IN THE MIDST OF DEATH, WE ARE IN LIFE The choir at the 8:30 Mass had just finished "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands " Then, everything fell apart
Loxterkamp, David
IN THE MIDST OF DEATH, WE ARE IN LIFE There at Greg's side David Loxterkamp It was toward the close of Mass on the Second Sunday of Lent. Twenty screeching voices and three clanging guitars were...
...What mattered was the privilege we all felt as we rushed to Greg's side on that Sunday morning, trusting that he would have been there for us, knowing we may be called upon again...
...This notion is what makes the "Lamb of God" the Good Friday of the Catholic Mass: Incredulously, we beseech the very Lamb whom the Father had forsaken to grant mercy on our mortal souls...
...It confirmed the presence of ventricular fibrillation, and with two jolts from the paddles we converted our patient to a normal sinus rhythm...
...Since he was not breathing, I propped his head, pinched his nose, and forced a full breath of air into his lungs...
...When it finally arrived, the wall clock recorded-to my astonishment-a lapse of only eight minutes...
...Why are we spared...
...When will our trials begin...
...Despite the march of regular beats across the monitor screen, our patient and friend and fellow parishioner lay moribund on the cot, having died instantly in the side aisle of the church, during his unbroken fall to the floor...
...was having an insulin reaction...
...Twenty-four intent, frightened, innocent pairs of eyes fixed upon me as I rose to speak...
...I confessed to one of the nurses that this was my first resuscitation outside of the hospital...
...Even though I am in good heath and free of the niggling ills that, after a certain age, badger us into believing we have hit the downward slide, I am also adopted and-therefore, in my wife's opinion-a walking genetic time bomb...
...A doctor's life is a continuous memento mori, a reminder of death and life's unfairness, fragility, and the speed with which all good things pass...
...So the words hit me hard, those of John Rutter's Requiem that we had been rehearsing in our community chorus...
...I have learned by living here that we are all part of the same family...
...I reviewed the morning's details with Bonnie and Betsy, who had been absent from the 8:30 Mass...
...Surely it was there, for hadn't he just sighed and turned his head...
...A wide swath of community had assembled that morning for the Rite of Christian Burial...
...Mine, too," she replied sheepishly...
...From the rise of the altar where I directed the Saint Francis Youth Choir, I could scan the whole congregation: below me, the smiling faces of the first-row regulars...
...I groped for the carotid and femoral arteries and pressed my ear to his chest...
...With glacial speed I pondered the conflicting evidence: A youngish man David Loxterkamp, m.d., is the director of the Saint Francis Youth Choir and practices family medicine in Belfast, Maine...
...I recently heard from a social worker friend that April is the peak month for suicide...
...In the midst of death, we are in life...
...Yet we labored on, doctor and nurses, priest and parishioners, through the unpardonable delays of the ambulance crew...
...high in back, balcony-dwellers fidgeting through the final refrain...
...In the season so redolent with rebirth and awakening, hope and renewal, perhaps the contrast with one's own despair can be utterly overwhelming...
...And I found myself repeating these words over and over during the ensuing days, to acquaintances of the deceased and the nurses who assisted me and the office staff who comforted me in a genuine show of concern...
...I accompanied the attending physician to the small office where Greg's wife Bonnie was waiting...
...For it has been the Spirit I have sought ever since...
...To me, too," I agreed...
...line-I felt astonishingly naked and helpless...
...Without any tools-a stethoscope or blood pressure cuff, a bag-and-mask or I.V...
...another instructed the onlookers to "give them air," followed soon by the clunk of double doors swinging ajar and a blast of cold air reaching us from the rear of church...
...I am the lucky one...
...I told them, in words as straight as possible, what I had lately come to know...
...Someone assured me that an ambulance had been called...
...On further inspection I could see that the ashen man was our parish council president, only a few years my senior and in apparent good health...
...I assured them that we had done everything possible, and felt terrible that we hadn't done enough...
