Glorious mysteries

We attended a funeral for J., Karin’s kindly old colleague.

“J. and I used to talk hockey,” said the priest. “Sometimes joyfully, sometimes with a little griping.”

That was about it for reminiscing about J. (Reminiscing is done at the wake, apparently.) The priest and mourners then prayed the Glorious Mysteries, in which are included:

• one Apostle’s Creed
• six Our Fathers
• six Glory Bes
• five Oh My Jesuses
• fifty-three Hail Marys
• other formulae

My heart sank around the thirtieth Hail Mary. Was the priest shooting for one hundred? Mercifully, no.

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I finished reading the Adrian Mole series. It gave me much pleasure.

I’ve begun reading The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. It features Miss Jane Marple and is set in the classic murder-village of St. Mary Mead. When I finish, I’ll’ve read all sixty-six of Dame Agatha’s crime novels.

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Daniel, somehow, is learning to speak in French.

Bonjour, Daddy, he grins. Ça va.

Not bad for not having been taught. And his accent is spot-on.

Margie; Somaliland; Western Togoland; Uyuni

R.I.P. Margie, a kindly old woman who went to church with us. She was famous for sending greeting cards. Word has it, before she died she prepared several dozen Thanksgiving cards, and so we may hear from her one last time. We attended her funeral; Samuel was asleep when we arrived, but he soon woke up and had to be taken outside; he and I sat on the front steps and identified passing cars. “Sports car. Truck. S.U.V. Sedan. Truck. S.U.V. Police car.” This kept us busy until the last hymn.

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Here’s another fine video from the YouTube channel Un mundo inmenso. This one is about Somaliland, the self-governing northwestern region of Somalia.

I hadn’t known that Somaliland is so stable, or that other countries and the UN refuse to recognize it as an independent state because they’re wary of lending credibility to other secessionist movements.

(The situation may well be more complicated than this. Even so, the video is a good starting-point; also, it got me reading about another “unrepresented nation”: Western Togoland, which has eleven million people and the world’s friendliest flag.)

But Somaliland isn’t as beautiful as “Uyuni, the Most Incredible Landscape in the World”:

One time, with David, I was looking at pictures of Bolivia, and he was like, “I don’t understand why this isn’t everyone’s main interest in life.”

In memoriam

It looks like I won’t be going to the funeral after all.

My dad shared these photos of my grandma and her family. The first was taken many years ago in the Ecuadorian jungle.

(My little mother is in this photo – she is the youngest daughter.)

This more recent photo was taken after the deaths of my grandma’s husband and of her second daughter, Irene.

You can see how cheerful my grandma was.

She also was one of the most studious people I have known. She constantly read the Bible and books about the Bible. Her sight was very poor, and so, using a magnifying glass, she would proceed slowly; and because of the effort it cost, she would read little else – she placed God first. But when I was young and she could see well enough, she made for me a tape recording of all of Charlotte’s Web.

You’ll recall that after my grandpa died, I mentioned the books that he and my grandma had written together. They were narrated from his perspective. But she was not the lesser author.

He was rather legendary – a Great Man, I’ve heard people say. He was a force. But so was she. He would have needed someone like her to keep up with him. I remember watching a presentation that they used to do for U.S. churches. They would speak the Shuar language to each other; and, as was customary in dialog between the older Shuar, one of them would begin to speak before the other had finished his or her sentence, so that there was no pause between the utterances.

I used to talk to her quite a bit. She would listen, and she was not intolerant of my opinions, but there was no changing her mind. She had long before decided which path to take, and she tenaciously continued down it. It is better to be like this, I think, so long as one goes in the right direction.

Which, of course, she did.

R.I.P. Grandma

My mother’s mother died today in a suburb of Kansas City. Because it is almost midnight, I’ll wait until next time to say a few things about my grandma.

My mother has traveled to Kansas City.

I don’t know what sort of funeral will be held – the pandemic complicates everything, of course – but it is not out of the question that I should travel.

Some ethical reflection

Consider two declarations:

(1) In 2016, Trump said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

(This seemed pretty hyperbolic at the time. Now, not so much.)

(2) Three days ago, it was revealed that although Trump knew that the coronavirus is highly transmissible – and that it’s “deadly stuff” – he held large gatherings and was slow to promote social distancing because he “wanted to always play [the danger] down.” “I still like playing it down,” he told Bob Woodward, “because I don’t want to create a panic.”

These actions – shooting somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue (hypothetical) and knowingly playing down the danger of COVID-19 (actual) – have a great deal in common, morally speaking. They’re both deadly; they’re both deliberate; and, on the face of it, they’re both outrageous, or they ought to be.

Exercises. Answer the questions of either Set 1 or Set 2, and those of Set 3.

Set 1. (a) What are the morally relevant differences and similarities between the two acts? (b) Which of the two acts would it be morally worse for Trump to do?

Set 2. Recall that Trump’s electoral opponent this cycle is Joe Biden. When Trump made the first declaration, in 2016, his opponents included Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, as well as Republicans Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and Marco Rubio. (Trump has never run against Hitler or Stalin.)

Given whom Trump competes against, would voters be morally justified in remaining loyal to Trump …

(a) … were he to shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue?

(b) … even though he deliberately and knowingly played down the danger of COVID-19 – and even though his action may well have caused many thousands of premature deaths?

Set 3. Can these exercises even be done with any seriousness, or are the answers so obvious that it would be a waste of time?

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Though I condemn Trump for his response to COVID-19, my own response has fallen well short of what I think it would be good for people to do.

Today, I attended Rick’s funeral. It was held in a crowded gym.

Oh, I wore a mask, but I was there far too long for the risk to cease to be negligible (see the first chart in this useful article).

I came away with a souvenir – a t-shirt with this caption:

I WENT TO

RICK’S MEMORIAL

AND ALL I GOT WAS

THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT

I pray that that’s all I and the other mourners came away with.

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Of course, this isn’t to say that the same countervailing considerations apply to my situation and to Trump’s …

Or that I couldn’t make tradeoffs to balance off my action’s increased risk to public health. (Could Trump make tradeoffs on the scale that his action demands? I doubt it.)

Still, I remain very dissatisfied about what I did. I hope that, for his own sake, Trump also can acquire a sense of dissatisfaction.

I take on more responsibility in the home

Yesterday’s temperature plunged to sixty (F); it felt downright cold. I decided that Samuel should wear pants. He thought this was hilarious; he thrashed and thrashed, taking one leg out of his pants while I tried to put the other leg in. He did this every time I changed his diaper.

I do my share of caring for the boy; but, also, until now, I’d hardly ever bathed him or put him to sleep at night. I’m expert at putting him to sleep during the day, but the night-time task is altogether different. I’ve regarded it, and the bathing, as within Karin’s sphere. Well, tonight, I did both those chores (Karin needed to compose her remarks for Rick’s funeral). I did the bathing particularly badly. Samuel wasn’t pleased. He usually lingers in the tub and splashes the water with his legs for several minutes after he’s clean; this time, he was eager to get out. But he came through the ordeal. I expected his bedtime ritual to go even less smoothly. But he listened respectfully as I read to him, and he finally dozed off during his third book, Dr. Seuss’s Fox in Socks.

There is a social worker who talks to us about our baby every other week. It seems she’s been grading Samuel. Two weeks ago, all his grades were high, except in the category of gross motor skills; but this week, the social worker was pleased to report that his gross motor skills had received a grade of 55 out of 60.

Julia

R.I.P. Julia, my grandpa’s sister. Today our family held her funeral.

I didn’t know her well. She wrote nice letters to me when I was little. The few times I met her, she was very kind.

That impression was borne out by the funeral. Stories were told of her kindness. They were interspersed with hymns and scriptural readings.

Before the funeral, the church served quite a feast. Some six hours later, after a long nap, I still viscerally remember that feast. The rice dish. The potatoes. The chicken drumsticks. I also drank three delicious bottles of Aldi water.

Little Samuel made the rounds and was much admired. He wore pajamas to the funeral. No one could put him to sleep, though, until Roger, his first cousin twice removed, rocked him to sleep.

Here, Samuel plays with Roger’s beard:

An inheritance

The snowstorm did hit us, and hard. Side streets were made impassable. Businesses, libraries, churches, and schools were closed. Every so often, we’d see people pushing their cars to release them from the snow; on one occasion, I had to push out Karin’s car. It was a pleasantly easy thing to do, due to my fat (I used to struggle mightily to push cars).

Karin has long desired for me to view Frozen with her. I had a different hope for this evening, but, what with this weather, I shall have to “let it go.”

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My mother slept two nights on our cot. Then she moved to the house of Edoarda & Stephen (she’ll go to Martin’s & Mary’s next). All during her visit to South Bend, she’s been at the police station or on the phone, trying to recover her missing documents. She’s scheduled to fly back to Ecuador on Wednesday. If she can’t obtain a new passport by then, she’ll have to stay in South Bend at least another week.

She brought many of her dead father’s belongings to distribute among her children. Before she arrived, I had almost no fitting dress shirts; now, I have about ten. I also inherited a large photo of the Atshuara chief, Tsantiacu, which was propped up near my grandpa’s casket at his funeral. I remember having been affected to see that portrait. I think that my grandpa will be glad to be reunited with his friend, who gave up blood feuding for Jesus’s sake.

The funeral, etc.

On Friday, Karin & I rode to Kansas City in Martin’s & Mary’s car, arriving with them in time for the “viewing” ceremony. Grandpa looked very peaceful in his casket. He’d been laid out in one of his comfortable flannel shirts. I talked to many people, including a guy named Ryan with whom I’d gone to high school in Missouri in 1996. A member of the armed forces, he’d traveled virtually everywhere; he had much to tell me about Antarctica. Later, I introduced Karin to my grandma, but only briefly because everyone wanted to speak to her.

Afterward, I ate at a Waffle House, which I hadn’t been able to do since 2010. Then Karin & I spent the night in a well-wisher’s basement. M&M shared a hotel room with Ana & David and were attacked by bedbugs. Edoarda & Stephen, who’d used that room the previous night, also suffered bug bites.

