Old Saviour Church

* This is copied and modified from my previous blog, “Anglican, Plain.” Again, this is about a real person in a parish where I served a few years ago. When I write about these former parishioners, I don’t use their real names, although it is impossible to change the setting in which I met them. Those readers who live in the locations where these anecdotes took place may recognize the people. Your experience with these people may have been different. Please respect the privacy of their families if you think you recognize of whom I write.*

Hetty lived in the community where I was pastor. She was a recurring name on every visiting list left by my predecessors.  She was just about sixty years old. I don’t think she had ever had an income-producing job in her life. Her days had revolved around caring for her mother since she was young. She was a prolific knitter. It provided a supplement to her tiny disability pension and gave her a few treats in her quiet life.

She had never married. She had been born outside wedlock. Her mother, as far as I knew, had never married, and Hetty was an only child. The extended family had lived on a hardscrabble farm on the edge of the settlement.  They had been late immigrants, and the land they had obtained was swampy and cedar-choked. It wasn’t much of a farm to support several brothers and a sister, and then a single child. Hetty had a photo of herself as a child, sitting amongst her extended family. She had a pet chicken on her lap.

She was rather like a plump little hen herself. When I met her, she was trimmed down from being a very plump hen indeed. She still had the broody figure, and she habitually slumped forward in her chair and when walking, a result, I think, of a lifetime of sitting and encroaching arthritis. She would tuck her arms back along her sides, a habit from knitting, which  enhanced the hen-like appearance. Her eyes were bright, and her hair, growing back after chemotherapy, was a dark shock that usually stood up in three directions, like a hen’s comb. She was a survivor of breast cancer. The cancer diagnosis and treatment had come to define her life.

She had a hoarse, unmodulated voice. It would soar in volume as she talked, relating one of her many anecdotes. She was animated when she recounted her many doctors’ appointments, how the doctors were so nice to her, how they truly cared, how loved and supported she felt. Except for Doctor Margaret, who could do no right, being a woman doctor. I wouldn’t say Hetty was a hypochondriac. It was just that for the first time in her life, people took care of her. She loved all her (male) doctors greatly. I don’t know if they were appreciative of her love, but in her own way, it was innocent and faithful.

I called on her at least once a month. She did not drive, so she was dependent on neighbours and friends for shopping and entertainment. She wasn’t a television watcher. I suspected that she couldn’t follow the plots of soap operas or dramas, and her sense of humour was old world.  English was not her first language. She spoke Danish all her life, with enough cousins and neighbours who also spoke it that she did not lose her language skill.

Hetty lived in a house trailer, or a mini-home as they are called there, which had been purchased with insurance money after the family homestead had burned, leaving her and her mother homeless. It was circa 1976, outfitted with a complete kit of furniture. I had lived in a similar model about 1978, so I recognized it. Almost thirty years later, she still had all the original, pathetic-quality furnishings and curtains. Then she had added knick-knack shelves, whatnot tables, slim wobbly bookcases, hassocks, baskets of yarn, folding trays and most of the contents carried by W.W. Woolworth’s Five and Dime in Presque Isle. She loved a good rummage or garage sale. The little house was overheated and usually smelled of hot cooking fat. It was clean, as clean as rotating Red Cross caregivers could get it. She was a great favourite with her caregivers, as she was almost always sunny and pleasant, generous and sentimental. Only once did I ever hear her speak harshly of someone who had hurt her feelings, and it was with a great deal of sorrow as well as a bit of satisfaction in having had the last word. She cried quickly and copiously. I took care to turn the conversation away from morbid subjects, though she had a relish for the details of horrible illnesses and injuries.

Her favourite entertainment was live country music. A neighbouring church had a music night once a week in their parish hall. She was a regular. Someone would pick her up on their way by, and she sat there, week after week, tapping her feet, enjoying the hot sweet tea and cookies that were the regular fare. I believe she used to dance; it wasn’t anything I ever witnessed. I’d say her next favourite  activity was a good funeral. My Danish congregants had a healthy and earthy attitude to death. They mourned their loss, but a history of famine, forced immigration, hardship in the new world, and the loss of children to epidemics, old people to pneumonias, and young people to accidents made them aware of death in our lives, daily. Cancers are common. Fatalities in the fields or woods and on the roads and trails were a yearly occurrence. We clergy officiated a lot of funerals. Good funeral sermons and some favourite music of both the modern gospel and antique Danish hymnal were expected. The cemetery burial ended with a traditional Danish hymn sung a capella. Our local funeral director, although not Danish, would lead it if no one else had the voice for it.

