Jesus you are my floor You are my walls And you are my door You are my windows And you are my room You are my stairway You are my house And the rock it sits on
Don't matter, boy... let the tears run out and down I've nowhere else I need to be hide your head against me Let the sorrows you feel be our shared companion I'd gently remind you that there's nowhere I'd rather be
Jesus you are my eyes You are my ears And you are my sighs You are my screams And you are my words Past this despairing You are my dry lips And you are my everything
Don't matter, boy... let the tears run out and down I've nowhere else I need to be hide your head against me Let the sorrows you feel be our shared companion I'd gently remind you that there's nowhere I'd rather be
Jesus you are my sorrow You hold my despair And you are my Savior I'm in your tender care You are my Beloved My faithful wounding friend You hold my broken soul Here at despair's end
James E. Trott, myself, Lucile H. Trott in Fort Benton, Montana, Feb '09, near my Dad's 90th Birthday
Yesterday... wrote this.
My Father's Passing
Can't come up from under grief's blue-green the tears unshed, wet-eyed from those that have been Sky too bright, sharp light, my heart over-borne The sea of me filled yet sorrow's torrents coming
I sat there alone with my father busy dying My hand upon his thin grey hair, sweat clinging to my fingers upon it and I couldn't stop touching the one so near yet going so far away past reaching
His face not his face, where is the man I knew in this Emptied suffering stranger, eyes as blue as harsh sky Opening to see me / not see me, opaque with mystery Touching his lips with wet sponge as long ago was done
Suffering, he me we, in our own twinned mystery What history halves the solitude of dying Between the suffering going and the one who waits for the suffering of the other, and his own as well to pass?
I sang hymns, random, softly to not ungentle his struggle to breath; none were with us in those small dark hours as I emptied the red-covered Methodist pages, almost hoarse, and my unyoung voice was that of an orphan-in-waiting
Praying to God yet unable to feel anything but the sorrow, the loss of him, oh, the loss loss loss, sorrow, sorrow, in waves upon this sudden barren shoreline of myself, Understanding all at once -- with terrible clarity -- why Jesus wept.
The Dylan Thomas poem, "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," has always deeply affected me. So, this past February in the moments before my father died with his wife and children there beside him, I spontaneously quoted the title of the poem and its refrain: "rage, rage, against the dying of the light." My brother Drew, who ironically is more the Agnostic in contrast to me the Christian, said "No, no, that's not appropriate." And he began to sing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." We all joined in, and as we sang our father's breathing stopped and the death pallor fixed his features.
My brother captured the sacred moment, and I was glad he had done so. Yet within me I still felt the other lines.
[Here is Dylan Thomas himself reading "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night":]
Why do I -- and for that matter Dylan Thomas, who was a Christian as well -- find the refrain "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light" so compelling? Is that not a cry of futile despair rather than one of muscular faith? Where was my trust in God's heaven?
Jesus wept. He stood, looking at a grave with a man he knew he would raise from the dead, yet he wept. Why? All the sorrow of this life seems to me rooted in the knowledge we understand immortality, at least dimly, yet experience our mortality. On the face of it, to cling to life so fiercely seems the act of a pagan; shouldn't we welcome death's embrace as the entryway to everlasting life? Yes... but. Jesus not only wept at the grave of Lazarus. In Gethsemane He sweated blood and pled His Father would deliver Him from the trials he faced. "Not my will, but Thine be done."
Thomas' poem was specifically about his own father, something I'd forgotten until after my own dad's death -- and my spontaneous quoting of the poem's title -- I had to go back and revisit it. To me, the outcry against death is the response of a whole person, a deeply Christian person who nonetheless understands how outrageously wrong death is. Yes, it is "the good night" for the believer... but it is not what we were meant originally to experience. Death is not an everlasting night, morning will come. But death itself is only good because it has been defeated by Christ's perfect obedience, which suffered death in order to break death's bonds. Raging against death is in a deep way an affirmation of sanity, and of goodness, and of a faithful despair not unknown to the Biblical writers.
There is one more layer, I think, to this poem that I'd not have known before experiencing my own father's death. The raging against death is something for the survivors of the one dying as well as -- and perhaps moreso than -- the one doing the dying. Thomas urges his father to resist death, and why? Because he does not want his father to leave him, and there is a terrible surrendering to death that those left behind may have to watch occurring. The irrational but wholly sane response of the lovers to the beloved is "No. Do not go. Please, stop this." It is rage, but an impotent resigned rage.
Dylan Thomas - "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night"
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on that sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
