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Last Words
by Makayla Carmichael
As the latecomer enters the church from the front entrance, Rachael turns to look at her uncle, sitting beside her. He smiles in a whisper, gotta love how this place is designed and it was true. The church pews, laid out in crescents across the sanctuary, face the altar and the entrance purposefully, as if pressuring the congregation to be on time. It was always a little joke between them and this morning Rachael had reminded both of them, her Uncle Stu and her mother, Sunny, to hustle it so they’d arrive at the noon service on time. They’d had to leave early, driving ninety miles up the mountain to make it to the Good Friday service they attended every year at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, the beginning of their long Easter weekend getaway. Sunny was the only regular church-goer. Uncle Stu would go when he could see well enough to drive and those days had become fewer. Rachael attends on special occasions and this service, one for the community, represented by ministers of differing denominations, was her favorite.
On the way there it had been a familiar banter, Sunny reminding them of what they owed for the trip and Uncle Stu, goadingly in answer, might have to take a look at that receipt. Sunny, always organized, always anticipating being challenged by her big brother who knew how to choke a dime, handing him the receipt she’d carefully retained as evidence.Not even taking it from her hand or looking at it, he’d mumbled, can you take an IOU? Can’t get to my wallet right now and Rachael with her eyes on the road could feel her mother’s smile as well as the twinkle in her uncle’s eyes. And that is just how it went between the two siblings since childhood, the teasing, a constant thing with them, growing up and now Rachael, her mother and her uncle remained close, staying in their same small town together as the rest of the family had spread out and away.
Today they’d arrived to the service after a year of absence, post-pandemic and there were people in the congregation, glad to be back in person as well as others still on Zoom, their framed faces projected onto the wall of the church. Those stacked boxes of heads seemed silly to Rachael and so much has changed. There were seven ministers for seven words that Jesus spoke from the cross as he died. Each minister had been assigned one and would read it, then interpret the simple phrase. It amazes her how an utterance made in suffering and death can imply so much to so many. She’s reminded that there are many ways to suffer. Besides being nailed to a cross, made to wear a crown of thorns, bleeding and thirsty, seemingly forsaken, there are so many other ways and those can kill also. She wonders if her spirit is sick and maybe that is why she is here again. Or maybe she came to be reminded that suffering is universal, can be unending, but there is still joy to seek. She needs to be reminded of that today. And that is why she’ll come again and again each year. She closes her eyes, feeling as though being propelled forward and the words just appear to her. Run. Jump.
The sanctuary is quiet and still, the altar, stripped and barren, emphasizing the clean and grainy wood of the hand-hewn table and the dark wooden cross that suspends above it. It is beautiful in its simplicity, devoid of distractions that might crowd thoughts of meditation or worship and the church, the service, emit a humble purity. They sit near the windows that face the woods. Rachael will look out through them while the ministers speak, her thoughts wandering when they get too longwinded. She sits between her mother and uncle and they kneel in prayer as is customary in the Episcopal church, just briefly. Sunny, taking her time, prays longer while Rachael rests back against the pew, acutely aware of her mother’s small kneeling frame beside her, hands clasped together, eyes closed, her presence lingering.
The first minister says, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” Rachael listens, but turns her head to look out the window, longing to see snow that cleanly covers and silences, but it’s Springtime and lush with greenery, and forest sounds, and the loud sunlight streams into the woods surrounding the church. There is a house nestled in the foliage and she wonders if the people that live there can hear the congregational prayers that must carry through the woods and also…how can someone ask forgiveness for the people who are killing him? Can she strive to be that selfless? Part of her wants to give up now, not believing she could ever do that. Will she be tested like that or has she failed that test already? Rachael, remembering Sunny’s letter that she’d found, watches as the yellow day turns gray and snow appears on the ground and in the air. She sees them, her mother and father as newlyweds, driving through Snoqualmie Pass, Washington, their VW leaving tracks in the snow that are quickly covered up in the storm. It is 1958. The car slows to pull over and they both get out. Sunny is looking up, her arms outstretched. She reaches down and forms a ball of snow in her hand, sends it hurtling toward him, smashing against his sweater. She laughs, bends down to get another and it’s on. Oh, it’s so on, he whispers as he returns a zinger back at her. They run around like kids, chasing, retreating and dodging. Sunny falls and is swallowed up in the white, then rolls onto her back, moving her legs and arms into a snow angel. He falls down beside her, the powder hitting his face, melting over its warmth. His hand reaches for hers. Their faces turn to each other and the wet snow almost looks like tears as it courses down across their cheeks. Rachael surfaces from Sunny’s written words, feels her mother’s hand squeeze her own. She hears her whisper, so glad we could come again this year and her mother’s face becomes the young woman from the snowball fight, the adventurer, bravely following her love to a new life out west, where Rachael and her brother, Jimmy, had been born. Years later the family had returned east and the marriage had taken a turn, her father restless, the promise of the young lovers in the snow, forgotten. In her mother’s face Rachael searches for that early life, the happiness that had been lost and feeling a quiet calmness, hears her mother’s voice as in answer. It’s all okay now.
