“Grief tears open the fabric of our hearts, and into that vastness the mystery of love comes seeping, permeating the ravaged landscape of our lives and blessing it.” –– Mirabai Starr, Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground
I was visiting with a friend who lives in the city of Mason, Ohio, a thirty-minute drive north of Cincinnati, when I heard the text drop in. I ignored it. I did not even check to see who was sending me a message. My friend in front of me was my priority, not whoever was reaching out at that moment. A little bit later, I picked up my phone to show my friend a photo, and the wording of the text caught my eye. It was from my younger sister-in-law: Call right away.
That is never good.
My beloved brother-in-law, Ron, had collapsed while he and my sister, along with my older brother and his wife, were entering the venue to hear the Trans-Siberian Orchestra perform. He was rushed to the hospital.
“It’s not good,” said my sister-in-law. “Meet us at the hospital.”
I hopped in my car, sped onto I-71, headed south. I called my sister-in-law back to ask what entrance I needed to go to –– the hospital is a huge, sprawling complex. She didn’t take the call.
A few minutes later she called me back.
“How is he?” I asked.
Silence.
Then very softly she said, “Barbie, he’s gone.”
THE TOP OF THE TREE
That was December 6, and now as I write this, December 20, I look back at the past two weeks and see my life has been a blur of activity. Supporting my sister as she needed. Helping with funeral arrangements as I could. And now we who loved Ron are left to work our way through the holidays without him.
Through. That is the magic word here. There is no avoiding it. We, my siblings and I, those by birth and those by marriage, can only live beyond this loss by going through it.
When my parents died, I knew my siblings and I had moved to the top of the family tree. Now with Ron being the first in our generation to die, I see how the branches that we are will someday fall away as he did. Not that I did not know this. It is just the fact that mortality is now staring me in the face. It is as if a storm blew in. And much like what happens after a heavy rain, when the ground beneath my pin oak is littered with dead branches, someday each of us that Ron left behind will join him in that great mystery we call death.
GOING BEFORE US
During the first part of the funeral Mass, we sang “Be Not Afraid,” a hymn, written by the Jesuit priest Robert J. Dufford, that I have always liked. Then as many of those gathered there came forward to take Communion, I sat in my pew, trying to grasp something, hold on –– to what I did not know. I picked up the hymnal to re-read the chorus: “Be not afraid. I go before you always. Come, follow me, and I will give you rest.”
Although I know that the “I” in the chorus refers to God, I felt as if Ron were speaking to me instead. That he goes before us. That we are to follow him.
And how are we to follow him, as we continue to live our lives without him?
Ron in living every day showed us how.
SALT OF THE EARTH
Before his retirement, Ron taught school and coached football. He also was a licensed electrician who owned his own business. He lived a full life. Certainly, as true with any of us, Ron had his faults, but central to his character was a generous heart. No wonder so many people loved him.
When my small church needed a professional opinion regarding the electrical needs for new technology, Ron gave up a Saturday morning to make an assessment. When my neighbor needed a couch moved to a new apartment for her autistic grandson, Ron showed up with his truck. Everything from re-wiring a nephew’s new restaurant to replacing a ceiling fan for me, Ron came and did the work. With a smile. Often with laughter.
Ron was salt of the earth. That big heart of his brought light to so many until the day it just gave out. It is no wonder that more than one of his football players called him their favorite coach.
LAUGHTER, LIGHT, LOVE
When the poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lost her teenage son to suicide, a friend called her and offered comfort with these words: “He has given you his love light to carry.” I borrowed those words when speaking at the Celebration of Life that we held for Ron the day after the evening funeral mass.
“When I think of my brother-in-law, I think of laughter. I think of light. I think of love,” I said to family members, friends, former coworkers and students, all who had gathered to celebrate a life now gone. “It is now our job to carry Ron’s love light out into the world for him.”
And as I write these words, with tears from the loss of a brother who will never again sit on my couch, never again laugh and talk to me, sharing his heart, I say to him: “Ron, you who go before us, show us the way, and we will follow, carrying your love light. I know it is bright enough to carry us through.”
In loving memory of Ronald J. Radenheimer, 1948 – 2024
FOR REFLECTION: Think of the loved ones who have gone before you in death and how their passing tore “open the fabric of (your heart),” to quote Mirabai Starr. Could you find a sacredness in the death that you previously never would have considered? Could you see how the “mystery of love” blessed your life at that most challenging time? If not, what did you experience and how have you been able to move forward?
Top image: Pixabay/Ryan McGuire
Midtext image: St. Francis de Sales Parish, Ajax, Ontario, Canada
Side image: Pixabay/Avelino Calvar Martinez