The funeral itself was held the next day. Three hundred people attended (or so I estimate). I and the other grandsons bore the casket. I was reunited with Amber, a schoolmate from Ecuador who’s now a missionary to Papua New Guinea. Later, an old farmer from Duluth, Minnesota, questioned me about my dissertation. One woman learned that I’d studied philosophy and then asked if I believed in God.

On the whole, it was a grueling day.

The next morning, Karin & I got back into the car with M&M and rode back to South Bend, where we discovered that Jasper and Ziva had broken into their plastic container of treats and eaten the lot. The kitties were but little harmed: their treats aren’t very calorific. Jasper actually looks thinner now.

Today, some undetonated pipe bombs were found at a busy intersection near my favorite Vietnamese restaurant.

Interpreting a funeral

Antonio Valencia poses here with the medics of Manchester United, thanking them for quickly healing his broken hand. He came back from his layoff earlier than expected. He was the “man of the match” last weekend, versus Arsenal.

On Friday, Karin’s grandma died after a long illness. The funeral was held this afternoon, and I played a large part in it: I interpreted, into English, the speech given by one señora Máxima, whom Karin’s grandparents had known when they were missionaries in the Dominican Republic.

It was a lovely and very long speech. It included:

(1) Stories of how the dead woman liked to bake. (A bake shop, named after her, is now operated in the Dominican Republic by sra. Máxima’s niece.)

(2) Accounts of the dead woman’s unfailing cheer, and of her submissiveness. (“Who is this person who is being talked about?” wondered Brianna. Indeed, my own memories are of a sassier, stronger-willed woman.)

(3) An acrostic of the letters D-U-L-Z-U-R-A which, sadly, was not translatable.

(4) Detailed greetings from quite a few members of the Dominican church.

Afterward, my interpreting was praised by many of the mourners. It was nice to be recognized, but I felt like collapsing onto a sofa. Translating a half-dozen single-spaced, typed pages in front of so many people was like shoveling a mountainload of bricks.

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Martin & Mary have flown to Houston to spend Thanksgiving with Ana & David. While they’re away, Karin & I will look after Bianca.

The mouse (cont.)

Friday night, as I lay in bed, Stephen knocked on my door to tell me he’d seen the mouse scurrying through the vent between our rooms. Bianca still hadn’t killed the poor thing (but now we knew why she’d been waiting so long in Stephen’s armchair). … I went to sleep.

The next day, as I was napping on the couch, I again heard the mouse’s squeaking. Mary also heard it.

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That night we watched Arachnophobia (which is about spiders, not mice). When the movie ended, the mouse reappeared in Stephen’s room. We hurried to our stations. Edoarda, Stephen, and Bianca cornered the mouse. Martin & Mary hid. I tried to coax the mouse into a trash can.

Fleeing, the mouse jumped into a different trash can. Its little heart was thumping.

We felt such pity for it. What to do?

We couldn’t adopt it as a pet — clearly, it’d never get along with Bianca. Nor could we humanely offer it to Bianca to eat; nor could we bring ourselves to squash it. To put it outside would be to subject it to famine, to the cold, to other predators. Yet that was what we did. I left the mouse out on the lawn, and it began to crawl away.

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The next morning, a hummingbird hovered outside our kitchen window; Martin called us to watch it, but we quickly lost interest (there are plenty of hummingbirds in Ecuador). I decided to go out to look for our sorry little mouse. It had moved away from the lawn; perhaps it was beginning a new life. Then I saw it on the sidewalk. It was dead.

One by one, we went out to pay it our respects. Mary built a grave for it, with yellow flowers.

(Photo by Edoarda)

Violet

Today I traveled with Mary & Martin to Woodburn, Indiana, for the funeral of Violet, our great-aunt. This blog entry was read during the service.

An excerpt:

In The Great Divorce C.S. Lewis talks about the kind of woman who becomes the “mother” of all who enter her door. Violet was this sort of mother, for whom “every young man or boy that met her became her son. … Every girl that met her was her daughter.” In the book, Heaven celebrates her with a great, golden fanfare. Because the quiet, sacrificial service of a mother has enormous spiritual influence: “like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end?”

When I was very little, Aunt Violet visited Ecuador. We played together every day. Though I forgot that friendship, that mutual enjoyment, she did not. For each of my birthdays, she sent me a card; at every family reunion, she greeted me warmly.

As I grew older, I returned less and less warmth to her until finally, for no good reason, I was as cold as ice to her. Her service to me became truly sacrificial.

(These days I have been repenting of many things. But enough about me.)

And so every participant said what a wonderful mother (grandmother; foster mother; spiritual mother) Violet had been. And when the last witness left the podium, Violet herself was given the final word. Her voice was played over the loudspeaker. It was a bit like a movie flashback, a bit like a voice from beyond the grave. In the recording, Violet was giving an interview to her granddaughter, Jill, about Jill’s daughter, Violet — about how well she loved that little girl.

Though I had barely taken the trouble to know Aunt Violet, her voice sounded so familiar, so joyful, it was as if she had never really gone. It was as if being with her again would feel like the most natural thing in the world.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.