Love sincerely, urgently, passionately

8th August 2011 · 0 Comments

By Fr. Jerome LeDoux
Contributing Columnist

As perhaps all of us do, I always leave a funeral grasping for something I cannot find, feeling that there was something not thought about, not expressed and not shared. Above all, I leave with an urgency about life, love and sharing the gifts of life.

That urgency pursued me as I drove away from Lake Charles back to Fort Worth. Knowing that Herman, my brother-in-law, was only two years old when his mother died and only thirteen when his father died, I meditated on the brevity and elusiveness of love.

Even when things seem at their best, our mutual dance with love and its beguiling charms and delights flash across the stage of life with bewildering speed. A big, powerful man whose good looks punctuated his zest for life, his love for family gatherings, zydeco, horses and good Creole/Cajun cooking, Herman did not wait for life to come to him.

Instead, he stayed in the mainstream of his big family and huge extended family, sharing and enjoying the blessings God had given him.

Although his daily contacts with mercury and asbestos as part and parcel of his work at a chemical plant began to wear him down, he did not let it slow him down or deter him from the joie de vivre.

In just two months beyond his 69th birthday — a span we consider brief — Herman had completed his dance with life and love after 42 years of marriage. At my sister Aggie’s bedside within two hours after his death, I listened painfully to her account of his final struggles and passing, ending with the anguished words, “And now I’m a widow!”

That sounded all too familiar, for our senior sister, Veronica LeDoux Mitchell, had lost her husband Howard “Mitch” Mitchell in October 1987. A good father to their two daughters Marlene and Gail, Mitch was only 67, but a congenial, great kind of guy.

Looking around at the funeral, I thought, “Now both of my sisters are widows.” Looking beyond them, I spotted many widows and widowers in the congregation. More poignantly in some cases, I saw some folks whose dance with life and love in marriage was cut short by every personal or family problem you can name under heaven.

Worse than by sickness and premature death, the brief dance with life and love in some unions was cut off by separation or divorce. Depending on the circumstances, that termination is at times much more painful and unsettling than widowhood is.

As our life and love flash across the screen of life with the seeming speed of lightning, numerous faces tell the tale of people who feel they have been taunted by the delirious promises of life and love, by early, gleeful intoxication but rapid termination. My prolonged highway meditation carried me over the range of beautiful though puny efforts of us human beings to tell our vital story of life and love. Hung up in my mind was the song, “You can dance” with whomever, “but, darling, save the last dance for me.” Or, “My prayer is to linger with you at the end of the day in a dream so divine.” With such human dreams of love come visions of all the joys of family life, growing together in the faith of our mothers and fathers, in breaking bread and sharing ancestral storytelling, music, recreation and all kinds of delightful communication.

No medium of communication, no words, no action in life is nearly so eloquent as a funeral, even when little is said or sung. So compelling is the object lesson of the funeral itself that people are drawn to it, to its celebration and to news about it.

Likewise, a funeral is incomparable for being a time of gratitude, grief and grace. No matter how short or troubled a life may have been, amid our loss and grief we experience the power of God’s grace and an overwhelming need to say thanks for the gift of life and love of the deceased, thanks for his/her family and extended family. The shortness of our days drives us to love each other sincerely, urgently and passionately. Over 16 centuries ago, the great St. Augustine said it well, “You made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you!”

This article was originally published in the August 8, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper