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| The cake we shared after the service on April 7..with purple forks. |
The Answer is “Everything!”
Rev. Robin Landerman Zucker
First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh
April 7, 2013
There was a woman named Helen who had been
diagnosed with cancer and had been given 3 months to live. Her Doctor told
her to start making preparations to die. So she contacted her pastor and
had him come to her house to discuss certain aspects of her final wishes.
She told him which songs she wanted sung at the service, what Scriptures
she would like read, and what she wanted to be wearing. The woman
also told her pastor that she wanted to be buried with her favorite
bible. Everything was in order and the pastor was preparing to leave when
the woman suddenly remembered something very important to her.
"There's one more thing,” she said excitedly.
"What's that?" came the pastor's reply.
"This is very important." The woman continued. "I
want to be buried with a fork in my right hand."
The pastor stood looking at the woman not knowing quite what to say.
"That shocks you doesn't it?" The woman asked.
"Well, to be honest, I'm puzzled by the request," said the
pastor.
The woman explained. "In all my years of
attending church socials and functions where food was involved,
my favorite part was when whoever was clearing away the dishes of the main
course would lean over and say 'you can keep your fork.' It was
my favorite part because I knew that something better was coming. When they told me to keep my fork,
I knew that something great was about to be given to me. It wasn't Jell-O
or pudding. You didn’t need a fork for that! It was chocolate cake or cherry
pie. Something with substance. So I just want people to see me there in
that casket with a fork in my hand and I want them to wonder 'What's with
the fork?' Then I want you to tell them: 'Be hopeful. Something
better is coming, so keep your fork too."'
The pastor's eyes were welled up with tears of
joy as he hugged the woman good-bye. He knew this would be one of the
last times he would see her before her death. But he also knew that
Helen had a better grasp of life’s blessings than he did. She KNEW that
something better was coming.
At the funeral people were walking by the
woman's casket and they saw the pretty blue dress she was wearing and her
favorite bible and the fork placed in her right hand. Over and over the
pastor heard the question "What's with the fork?" And over and over
he smiled. During the eulogy, the pastor told the people of the conversation he
had with Helen shortly before she died. He also told them about the
fork and about what it symbolized to her. The pastor told the people how
he could not stop thinking about the fork and told them that they probably
would not be able to stop thinking about it either. He said, “Keep your fork,
and let it remind you oh so gently of Helen and that something good is surely
coming.”
I love that story, and Helen, well, she is a
great role model, isn’t she? This woman, facing death but embracing
possibility, absolutely epitomizes optimism and faith. As a group, we Unitarian
Universalists may not share Helen’s theology or her view of the afterlife, but
like her, we are hopeful people.
And, in our midst, we have so many wonderful role models of strength and
graceful, creative aging - remarkable women like Gen Mann and Christine
Michaels, who shared their reflections about creative aging with us this
morning.
These women are what I would call grounded
optimists, and most of the time I am one, too - a real dyed-in-the-wool,
half-full glass, triple layer-cake kind of gal. That’s probably why I ended up becoming a Unitarian
Universalist because this liberal faith of ours is essentially an optimistic
faith. My message this morning is one of hope and optimism. Of course, it would
be irresponsible of me to suggest that life; a truly human life is an either/or
proposition. It isn't. Our lives and this world are composed of good news and
bad news, controllable and uncontrollable forces, and a perfect life is an
oxymoron.
Our human predicament is a little like this
infamous lost cat ad found in England and posted on the Internet that I shared
last January when I preached about perfectionism. It reads, "Lost cat --
old, mangy, one-eyed, limped, neutered, crippled. Answers to the name:
"Lucky." Life can be so
like that. One day, it’s raining on our parade and the next, we've experienced
a moment of splendor and a break in the clouds. It's unpredictable -- triumph and tragedy, joy and sorrow,
suffering and renewal.
I haven’t always been able to see or believe in
life’s silver lining. In 1986, when I was 29, my vivacious lovely mother,
Flora, died at age 55. It was heartbreaking and confusing to watch her suffer
and deteriorate from a non-operable brain tumor. She had been looking forward
to her own third act…becoming an interior decorator and adoring future grandchildren.
Since then, I’ve come to realize how ill equipped I was, in so many ways, to
cope with the magnitude of this loss.
Despite the many exceptional older women role
models I’ve encountered these past 26 years, the one I lacked was the very one
that could enable me to envision my own third act -- my own mother. Over the
years, no matter how I tried, I simply could not picture myself as a woman
beyond age 55. A friend suggested I have an age progression photo of myself
done. I passed on that, but it was tempting. Anything to catch a glimpse of
myself, silver-haired and etched with wisdom and a life fully lived; posing
with grandchildren at high school graduations.
Then something stunning happened. I was enjoying
a glass of wine after conducting a wedding in November 2010. It was the last
wedding in a long season of weddings during which I had eaten my weight in hors
d’ouevres. My voice was raggedy
and hoarse as I shared my weariness with an older guest seated at my
table.
She looked at me warmly with sparkling blue eyes
and said, ”You need to take care of yourself, Reverend. You are going to live a
long time.” I was dumbstruck. “How do you know that?,” I asked quietly. “Well,
because I do,” she replied, her graceful smile framed by shiny silver hair. “Take
care of yourself, you’re going to live a long time.”
This encounter caused me to examine how little
confidence I had had in my longevity, and the ways that had impacted my daily
wrestle match with life - How controlling I could be, how frantic I felt at
time to get things accomplished, to see my children through milestones, to
sustain normalcy.
I would hold my breath waiting for results from
annual physicals and mammograms. At times, I worried that I was cursed and
destined to repeat my mother’s karma. I had trouble planning for old age because I didn’t have any
tangible sense of it. Some days it felt like I was just tearing pages off a
calendar in some doomsday countdown.
In 2011, I grew tired of this cycle. I made the
decision to set a new course and embark on a new road, and I moved here, home
to Pittsburgh. Then, in April of
2012, I turned 55, the same age as my mother when she passed. How could this be? It made no sense. I
feel so young, so full of life. How could she have died at this age? I went to
visit her grave on my birthday and read the inscription we had chosen:
“Beautiful and Noble spirit” and the tragedy of her early demise took on a new
dimension.
Later that day, I was out walking my dog, Kip,
and feeling a familiar malaise again – the old fear, the belief that the future had no
shape and was too flimsy to grasp. And the question came to me, somewhat
self-pitying, given all my relative blessings, “What can I look forward to?”
The toxic chatterbox in my head was stirring up trouble again. “Nothing,” she
sneered. The loop began - I’m not
partnered, I’m not sure what will happen in my ministry or career. Really, what can I look forward to?”
“Nothing.”
As I ambled along Mifflin Ave, crocuses were
popping up through the spring soil, and a different voice (perhaps the voice of
the wise wedding guest or the voice of my mother) broke through the gremlin’s drone and said softly,
“Everything, Robin. You can look forward to everything, if you choose to.
Looking forward is a choice. Being willing to look forward to everything, come
what may, is a decision that is open to you now, Robin. The answer is “Everything.”
And it was like the sun had come out in my soul.
I believed in that moment that I
was not my mother, that I was going to live a long time and that I had a
choice. So I made it -- I would look up, look out, and look forward. We all
throw around the idea of epiphanies and revelations - this felt like the real
deal.
Buddha famously advised: “You must let go of the
life you planned in order to embrace the life awaiting you.” That day, my 55th
birthday, I loosened my death grip
on mortality, and the future I had yearned has come to nestle in the open palm
of my hand.
I am healthy, fit and feel more peaceful than I
have ever felt. My children are functioning and happy. My ministry here has flourished and
grown. I cannot imagine my life without you, dear congregation. And, I met
Michael, my beloved partner and we are envisioning an active, connected and
vibrant future together. The answer
is “Everything.”
On April 18th (in 11 days) I will turn
56. It seems like a small miracle to me. Through the dark days of aimlessness,
I kept my fork and I’m so glad I did , as there will be cake, not just in
coffee hour after the service (chocolate, by the way), but in all the quiet
moments of grace, bright moments of joy and even in the dim moments of sorrow.
The answer is “Everything.”
Our former UU president, Paul Carnes,
echoes this view. "Life is so
great a blessing,” he tells us, "that every tomorrow we project, every
time we aspire or dream, every time we set our alarm clock in faith that the
sun will set to rise again, we bear witness to our optimism." Every time
we keep our fork, in other words, we "practice a resurrection" of
sorts as we rise again and again in hopefulness.
Not surprisingly, it turns out that
the key to staying healthy and living longer is attitude, essentially deciding
you are not old and decrepit (despite any evidence to the contrary). I’m
not even sure what it even means to be old anymore. The humorist Bill Guest
says you’ll know you’re old when, among other things, you wear a nametag as
much or yourself as for others and happy hour is a nap.
