you need to marry him.” We were working together, but not dating. Actually, I was dating a prison architect at the time, so maybe that was part of it. (Not an architect serving time but a guy who designed prisons. Specifically, prison common rooms and showers.) The architect was modern and edgy and he lived in a downtown condo with exposed pipes, a steel kitchen and a reclaimed brick wall with a floor-to-ceiling view of the Mississippi as it meandered through downtown Memphis. I have no idea why I dated him, other than the fact that he looked a LOT like Sting, drove a BMW and had incredible taste in restaurants. Perrin’s deep personal integrity and wild-man “I can do anything” spirit trumped the architect’s expensive restaurants and red BMW. I needed the strength of his calm. God has a preference for giving us what we NEED as opposed to what we think we WANT.
One of the spirits snuggling up next to me today is my Mom. Dad was a pastor, but it was Mom who taught me how to walk a faithful walk. She was a 43-year breast cancer survivor who was supposed to be dead. She and God did everything together and I do mean everything. Now, as a kid, I thought this was nothing short of kooky. When you’re 8 and your Mom is mopping the floor with God it seems a little weird, you know? But when you pass your “Lordy, Lordy, Look Who’s 40” birthday, and you want to reinvent your life and be a storyteller, that Mom who knows how to do everything with God turns into Wonder Woman. She was so supportive of my calling, even when it meant I would lose a lot in the bargain. In fact, she was the first one to tell me that it might cost me, “You’ll probably have to give up everything you hold dear: Your magazine, your life in the city, your friends. But following God will give you things you never dreamed of, too, honey.” How right she was.
They moved with us, taking the small apartment on the back of the house because her cancer had come back, Daddy had Parkinson’s and they could no longer live alone. As her cancer metastasized first one place and then another, I took her everywhere she needed to go and made her favorite meals until she no longer had an appetite. In the last week of her life all she wanted was music, so I sang the whole Methodist hymnal for her. As her energy moved between here and the beyond, the hymns of the faith that she had so loved to play on her grand piano traveled with her. And it was an honor to be there when God came and folded her last breath into his arms in a gesture of utter tenderness.
Daddy came to visit last night, too, as I reclaimed the small closet that was “his” in their old apartment. (I’m converting it from a photo studio back into an apartment.) He sat beside me as I leafed through his old church bulletins boxed by liturgical season: Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, Ordinary Time. Another small box held index cards with the lectionary texts in alphabetical order and underneath each one he had recorded various sermon themes in his scratchy hand. His life of preaching in an index box will now go to his other daughter, the one who attends his seminary on a legacy scholarship. I kept his local preacher’s license, issued when he was not quite eighteen. I still remember the story of how he hitched a ride to the district meeting and ended up in a car with the radio star, “Singin’ Sam Rayburn” who tried to convince him to join his radio show as a singing evangelist saying, “Your voice belongs on the airwaves of God!” Fortunately, the Methodists were happy to have him, too. Everyone enjoys a Welsh tenor.
And Perrin has been here all week. The faces of his often famous clients leap from huge gilded frames that are now all over the back of my house awaiting a ride to the frame broker. My husband could sense who people really were and he didn’t stop photographing them until they revealed themselves on film and then he would grin when he got what he needed.
Which brings me full circle to that idea that God gives us what we NEED instead of what we think we WANT. I thought I wanted a man in a red BMW but what I needed was another pastor’s kid, a Southern aristocrat who knew how to savor time and took care of his own. On this day of the dead, as the red and orange leaves fall soft against the snow, I am inspired by the tenderness of love well lived and reminded again that the veil that separates us from the saints is often very thin.
Click here to listen to a song
from Faith of Our Fathers, my CD dedicated to Perrin and my Dad