“Woman, behold your son. Behold your mother.” Rachael hears the minister’s words distantly. Jimmy passed away early one Sunday morning just weeks after telling Rachael he was going to die soon. She hadn’t believed him, had heard his words, but had quickly moved away from them, thinking he hadn’t meant them, believing he wouldn’t just leave like that. But she’d told her parents what he’d said. Just an accident, her father had stated, her mother agreeing and what did it matter what they chose to believe, Rachael thought? He is gone. She and her parents had stood beside Jimmy’s body, stunned. She again felt the silence that had held them so still in that moment, except for the choking sound emanating from her father’s throat like a suppressed cry and she could see her mother’s hand, reaching out to touch Jimmy’s face one last time through the sterile bitter air of formaldehyde. It was just one of the images Rachael would carry forward in her life, so long ago now. But it was all there still, something she would find in her mother’s face, the loss, permanently shadowing it. It was there just like the image of her frailty ten years ago when Sunny had gotten cancer, her skin, translucent and damp, her frame skeletal. It had been a long battle, twelve months of fighting, the surgery and radiation, her mother moving in with her for a while to make it easier for both of them. She’d been amazed at Sunny’s strength and bravery, even her endurance; the daily trips to the hospital, the claustrophobic mask her mother had worn over her face during her treatments, the painful cries that Rachael had heard in the night coming from her mother’s room. They were all just memories now. It had been hard watching her struggle, wanting to tell her things, but staying quiet, grasping for normalcy, convincing herself it would all be alright, her mother telling her so. And it had been because today Rachael couldn’t see a trace of illness in her mother’s face as she sat beside her, feeling her mother’s strength through her hand as it rested in her own. Run, jump. Bounce.
Rachael’s thoughts turn to her uncle beside her. Growing up, his home had always been a refuge, through the divorces and remarriages, the ground that seemed to constantly shift below her feet and he’d never seemed to mind when Rachael and Jimmy had appeared, unexpected for supper or at other times, just dropped off. It was the family home, her grandparent’s house first. He’d never left it except for college and a brief stint in the army. When she and Jimmy were kids, he would come home from his dental practice, their grandmother busy preparing dinner in the kitchen and they would play the game, running between the back porch doors, not letting Uncle Stu inside, his face appearing contorted in the door window panes, shaking the old loose doorknobs like a crazed monster until finally they would relent, unlocking the doors and letting him inside. He must have been tired after work, but he’d played the game with them each time enthusiastically. An orthodontist, he’d straightened her teeth, Jimmy’s too, as well as their cousins’. He’d hired a teenage Rachael to work in his practice, purposely overpaying her and when she’d gone to college, he’d helped with that too. He’d helped all of them, all the cousins that needed it, never having children of his own. When she walked across the stage at her graduation, he’d cried and when she’d moved north temporarily, away from home, he’d taken her to the mall to pick out a warm winter coat.
