Requiem

Requiem

I watch them die all the time. Addicts of every sort come thought the Emergency Departments and Intensive Care Units on their ways to embracing addiction’s clandestine promise of ultimate despair. There is no worst. Teenagers and young adults—to heroin mostly, but there are so many other’s out there stealing lives as well. Women and men of more mature years—besotted a lifetime by alcohol’s furtive ways. They are strangers to me. I hold their weeping wives and mothers; absorb their father’s and their sister’s and their brother’s rage of lifetimes spend in helplessness before the sneaking specter of the demon they watch daily drain the life of the one they love. Their children I embrace, too tightly sometimes, joining in their desperate search, a place to hold at once their great despair of love and anger raging at their parent’s ultimate betrayal.

These apparitions try to follow; pushing and shoving too close after, as I close the group room door. Behind which we do battle with the demon’s deep despair. There its acolytes gather seeking abrogation from the vows they make with every urge and thought and action while still in covenant with its fate. Among them I try to mirror devotion of another sort, sacraments to another faith, a liturgy of hope and compassion’s contemplation, mystic bonds with other strugglers on their way. There is none else to be done for them, only they can utter prayers for their conversion from betrayal of the demon’s faith, only they can journey deep within contemplating offerings of another sort, to a faith they can see only dimly through the mirror of the devotions of the others gathered in the faith.

Unexpected some wraith wanders in when the door closes a bit to slow and we are forced, bowed—helpless before its hopeless form. There is no hope in helplessness, or in our grief before its victory over what was never ours to touch or to command. With one heart and mind and soul we wished we had found the power to exorcise, found words, or thoughts, or gestures, ideas or even deeds to save her from her act of dying devotion to the dread-filled faith. We gathered in our grief for the loss of her and the grieving of ourselves, lost supplicants against our wills, to the truth of our own power spent for love of her which could never be enough to will her will to share our common faith.

Gathered here in the face of death, too real before us in our grief, the outward and visible sign of her devotion to the faith which daily offers sacrament: “Take, drink of this chalice of hopelessness; take, eat this bread broken in your brokenness; every time you drink of this chalice and eat this bread you proclaim despairs victory, this day all your days to come.” We who could not save her, can only share deeply our own sacrament, affirm our common faith, pray the liturgy of our hours of hope, sit in quiet contemplation of the compassion which we share.

There is no better memorial to her memory which we all share than to stand before the gates of death proclaiming the faith which offers life. There is no hope more powerful than to reflect this faith which we know is true so that others seeking abrogation might hear our common prayer. Amen.