I wanted to tell you something
Iwanted to tell you something funny a few weeks ago — how, in 1970, Apollo 13 pilot Jack Swigert realized, halfway to the moon, that he’d forgotten to file his income tax return. NASA’s Houston team cracked up when he asked them to help him request an extension.
It turned out he automatically qualified for one because on April 15, 1970, he was “out of the country.” Indeed! I stumbled across this anecdote and put it in my “column ideas” file, thinking it would make you smile — something we all need these days.
Hours after Swigert worried about his taxes, he and the whole crew faced possible death. Their crisis inspired the Tom Hanks “Houston, we have a problem” movie. But they delayed both death and taxes during their epic midApril journey.
I planned to use this 50-year-old story to launch an Easter meditation on hope, but I could not. I had nothing to say. This Easter I was just going through the motions, feeling not an iota of its normal, overwhelming joy.
The next day I would be transferring my only sister to an assisted-living facility as cancer continued its savage, four-year march through her body. And the Monday after that, April 20, my beloved and outrageously loving sister, Brenda Kay Dailey, went to her eternal home. She was 62.
The end came so fast, and I was not prepared for how it would feel. I’d reached age 57 without ever losing anyone close. Is that unusual? It seems so.
Both grandfathers died before I was born. Both grandmothers died when I was in my 20s, but I didn’t know either one very well. These losses were somber but not devastating. Now there is a place inside me that aches until it’s numb.
My 91-year old parents have lost the eldest of their three children. “It’s not right,” my dad said. “I should have gone first.”
Many, many human beings are grieving right now. We are losing loved ones to a stealthy virus. We are losing jobs and businesses. As retirement accounts plummet and savings dwindle, many of us are losing longheld dreams for our future.
In the midst of so much sadness, we draw comfort and conjure hope from memories. And, if we choose, from God’s promises.
Brenda Kay spent almost 40 years teaching learning-disabled and emotionally challenged children. She never married or had kids of her own, but really, she had thousands.
She loved her students and they loved her. Her wallet is still stuffed with gift cards to coffee and sandwich shops, the cardboard wrappers addressed to her in children’s painstaking script. In a low-income school district, these are weighty symbols.
Once I off-handedly expressed annoyance that I could no longer find my preferred toothpaste anywhere — green, not white, in a stand-up container, not a tube. A few days later my sister handed me a shrink-wrapped six-pack of that exact toothpaste, found online. Multiply that thoughtful gesture by decades.
The worse Brenda Kay’s cancer got, the more cheerful she became. When it metastasized from breasts to bones to liver, she looked me in the eyes and said, “I’m at peace.”
Months ago, one of the many medicines put in her body destroyed her warm, alto voice. When the doctors discovered recently that the cancer had spread into her brain, she told me, in a now high-pitched rasp, “Cancer sucks, but I’m okay with Jesus.”
She said this to everyone, actually, often eliciting fascinating responses.
Nursing home workers summoned us to see her on her final days. That is a solace not available to families of COVID-19 victims — a tragedy I now, only in bereavement, understand.
My birth on May 18, 1962, cut short Brenda Kay’s 5th birthday party. This year, for the first time, I’ll mark our shared birthday alone.
As for an anguish-delayed Easter, I’ll be celebrating it today. And tomorrow. And every day for the rest of my life.