“I thirst.” The simple phrase seemed to propel across the quiet sanctuary. The obvious thing Jesus thirsted for was water, but they gave him soured wine. Rachael thinks, everyone thirsts for something, but do they get what they need? Did Uncle Stu get what he thirsted for? He shunned things. The year after Rachael’s grandmother died, in grief, he’d written a letter to the family, saying he did not want to receive gifts anymore, but the family ignored his request and continued to give him things. In his house Rachael found many of those presents opened, but left in the boxes, never used, the boxes stacked in corners and on top of tables and shoved underneath furniture, so much stuff. She’d wondered why he’d never given it away himself. He’d just left it there to gather dust, to step around, to see, but ignore, piles of things and she wonders did they give him what he thirsted for or had they just given him soured wine? He was a good son. He’d stayed on at the house with his mother while his siblings scattered. He never married and Rachael knew that later in his life he’d seen that as a failing and she wished he’d married, had kids. He would have been able to stay in his house and it would not have become a chaotic mess. After losing consciousness he would not have lain in the driveway like that. He would not have thirsted so. His house had sat mostly untouched since his stroke. He’d had to move to assisted living, but he wouldn’t let Rachael sell the house and when she moved through the quiet rooms, Rachael would see his image, working in the yard or sitting at the kitchen table, repairing something that long ago should have been tossed out, living his life simply until he couldn’t any longer, but he’d never asked to move back home again.
The next minister said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” She had found a lot of things in her uncle’s house that led her to believe he’d given over his life’s direction long ago; the bed that had been moved onto the sleeping porch and his worn chair in the den, sitting underneath a single reading light in the otherwise unlit room, the windows covered to keep the hot sun out in summer and the heat so sparingly used from escaping in winter, all the broken things that had not been fixed nor given up because he couldn’t fix them himself, choosing instead to live without, the traps that had been removed from the sinks, the plumbing that needed replacement. It was the darkness he existed in within his home, the piles of papers that must have been overwhelming to sort through, the brown grocery bags, overflowing with junk mail that just sat inside his foyer. It was the canned goods that remained in the cabinets, long ago either exploded or disintegrated and the medications that had been lined up on the kitchen counter, too many to sort and manage, mice feces just inches away.
He had heart issues, kidney problems, fading hearing and was going blind from macular degeneration and when she looked at her uncle’s face beside her, it seemed to change from old man to playful youth, racing downhill on his Flexible Flyer, the oldest son, losing his father when he was only a kid, becoming the young man, the dental student at Chapel Hill, the army dentist and then back again to an old man, but still carrying the same light in his eyes. He’d been handsome, shared her blue eyes too. His house had been a mess, Rachael believed because he hadn’t had a woman to tell him to straighten up and get rid of things, spend his money to make repairs and she’d decided one day, after stepping for years on the same pile of trash, that she was going to start cleaning it all up. It’s what the voice inside her had told her, that it was okay to do that.
Rachael found another letter, just a draft with crossed out words and corrections, written in her uncle’s familiar cursive style and decided it would be just like him to carefully construct such a letter before penning a final. It began, Dear Susan and it had been tucked into one of the drawers of an old desk. After reading it she wondered who Susan had been to him, if a final letter had ever been mailed or what had happened between the two of them. Maybe he’d only written the draft and never sent a final. Then she’d found an old black and white photo of a young woman she didn’t recognize, not pretty, but something about her, sitting alone and looking away, out past the frame of the picture, seeing something in the distance that held her attention. Rachael liked to imagine her to be Susan, but she’d never asked him. Some things she asked about he couldn’t seem to remember, but there were times she sensed he didn’t want to tell her other things so he would only tell her he couldn’t remember. Rachael didn’t want to hear him say he didn’t remember Susan so she never asked. And it was a big old house, containing a hundred years of her family’s history and took several years to clear out. After it was done, she’d asked him if he wanted to go see it all cleaned out. I guess not was his answer and she’d understood. He'd told her to sell his car in the middle of the pandemic, finally admitting, I just can’t see to drive anymore. It was only a used Corolla, but she remembered his shiningly proud face when he’d bought it for himself on his birthday many years earlier. It was to be his last car. His first had been a nineteen-fifties baby blue Ford that he kept into the nineteen-seventies, washing it every weekend in his driveway until someone had smashed into it and he'd had to give it up. Still, when she looked out from the back porch of the house and down into the driveway, she could see him looking up, waving a wet rag at her, calling, I’ll be in soon for supper.
