Category Archives: Death

On cards and other gestures

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For more than 25 years, H. and I have been observing an almost daily ritual. We get up at six and drink maté, a Paraguayan tea.* During the half hour we’re imbibing our caffeine, I wake up (as a morning person, H. is already wide awake), we usually read Rejoice!, and we cross-check our schedules for the day. Then we get on with it.

Weekends, it may all take a little longer, and may include reading the paper and listening to music.

The past weeks we’ve added something else to our maté routine. We’ve been re-reading — three or four of them a day — the sympathy cards we received after my father’s death in December. We think about the senders and what they and the cards have said, and we include them with gratitude in our morning prayers.

I hope it won’t hurt anyone’s feelings to say that most of these cards then land in the recycling bin. The point I want to make is how much the cards have meant to us. Sometimes a person forgets the power of the small gesture — and how large small can be — until one is on the receiving end of one after another after another.

Some cards came from people we would not have expected to send one, and the surprise of that touched us. Some people who knew Dad took the time to share their memories – memories that enlarged our own memories of him. Some added a poem or reflected on similar experiences. Each card was unique, each one was appreciated.

We were the recipients of many other gestures-for-times-of-loss as well, such as emails and phone calls of condolence. Last week, we got the list of people who had donated money in honour of our father to the charity we’d chosen. Again, it was a humbling and touching experience, to see the names and think of what these gifts meant about Dad and us and these givers, and for the recipient mission agency.

Some gestures took the givers significant time. One friend spent the day baking cookies for us because she knew we were having a lot of out-of-town company. Several friends and a neighbour brought meals, including some of the most spectacular soups I’ve tasted in a long time. The church deacons came to visit, bearing  a fruit basket.

These are traditional ways of caring; they’re gestures and rituals we bring out for certain times. But like any ritual, whether it’s a daily one like our morning tea, or something practiced for specific circumstances, they build and maintain community. And what a wonderful thing it is to be part of community.

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*Drunk alternately as an infusion of hot water over yerba tea leaves in a container called a guampa and sipped through a metal sieve-straw called a bombilla. (Yerba leaves and paraphernalia pictured left.) Let’s just say it grows on you.

For the people of Haiti

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Last evening, at a gathering of the regional Mennonite-Catholic Dialogue (a group of six Mennonites and six Catholics which meets several times a year), John Long of the host parish led us in a prayer for the people of Haiti that he had adapted from Edward Hays’ Prayers for the Domestic Church (1979). It was deeply meaningful to gather up in prayer the many responses and emotions we feel as we try to absorb the news. John gladly gave me permission to share some excerpts here, from “Prayer upon Hearing of a Death.”

Blessed are You, Lord our God,
     who are the keeper of the Book of Life. 
This week we have learned of the death of many in Haiti
     and, as this type of news always does,
     it comes as a shock.
We know, Lord, that we all must die,
     and that You alone keep the dates of our death
     within Your Book of Life,
     but we still share the shock of death.
 That news carries with it the shadow of fear,
     for it is a reminder that, someday, we too shall die.
Today, then, we pray for all these
     who have passed through the doorway of death,
     and we pray for ourselves as well.
We remember in our prayer
     the members of the families
     who surely are lost in sorrow at this time.
Support them with Your Holy Spirit
     and grant them the courage to embrace this tragic mystery…. 

May we best remember these men,
     women, and children unknown to us
     by being grateful for life today
     and by loving You, our God,
     with all our heart, strength, and mind.
Lord, grant eternal rest to all who have died,
and divine consolation to all of the surviving families.

Blessed are You, Lord our God,
Keeper of the Book of Life. Amen.
 
 

The commitment of Peter J. Dyck

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Peter J. Dyck. Photo credit: MCC

 

Peter J. Dyck (1914 – 2010), well-known in Mennonite circles for his work with refugees in post-World War II Europe and beyond, died in Scottdale, Pa. last week, at 95. 

He almost died as a child, in 1921, of typhoid and hunger because of the famine in Russia. Thanks to food assistance provided by the newly formed Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), he survived, however, and with his family was able to immigrate to Canada.

The memory of that food aid would later motivate him to serve with MCC in England during the war. After the war, he and his wife Elfrieda (Klassen), who was equally involved in their dynamic partnership, moved to the Netherlands to direct a huge relief effort. They also organized and led the transport of some 5,500 Mennonites in four ships to new homes in South America.

The couple worked with MCC and the Mennonite church in various capacities throughout their lives, but it’s the events associated with the refugee work that will probably remain most closely associated with their names. Certainly those stories of rescue and resettlement, full of drama and pathos, formed a significant part of my sense of how the world had unfolded during the brutal and turbulent years just before my birth. I’m not sure how they came to me, but it must have been through Mennonite periodicals, speakers, and books. Books like Helen Good Brenneman’s But Not Forsaken, and later Barbara Smucker’s excellent children’s novel, Henry’s Red Sea, about one of the most dramatic of the events, the movement of former Russian Mennonite refugees through Russian-occupied territory by train to reach a ship waiting to take them to a new homeland. Peter Dyck too was a great storyteller and did a great deal of public speaking, and with Elfrieda, co-authored a fascinating account of their postwar experiences, Up from the Rubble.

Yesterday, in the sharing time in church, one of the women in our congregation recalled with gratitude Peter Dyck’s life and service. She was three years old when her family crossed the ocean in one of those groups overseen by the Dycks. She also reminded us – as an encouragement to the younger generation – that Dyck was in his 30s when he was doing the work that made such a difference for her and so many others. I don’t know how aware the Dycks were at the time of the historical significance of their gathering and re-location of refugees. Perhaps they sensed it, but were probably mostly just busy giving their best intelligence, energy, and fortitude to their assignments.

Somehow it all begins to seem very long ago, and with the passing of Peter Dyck even longer. So I too commend Peter (and Elfrieda, who died in 2004) Dyck to our memory and the events of that era to our attention. I think there’s still a great deal to learn from those times, especially from watching ordinary people work out their commitment to compassion and service in complicated environments, and doing this, not only because they’ve been helped themselves, but also because that’s what Christian disciples do in a needy world.

* A report of Dyck’s death and fuller bio can be found at the MCC website, here. The article includes an invitation to share personal memories. Some have already appeared, to further round out and bless the legacy of this man.