Talking on the phone about Ron Brown’s Memorial

Talking on the phone about Ron Brown’s Memorial

 

You have to trust that every friendship has no end, that a communion of saints exists among all those living and dead, who have truly loved God and one another. You know from experience how real this is. Those you have loved deeply and who have died live on in you, not just as memories but as real presences.

--Henri Nouwen

 

A kind of grieving, missing, longing

Missing not just a single man

A great man, a big-hearted man

But who we used to be

 

In the pictures I see Henry Huang, Lottie Jones, Stan and Vera

I see their kids—or don’t recognize them

Everyone is older, indistinguishable

 

The Communion of Saints

Unsaints, using walkers

Some, themselves, facing grave illnesses

 

Divorced now, separated

All of us, in our own spaces, comfort zones

Into old age, disease, ill-ease

Mental health, fragile

I can’t help but wonder

Who we’d be all together

Even grumpier, haters

 

Collectively who we were, back then

Neil called them the Golden Years

What was so great about having no money?

Burger bean bake, liver jive? More?

The fact that we have these memories

And that you were there and remember too

 

That we were young and had a dream, together

Of saving the world, taking the world on

Of combatting apartheid, injustice, taking down the rich

Helping our neighbor, whoever that may be

We raised kids together, not very well, with no idea

The how, the why, we never knew what we were doing

Except that we were doing it, something, to hopefully

Change the world

The festival, the magazine, the long hours

Building a log-cabin lodge, with no power tools

Doing crazy impossible things

We told you so, against our parents’ wishes

Against the alderman’s demands

Against the establishment, the mainstream

What other church leaders were saying

And we made mistakes

Lots of them, so many

In humility, in boastful pride, in youthful arrogance

Because we would never be old, sick, or die

 

But we are dying,

 

One face, one memory spurs another

I am scrolling through Facebook

Searching, trying to go back

Relive, remember, the water fights in the stairwell

opening the fire hydrant on really hot days

wasn’t there some tradition where we’d hold someone down

and use the big wooden paddle from the Sadie to haze them

remember when Tony would take off his legs, initiate new members with the macabre

prayer breakfasts, radical Christian worship, all-night communion, raucous bachelor parties

marathon council meetings where serious discussions took place—or not

maybe they just ate blue-cheese burgers, a special meal served when hosting dignitaries

come to find out who we were, what we were about

but even then we couldn’t exactly say, because we didn’t know the end

Dawn always said when I wanted to run away with the story, write the ending

That we hadn’t gotten there yet—

Maybe we have, maybe we are writing it now

We are the story

Turning one more page . . .

The end, ever after.