Nevertheless, in an
article for the Chicago Sun Times, Alexia Ruiz, quips that those of us lucky
enough to grow old must contend with miserable stereotypes of what its like:
the frailty, the forgetfulness and the early bird specials.” Yet, in aging, as in many things,
attitude can make all the difference and has a greater impact on health,
happiness, and longevity than the date on our birth certificates. In a study at
Harvard, psychologist Ellen Langer found that expectation, not biology, leads
many older people to set physical and intellectual limits on themselves. Langer
concluded: “They assume they’ll fall apart, so they let it happen. They pull
the plug on learning, growing, deepening, and connecting. Decline becomes a
self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Through her research, Langer learned
that men and women over 50 with more positive perceptions of aging, who are
more willingness to accept the inevitability of aging (without denial), live
nearly 8 years longer than those with negative attitudes. It turns out that
faith, meditation, and belonging to a religious community like First Unitarian
can lead to a longer and more fulfilling life, too – so stick around. Langer writes: “The misery myth is one
of the most pernicious myths, because when you think the future is really bleak
you don’t plan. But when you think, ‘I’m going to be the coolest 80 year old
who launches a line of hip clothing for old people, there is so much
possibility.”
These findings conjure a memory of an elderly
woman I came to admire in a previous ministry named Thelma. She was often known
to proclaim, "This has been a perfect day!" It was her trademark
phrase, even though she was nearly blind and crippled with arthritis. She used
to say that all she needed was “a pinky full of hope.” In her case, a gnarled
and throbbing pinky…but so much hope, faith and simple gratitude in that one
small digit.
Both Helen and Thelma would tell you that there
is cake in all of it, all of life, even the hard parts. And neither of them
would fib about death, either, because they accept that life is finite. Many
forces in Western cultures have conditioned us to be afraid of this, to fear
aging. We joke that 50 is the new 35, and although this may be truer than in
previous generations, it will not stave off an eventual end time.
We are poised, you and me, between then
inevitable and the possible. And there is an alternative to fear and loathing –
it’s using our finitude as a spur to live with courage and optimism, rather
than with dread. To drink from a half-full glass. To proceed with what the
theologian Paul Tillich calls "the courage to be" in the face of our
finitude. To push life out of our inner tombs of pain, fear, and disappointment. To answer “Everything” to the question
of what life might offer you or teach you.
I stand here, looking out on a
congregation of people who have had their share of glories and regrets. Oh, I
have too, and I ask myself: Would I live the same life? Do I have a do-over
option? No. Will the future be a
proverbial bowl of cherries? Unlikely. No, I am not looking forward to creaky limbs, forgetfulness, or
gravity. But, in 11 days I will be
56 (just sayin’) and I am not
going to wait until I’m 80 to don my purple hat to go out and have fun with the
world. As I approach this
milestone birthday, I’m elated to
have what the actress Laura Linney calls “the privilege of aging.” And in some
ways, I will be living this miraculous third act for two, for all the years,
the decades, my mom never got.
How about you? Can you answer
“Everything” to some part of the future you have doubted or feared? None of us
knows the future, yet we can only be open to it and bring our inherent UU
optimism into that future, if we are not afraid of it's ugliness or
unpredictability; and if we are not too cynical about its potential.
Ironically, the story is often told that when we get to the gates of heaven,
St. Peter will ask not what we hope for in the next life but whether we have
lived this one to the fullest.
Along with Thelma and Helen, Christine and Gen, I
encourage you to live and age as fully and creatively as possible, fork in one
hand, half-full glass in the other, prepared for the worst, yet seeking the
best; holding on to what is good without ignoring the heartbreak.
So,
keep your fork, even though we struggle some days to get out of bed.
Keep your fork, even if you’re down to a pinky full of hope, and what is good
often feels like its slipping through your fingers. Keep your fork even though
optimists like Thelma and Helen die, too. Keep your fork and live your own
“Everything” in this weary, wonderful world.
It has been said that "If a person gives up
hope he has entered the gates of Hell, whether he knows it or not, and has left
behind his own humanity." So,
keep your fork close at hand, and when people ask, “What’s with the fork?” tell
them (and yourself): “I’m leaving room for cake.”
Amen.
© 2013 Rev. Robin Landerman Zucker. May be
quoted with proper attribution to author and sources.