The funeral lunch was not neglected. A table of traditional foods was provided by the ladies of the parish. (We had one male cook amongst us, but he was kept in reserve for smorgasbords and fund-raisers where Danish sausage and other hearty meat specialties are required.) Hetty was a society matron at funeral lunches. She found herself a good seat, walking cane beside her, and we fetched her plates of sandwiches, delicate Danish creations of good homemade bread, sweet butter, sandwich meats and thin sliced vegetables and pickles, followed by another plate or two of the delicious, cardamom-scented and otherworldly cookies that only Scandinavians can produce. (I have acquired the knack of peparkakor, a spicy molasses biscuit.)

Hetty called me occasionally. She had need of a few groceries at the end of the month; she needed a new (to her) refrigerator, so would I contact the right people for that; she hadn’t seen me in a  while and I’d left a card in the door while she was out. She had a bitter pride when she had to ask for help. People offered and she accepted. She might ask a favour but she posed it as if she would, when possible, reciprocate. She could not reciprocate with me. Not that it mattered. I am pretty nonchalant about helping people in need. But I could see the frown, the incipient tear when she realized that she was indeed bitterly poor, and she had to go to the church for help. She had to ask me. She liked me, but I was not the same as the wonderful priests in the past, Father Such, Canon Wonderful, Mr. Greatheart. I was just little Pastor Julie. She didn’t hold it against me, but my stature did not cast the same impressive shadow.

She called me from the local hospital one day. She had been admitted for surgery. She had a terrible hernia. I don’t know what caused it. I suspect a lifetime of poor health and inadequate diet was the culprit. I went in immediately to see her before the procedure. She was a fragile patient, the body weakened by cancer and its cure. It really was the worst rupture I had seen in a few years of chaplaincy and hospital ministry. Her skin had split. She was in pain, but she joked a bit about it, poking her finger delicately around the damaged navel. She had no inhibition in sharing scars and wounds with me, nor was I ever shocked by such. Ten years of shepherding had submerged forever any remaining squeamishness that had survived motherhood.

The hernia was repaired, but her condition worsened. She was taken to the big hospital in St. John, far from home. I went down to see her in the midst of her diagnostic routine.

“They got me here in Oncology,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

“What is your doctor’s plan?”

“X-rays and tests and ultrasound. But why am I in Oncology? That means Cancer.”

“Yes, it does.”

She talked a bit randomly about her cousins coming to visit, and gifts they had brought, and what the food was like. She liked her roommate. She liked the nurses.

She got quiet. I sat in the pink visitor’s chair and waited.

“Do you think I got cancer again?” she asked.

“What does your doctor say?”

“Nothing, He said it was tests.”

She got quiet again. “I got cancer again. That’s why I’m here. The medicine stuff is chemo.”

She started to cry. I held her hand.

“Can you go ask?” she said to me.

I went to the nurses’ station. I asked if someone could explain Hetty’s medical treatment to her. They arranged for a doctor to come in later.

I told her this. She shook her head.  “It’s cancer. I know it. That’s why they got me here.”

“Yes, I think so.”

She covered her face and cried. Finally, she wiped her eyes and said. “I kept you a while. It’s a long drive home. My cousin will be in soon, really. I’ll be okay.” I said a prayer and left her.

She was transferred back to the local hospital. She slowly descended into more pain. Morphine didn’t help. The cancer was in her spine. Neighbours helped in the hospital, sitting with her, getting her comfortable, bringing her little treats as long as she could tolerate food. Her property had to be sold; she talked about the nursing home. She thought she would like it.

I sat a few spells with her. She liked to have me close when she was conscious, but that was getting rare. Her eyes would glaze as she lay half-reclining in the bed, propped with pillows. She would moan softly sometimes. She started talking to someone who wasn’t in the room. “What is she saying?” asked a caregiver who didn’t speak Danish.

“She’s talking to her mother. She’s saying, mother, help me, come get me.”

We looked at each other with troubled eyes, then back at the place by the window Hetty seemed to be addressing.

She died soon after that.

She had a good Anglican funeral, in the church.

I walked up the aisle ahead of the coffin, in my black cassock and white surplice.

“I am the resurrection and the life , saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth…”

Her cousin gave a eulogy. The lessons were read, I gave a sermon. We went out to the cemetery. She was laid next to her mother. “I’ve arranged for stones,” her cousin said. “For her, her mother, and her uncles. The family could never afford them. I can do that for her now. It’s the last thing we can give her.”

And so it is. The last good words to be spoken, the last gift, the hope of the resurrection.

“Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”

On the north shore of New Brunswick, on the disintegrating cliffs of sandstone with their deep granite bones, my parish had two cemeteries. The Clifton Cemetery, across from Christ Church, is in danger of  falling into the sea in a few decades. The relentless sea will take the bones and headstones of old sailors and fishermen who escaped a watery grave. The other cemetery is at Salmon Beach, a quarter of a larger burial ground known as Sand Hill. As is often the case with rural maritime cemeteries, the land was useless for farming, so it got used for some other kind of planting.

A hundred years of burials had pretty much filled our zone of the cemetery. Family plots were overlapping. Negotiations went on for one family to buy an empty nook or two from another. But sometimes those spaces weren’t empty as shown on the cemetery map.

The brass sounding rod was often employed. Driven hard into the ground, the ten foot rod would find anything solid. Poor families didn’t always buy headstones. In a generation past, the hand dug graves didn’t always fall in a neat line. Sounding revealed any misplaced vaults or caskets. In years past, plywood vaults weren’t used. A hole was dug, the coffin lowered, and the grave back-filled.  This made it easy to mistakenly re-open an old, unmarked grave. Years of topping up the depressions, and the natural shifting and settling of a piece of land that was mostly a roughly grassed dune, made the topography uncertain.

It was an ugly cemetery. Shaped like a dead whale, it had badly fashioned wrought iron gates, gravel  paths and an assortment of cheap thin headstones. It was bordered by chokecherry and scrub pine. It sloped down to a gully and a slab of fill built up to provide more plots. It had all the peacefulness of a vacant parking lot.

My archdeacon asked me to assist at a funeral one Saturday. I couldn’t, with a commitment for home communions that day, but I said I would come by the cemetery for the committal. He was concerned about the bereft, adult daughter, who had cared for her elderly father for a decade, and his twin brother, as well. The brother had died two years before, and she had been distraught then. Now that the frail old father was gone, he expected that he would need some help with an hysterical daughter.

I arrived at the cemetery just as he pronounced, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…” The daughter, with her son’s arm lightly around her shoulders, threw herself to her knees, wailing, as the casket was lowered. I lunged through the little crowd and caught her by the arms. “No!” she shrieked. “Don’t take Daddy away!” The son and I wrestled her back from the edge of the grave. She struggled against us.

“Mum!” he shouted. “You are not jumping in that grave.”

“Daddy!” she cried and keened. I had her in a lock grip around the waist as her son stood in front of her, his hands on her shoulders.

The archdeacon hurriedly finished the office, and relatives lifted the weeping daughter to a car, where she was locked in with hefty female cousins on either side.

The archdeacon was as pale as his surplice. I asked, “Do you need a nerve tightener?”

He shook his head. “I don’t drink.” He stalked off with a frown and left me to supervise the back-fill of the grave.

When we met again, I tried to explain. “These are people who aren’t far out of the old country.”

“Which old country?”

I gave him a deep, deep look, the sort of look one gives a rather stubborn and obtuse child who really does know better.

“Look at your parish names. What do you think is their ethnicity?”

He took out his parish list. (And I thought, You don’t know their names?)

“Reilly, Murray, Scott, Elways, O’Mallory, O’Thomas…”

“Irish. You haven’t been here long, have you?”

“I arrive just two months before you.”

“You hadn’t noticed a lot of emotion among them at funerals?”

“This is only the second funeral I’ve had here.”

Right. I had been doing all the funerals.

“Do you know what keening is?”

He gave me a blank-faced stare.

“It is a form of mourning. The women wail and cry at the graveside. They used to do it for the full three days of the wake. You will find they still do it in some families. They get all worked up. It lets the dead soul know the family cared.”

“That is absolutely pagan! Why do they do this?”

“It imitates the cry of the banshee.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

I have a glass face. Whatever I am thinking shows. I must have looked incredulously stunned.

“How can you not know what the banshee is?”

“Is it an animal?”

I’m sure I tilted my head like a puzzled dog.

“Ban shee. Bean sidhe,” and I spelled it for him, “is the familiar spirit of an old Irish or Scottish family, that wails over the dying. It is an omen of a death. It means…” (and I whispered) “.. Fairy Woman. One of the good people.”

He slammed his hand on his desk. I jumped.

“I…I have no tolerance for this nonsense! Surely they don’t believe in such…such things!”

I sat very still.

“Surely you don’t believe in this!”

I couldn’t tell him. I had reasons not to trust him with what I believed and didn’t believe. (Although that is a tale for another rainy day.)

Yes, I believe in the banshee. I’ve heard her. So have other people I know. It is an eerie, terrifying cry, that rises in pitch, wavers, drops, and starts again. I have reason to believe. It isn’t belief; it is knowledge.

But I really didn’t want to make another visit to the bishop’s office.

Oh, there are more stories out of that cemetery of thin ghosts…