The pandemic had been brutal to him. He’d deteriorated. When she’d finally gotten to see him after months of being quarantined, only window visits allowed when he could hardly see or hear her, he’d shuffled out into the courtyard of his assisted living facility. She’d been saddened and shocked to see the change in him, hadn’t detected the extent of his decline in the daily phone calls and his usual dapper appearance had become disheveled, wearing only his bedroom shoes, t-shirt and sweatpants. Another sudden and disturbing memory comes to her, riding the chairlift to the top of the Mountain with him, something they’d do each summer. He’d been happy that day, but Rachael wondered if he’d seen any hint of the darkness inside her and how in a weakened moment, she’d imagined an easier life beyond him. Pointing something out to him down below when floating over the jagged rocks, the highest point of the ride, he would lean over to look, only a firm push to his old frail frame, unnoticeable by anyone from a distance and his body would fall to the crevasse. Because she had been so tired really, so worn out from being the caretaker for so long and it had only been a fleeting thought, but it had been there. And wasn’t it a sin to even think it? Would he forgive her if he’d known? Rachael aches, remembering. Still, at the end of the day, when she would leave him in his room, getting him settled into his recliner and walking out the door, she’d tell him that she loves him and she meant it, would hear his whispered reply, I love you, Rachael, so so much, the words that would always end their day or time together. But today, sitting beside her, he appeared strong again, his gate restored, his vision and hearing acute like on a good day and what she wanted most, had prayed for, was to be there for him in the end. Run, jump, bounce. Float.
“It is finished,” the last words. It had hurt when she’d let the house go. Rachael, feeling breathless and bereft, walking through the empty rooms of his home, closing the big thick wooden door one last time and wmmph, the sound and smell she would never forget and never experience again, all old wood and breath, keeping part of her heart in its locked frame like a piece of stray clothing as it shut behind her. And she, standing outside on the porch, peering back through the window panels of the door into the empty foyer, feeling suddenly a stranger, seeing the end of their world and the beginning of someone else’s, a new family that would move in and never know the old family that lived there. It is finished. It is finished. It is finished and they are gone, the walls had seemed to whisper. She’d gone home and when night had come, she’d thought of the darkness that was settling into all the rooms of the old house, the moonlight that would replace the streaming sunshine. The next day it would all belong to another family. The sunlight, the darkness, the moonlight, the old wooden air would belong to someone else and would they even notice the beauty of it all? Maybe it would just be rooms to them. She would worry about those things afterward, nonsensically, feeling the pull of a loss she hadn’t anticipated.
The service ends and Rachael stands to leave. The spaces beside her where her mother and uncle used to live stand along with her and follow her outside the church. The sun is shining and she squints painfully, reminded of the bright sun that had shone on the day Jimmy died and of another more distant loss that sadly seems faded by time. The minister, the congregation, file out and some gather to talk while others go to their cars, anxious to get on with the rest of their day. Rachael lingers for a moment, unmoving, the spaces pausing with her. She sees the labyrinth that is carved into the sloping hillside next to the church. The presiding minister takes her hand just briefly.
“So sorry about your uncle, but I’m glad you came again. When did he pass?”
“It was December.”
“Well, I will miss seeing his face at the service each year as I miss your mom’s. How long has it been?”
“Nine years. The cancer got her.”
“So sorry for all that.”
“Thank you.” Rachael’s eyes tear uncomfortably in the sunlight. “What a brilliant day” and she moves along. Run, jump, bounce, float. Breathe. She won’t stay still, knowing the stillness would hold her. Just move forward. It is at this point in prior years they would head to their favorite lunch spot and discuss the service or talk about where they would go next to continue their day. Now Rachael and the spaces huddle together precariously and she feels the warm sunlight penetrate the cool mountain air. Is it finished now? Will it ever be finished, she wonders? One loss takes over and adds to another and is that what life is, the beauty of love, the pain of loss and propelling herself forward? She tells herself to proceed. Run, jump, bounce, float, breathe. Live. Move forward to the place she’s supposed to be. She will not stop, except briefly, to process what has transpired, but she won’t tarry long. Nothing will hold her like that. She knows they want her to keep moving forward. One day she’ll find out to what or to where or her next task. She won’t even realize it’s a task. It will just feel natural to her; like holding her mother’s hand as she died and taking care of her uncle as he grew old, like cleaning up a century of her family’s history and finding new homes for all the old things. She’ll walk forward, feeling the freedom that is hers. She’ll feel it on her face, like sunshine, warm and bright. She’ll let the losses float away and settle in the spaces that follow her to another beginning.