LESSONS AND BLESSINGS

One Tuesday evening last fall, my son Sean telephoned saying that his wife Erica’s great-aunt, Tante Adela, had died. The funeral was the next day in Baltimore, and Erica was flying home early from a business trip so they could drive up. Adela was the aunt of Erica’s stepfather Gary, and I had met her only once or twice.

As I was driving home later that evening, I was thinking – some of my best thinking happens behind the wheel of my car. I was wondering what I could do for Erica, and for her mom (Debbie) and Gary, to express my condolences. A card … a phone call … flowers.…

As I blew by my exit, I was remembering what I have learned from the Lakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation. When someone dies, everything else takes second place. That includes work and school. This often causes them difficulty in the “white” world and frequently sends them back to the reservation where that philosophy is embraced. At a time like this, the most important thing is not to do, but to be. To be with the family in their mourning. To be totally focused on the loss. I knew I had to go to Baltimore to be at the funeral.

I am blessed to work with people who are understanding and flexible, so I could walk in to work the next morning and say, “I’ll be gone for several hours today for a funeral.”

And you know what? I was the one who was blessed by that decision. I learned so much about this remarkable 100-year-old woman who escaped Nazi Germany on the last train from her town; who got papers to Dachau for her brother so he also could leave and become the father of Gary and Morris; who wouldn’t leave without her mother, whose papers arrived only the day before they departed and who assumed a parental role when her brother died early in the lives of Gary and Morris.

As I sat through the service, I recalled the funeral of Erica’s paternal grandmother a year earlier. She too escaped from Nazi Germany, part of a community in the Baltimore area that included Adela and Gary’s mom. Gary and Debbie had told me about this group of remarkable people at that service. They had all agreed that no matter their financial circumstances at death, they would be buried in a plain pine box at the same cemetery. There Gary’s father is buried, and Erica’s grandmother, and now Adela.

I was blessed to stand next to Erica as she hung back from the crowd at the cemetery, watching the pallbearers (including her brother and Sean) shovel earth on Tante Adela’s simple pine coffin.

I have been blessed on my trips to the reservation. I have learned many lessons from the Lakota and from the relationships formed there. But I think this might be the most important, and I thank God and them for that.

— Lyn Hanke

Courtesy of The Church of the Good Shepherd United Methodist