Rod Dreher on the Death of A Child

Rod Dreher and I would seem not to have a lot in common. He is a conservative Republican. I am a moderately liberal Democrat. He belongs to an Orthodox Church and is a social conservative. I am an Episcopalian and am a social liberal. Nonetheless, Rod Dreher is one of my favorite writers in the religious blogosphere. I highly recommend him, and am not surprised that my friend Keven Ann Willey (formally at the Arizona Republic, now in charge of the editorial pages of the Dallas Morning News) recruited Rod to move to Dallas.

Regardless of where you are on religious and political issues, read him every day.

Today's post on a death of a child is a gem. Read the whole thing, but here are some highlights:


This afternoon, the children of the Lakewood Presbyterian School, a great little neighborhood school where my son Matthew used to attend, will meet to mark the passing last week of their classmate Jack Foley. Jack was 11 years old. He died last weekend of complications from an epileptic seizure. Two years ago, just as the fall school term was to start, Jack's mother died of breast cancer. So much pain inflicted on such decent people.

. . .

The only other time I dealt with death as a child was when my Little League baseball teammate Roy Dale Craven was killed by a car. I don't remember that much either, except a feeling of complete bafflement that a friend could be there one day, and gone the next. It was like putting my face against a stone wall that shouldn't be there, but was; as I remember, I was more puzzled by Roy Dale's death than anything else. I had no context for it. I remember the funeral home -- Rabenhorst, a name that made me think of a dark castle -- and the graveside burial, but that's it. When I visited Roy Dale's grave for the first time in nearly three decades a while back, a lot of it came back to me. I wrote a piece about that, and one of the coaches I interviewed said:


The star pitcher for the John Fudge Auto Parts Angels was buried with his glove in his hand and his uniform on his back. This may have been the nicest set of clothes the child owned. That funeral was the first time most of us kids had seen death so close. At some point, someone on the team stepped into the aisle and went forward to pay respects to our fallen pitcher, lying in his open casket. Then we all followed, a dozen or so six-to-nine-year-old boys, telling Roy Dale goodbye. "When that happened, there wasn't a dry eye in the place," Mr. Pat says.

That night, I remember hearing my dad and Mr. Pat out on the back porch, talking. I stood by the screen door to listen, and realized these grown men were weeping in the dark. Startled and embarrassed, I went away. Yesterday was the first time in the 28 years since Roy Dale's death that my father has been able to talk to me about the events of that summer without breaking into tears.



Remember Jack Foley in your prayers today, will you? And also his three siblings, and his dad, whose heavy burden just got a lot heavier.


Read it all here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Giles Fraser on Gay Marriage

Image
The Rev. Gileas Fraser offers thoughtful piece on gay marriage on BBC Radio this morning: Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the Book of Common Prayer was being put together, marriage was said to be for three purposes: First, It was ordained for the procreation of children … Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication .. Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity. How do these three concerns relate to the prospect of gay marriage? The third priority insists that marriage is designed to bring human beings into loving and supportive relationships. Surely no one can deny that homosexual men and women are in as much need of loving and supportive relationships as anybody else. And equally deserving of them too. This one seems pretty clear. The second priority relates to the encouragement of monogamy. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself has rig...
Read more

Religious Map of United States

Image
This map shows which of eight major Christian denominations has a plurality in the United States, county by county. the map obviously does not capture the full story given the rich diversity of Christian denominations in the United States, but it does show much of the regionalization of the major denominations. The map and analysis can be found here . Hat Tip to my friend Jim .
Read more

New Climate Change Study

What a coincidence. Yesterday, I blogged about the James Dobson et al "We Get It" effort to deny climate change. Yesterday, NASA scientists issued a new report showing a strong causal link between human activity and climate change. Here is the Science Daily report: A vast array of physical and biological systems across the earth are being affected by warming temperatures caused by humans, says a new analysis of information not previously assembled all in one spot. The effects on living things include earlier leafing of trees and plants over many regions; movements of species to higher latitudes and altitudes in the northern hemisphere; changes in bird migrations in Europe, North America and Australia; and shifting of the oceans' plankton and fish from cold- to warm-adapted communities. "Humans are influencing climate through increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and the warming world is causing impacts on physical and biological systems attributable at the global scal...
Read more