dear Nell

on sunday when we heard the news, your fellow writers gathered around the large table and talked. about your yellow suit. we read your stories, finding particular meaning in your words, especially now. how in 2006 you wrote about how afraid you were to live alone when Mel's Alzheimer's required that he live away from you. how you loved nothing more than to do his laundry in those days, and found joy when for a fleeting moment he knew your face. how you used to be a 'ready, fire, aim' kind of person (your words), then one day you reversed the order of your day, placing 'aim' in the middle, and oh my, what a difference it made. 

we heard about your trips, and how at 80 you took yourself on a pilgrimage to Scotland of all places, lugging your heavy suitcase across the whole country, it felt like, and then subway and ferry, to get to a place you weren't sure you really wanted to go. and even though your body didn't feel like climbing the rocky hill to the ocean, damn if you didn't do it. 

and we got the metaphor, all of us wondering, could we? 

at the end of your climb, you found a rock to throw into the ocean, the whole thing weighing you down. 'what rock will you throw away?' you asked us four years ago, and again on sunday. and we thought of how, not a month ago, you stood before us and told us all about other rocks. choosing love over science when you were young, but now that the love of your life is gone, you are giving back to science, and to a young man who wants, as you once did, to be a doctor. 

'many blessings have come to me through my family, my friends, and especially my church,' you wrote this fall. 'what else could I possibly want and wish for? even though there are times i regret i did not pursue my dream, i see that God can bring many blessings out of disappointments and help us find peace as we take a different path.'

your words.

of course by then we'd heard the story. of the heart attack, and how, caught away from the phone, you dragged yourself across the floor to get to it. and it took you hours. and then, you got better, then worse, then better again, and we all knew come Lent you would be sitting in your chair to the right of me, writing only part of the story with the rest of us captured and waiting to hear the rest of it, as is your way. how many times did i say it: Nell, you have to write your story. or at least let me come and sit at your knee and listen as you tell it, and i will write it down for you.

we knew, knew, you were not done yet.

when we last spoke you told me stories of your life i had not yet heard. and i found myself thinking: will i ever be able to look at life as Nell does? will i ever stop mourning dreams i've lost and think, as you, instead about dreams yet to be?

you changed things. i remember the first time i knew who you were, when i walked into the room with the giant table we would gather around together for two years, searching for someone to lead our church. and you prayed a very Methodist prayer (which was not a bad thing at all, but different) and i wondered how you would get along with some of the folks in the room, how we would all come together to find one leader, but you implored us to approach the whole thing in prayer, and well, we did as you asked. and it worked.

i remember, too, how when our group of varied folk finally settled on that name, and he came to visit, climbing into the pulpit, you and i stood in the back of the church and you said: doesn't he look good up there? and just this week, you would have said the same, except this time, he spoke about you.

last year when all the women gathered for this new idea nobody really knew would work, you gathered the women in your age group and you stood in front of everyone, looking out at the 30s, 40s, 50s, the 80s and said: isn't this grand?

nell, you are grand. 

and oh, you would have loved it. the whole thing. how every single pew was filled (even the new seats). two bishops, not as celebrants, but sitting there in the pews with us, missing you. how we sang O, God Our Help in Ages Past, which i have been singing since i was a child and know every single word. as i sang, imagining you singing with me, i looked up at that big cross that you sit closest to, thinking oh my, she is there.

and all the words said about you that were just right.

and that most beautiful Goodall arrangement of the 23rd Psalm which is not sad at all, but promising, and as i listened it was clear to me you were with us, too.

i was sad, nell, we all were. we sang I Sing A Song of the Saints of God, a child's hymn, really, but you always considered yourself a child of God. and you have been a saint among us.

i watched as greg sprinkled dirt from the garden over the pall. watched as your handsome grandchildren clutched each other, wondering what part of you each of them takes with them, listening as just then, a breeze blew through the wind chimes in the garden and it just felt like you, all over the place. 

