Ash Wednesday
“What we call the beginning is often the end, And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” — from The Little Gidding by T.S. Elliott
On March 11, 2011, my father died. It was a Friday, not a Wednesday. He would be buried on Sunday. Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, wrote that the ashes of Ash Wednesday are properly thought of as Christ’s victory over death. Ashes as victory. My father’s death did not feel like a victory, but a prolonged sigh of defeat.
And that is what I remember most: that last long sigh.
I awoke that morning, around six o’clock, not sure why I had awakened. My mother was asleep in the chair next to his hospital bed there in the corner room of the inpatient hospice unit. I was beside the wall, a little further off, on a fold-away cot. There are probably 15 hospital beds there in that building, in separate rooms just like ours. There were nurses and staff and a common area in the middle of the building. There were flowers in the commons and a large, quietly-playing television, where a few people were taking breaks from sitting with a loved one who is struggling to breathe, struggling to live.
The room where we had slept was quiet. There was darkness, but the darkness was not complete. Unlike a hospital, hospice rooms are not filled with monitors and screens that light the room and the patient. It…