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

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pulling out the stops

let me start off by saying i am not an overtly religious person. being a cradle Episcopalian, i am not at all comfortable talking about God to people i don't know. but i pray every day, i go to church every week, and i understand that God does work in my life all the time. even when i don't ask Him to. and even when i least deserve it.

i've said before on this blog that i work at my church. and i love my job. it allows me to do everything i have learned in 30 years as a writer and even to learn a few things i didn't know before. and i love the people i work with.

people who don't work for churches might think that in every day there are moments when God is just about everywhere as you work. that may be true for some, but a lot of the time, i've found a day's makeup to be much like i imagine that of the secular office world — things like yelling at the office copier for not printing things right (ours is apparently post-menopausal) or not understanding how the phone system works. or having people stop by asking you to do things that aren't in your job description or emails about all the typos you make during a given week. (that would be a lot).

sometimes, though, you do find God moments, and not necessarily when you're sitting in the pews on Sunday trying to listen really hard to the message and not think about the mess you left on your desk just down the hall or the work you have to get started on the next day when you come back to work.



one thing that probably doesn't happen much in the secular world is having organ music waft down the hallways. real live organ music, not some recorded stuff, emitting from thousands of pipes that are just getting used to their voices. and it's loud and sweet and moving and oh, so, like you think God's voice would sound like, if you could actually hear it.



a God moment happened this week, and it began with music. my boss heard it first and wandered down the hall toward the church as if drawn by the pied piper, and i followed. we've recently installed a new organ in our nave, (well, i lifted nary a pipe) and it is not unusual for us to hear our organist, Kevin, practicing for Sunday. but this, well, this was different.



once inside the almost empty church, i chuckled as the theme from Star Wars shouted from the pipes. then my eyes moved toward a small cluster of women gathered in the pews. one sat in a wheelchair, and as i drew closer, i recognized her as one of our parishioners whose body is waging a battle with Lou Gehrig's Disease. i last saw her two years ago when she came to have her picture taken for the church directory. dressed in a sweater as blue as a bachelor's button, she was beautiful, and i told so. she tried to speak, but had clearly lost her voice, and i asked if she had laryngitis. she wrote on a pad and handed it to me, explaining that the disease was talking now. 

today she can no longer walk, though she can grip the pad and as she sat next to the pew, she wrote down the music she wanted to hear Kevin play for her own private concert. 

i sat in a pew across the aisle and listened, as Kevin played 'Silent Night' and 'Amazing Grace' — in ways i'd never heard them in all my years of listening. i pulled out the prayer book and said a few silent prayers for another parishioner and friend in the hospital. (and a couple for myself.)

and then Kevin said: now i'm going to pull out all the stops.

from the moment he played the first notes of Bach's "Toccata in D minor"  (having no real classical music knowledge, i know it as the organ music from Phantom of the Opera) the change in the room was palpable.

i watched Kevin play, wishing i was sitting behind him so i could see the movement of his fingers and arms as he worked at the console, pulling out stops and playing keys and pedals, giving his new console a real workout. then suddenly i felt the music wrap itself around me, and i just closed my eyes, hearing each organ note, not only with my ears but within me, transported, as he played, to somewhere i had not visited before.

and he played on. and on, notes i had never heard, like a new parent coaxing this infant instrument to speak up, and clearly.

photo: graham rountree of rountreemedia

when i did open my eyes, they were drawn upward, toward the pipes themselves, their powerful notes blending as they shouted, whispered, shouted again. i have not yet found the adjectives to adequately describe what i heard. but it was beautiful.

finally i looked at the clutch of women gathered around their chair-bound friend, and they were weeping. 

Kevin played more softly then, and my boss and i slipped quietly out and back to the work at hand, but the moment hasn't left me. Kevin's playing was meant as a gift for a woman who can rarely, if she ever will again, hear music played in the church she loves. yes, the gift was hers, but all of us present received it, too.

for the past few years i have reported on the progress as our new organ was being built. and in august last year, when the first pipes began to arrive, i started taking pictures — hundreds of them — to record this historic moment in the life of our parish. i've climbed up in the pipe chamber, learned that pipes are made of wood and steel and range in size from the height and breadth of a fledgling oak to some the size of a golf pencil. they are round and square. and the keys that make them work are crafted of polished bone and rosewood. i've listened as the organ builders refined the voice of each of those thousands of pipes to fit our space. 

but in that moment, i came to understand just how an organ is so much more than a collection of pipes and wood. it's a breathing thing.

i've written and rewritten that last sentence a dozen times now. it just sounds so over-the-top, clichéd to call a musical instrument a living thing. well, it was an over-the-top moment for me. it felt to me like God's voice got down from the lofty place we often put it and sat in the pew with me. and with the woman in the wheelchair. i don't know how she feels about her disease, but i can imagine how i would feel. I would want to roar as loudly as those pipes, saying 'can't you hear me? i am angry!', and then i would probably cry softly for a little while.

if you think about it real hard, maybe what happened on monday of this week, was that our new organ gave God a voice to speak to a woman who won't ever have a voice again and He said i am angry too. and i am crying with you. but despite all, there is still great beauty in the world. and she — we — all understood what He was saying.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

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