...I could now view our rescue efforts in something other than a medical light...
...As we passed through the receiving line, I suddenly came upon Greg's daughters, and squatted low to grip their hands and whisper, "I was at your father's side when he died...
...Suddenly I heard my name, "Doctor Loxterkamp, come quickly," as a young woman grabbed my guitar and another rushed me to a body sprawled on the carpet and wedged into a narrow passage...
...During the Agnus Dei, Rutter writes a sobering chant in the bass clef where the men maintain a monotone, "In the midst of life, we are in death...
...Today they seemed unusually raucous, with bodies scurrying and arms waving and a crowd converging to a point several pews back...
...The best we could," was all that I could muster...
...On Monday evening I attended the wake with my fellow parishioners, patients, acquaintances- all of us connected to Greg MaGuire by the Appleton School or the Catholic church, Democratic politics, or Greg's video business...
...But I was having doubts about singing it now, and meant to assuage them, or at least acknowledge them, in front of the children...
...Living among friends, and in my line of work, that is the only faith you need...
...Where was it...
...Singing is also a way to say "thank you" for all that Greg did for the children of the parish...
...I was surprised to see all twenty members in attendance, plus four more who had asked to come along, maybe out of a need to say good-by or bring closure to the terror and confusion of Sunday's ordeal...
...Do you think we did all right...
...Without community, I could not rebuke the claim made against all of God's creation, at every moment and with every turn: that in the midst of life, we are in death...
...A tiny hand shot up and wiggled from the second row, "But why do we have to sing the same song...
...It is about how communities respond in good times and in bad...
...Easter, the time when catechumens traditionally enter the Catholic church, is more than a witness to faith...
...I had the necessary training, a role to play, the means to express my love for my neighbor, and a way to exercise my belonging in the community...
...How could he be unresponsive and pulseless...
...wasn't he merely suffering from a drop in blood sugar...
...Reluctantly, disbelievingly, we began CPR, the three nurses and I who now huddled around him...
...Twenty screeching voices and three clanging guitars were barreling down the home stretch of the finale, "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands...
...I would turn forty-two in a few days, and birthdays are a treacherous time for me to plumb the mysteries of mortality...
...We gathered in the chapel to rehearse our songs before Mass...
...I just wanted you to know how much I liked and respected him...
...Get him some sugar," and packets simultaneously appeared from a dozen different handbags...
...Without a sense of community, Greg's tragedy might seem an imposition or intrusion on the privacy of my prayers...
...our lives, which God had chosen for us to continue...
...We had come to honor a soft-spoken man who labored a lifetime for his community, and for our greater awareness of an unseen hand...
...Indeed, I thought, my father's death had changed me forever, kindling an interest in hospice care, attracting me to my wife who had also lost her mother in adolescence, driving me to seek out the Spirit abiding in every death...
...Every day we console families in their struggles with disabled children, untimely deaths, or the decline of aging parents...
...Even though my father died, too, when I was your age, I have felt him beside me my whole life...
...But there was no pulse...
...We were Catholics and Protestants, the young and the old, saints and sinners, the living among the dead, all lining the wooden pews like the fingers of a folded hand...
...I heard Father Ray softly intoning what sounded like the prayers of the sacrament of the sick...
...Others ushered the children toward their religion classes and urged lingering parishioners out the rear of the church...
...Without community, I would forfeit the support of my fellow parishioners...
...But when we sing the words, remember not only Greg, but all your relatives who have gone before us, and 'you and me, brother', believers of every stripe...
...His wife had asked us to sing, but that was only part of the reason we were here today...
...He made no motion or sound while all around me the crowd shouted, "He's a diabetic...
...He was unconscious and could not be aroused...
...So saturated were these words with the memory of Greg and my father and my own tenuous circumstance that tears flooded my eyes as I sang...
...It was not just an exercise in moral or professional obligation...
...It was a week of strange conjunctions...
...The crew and I hoisted Greg to the back of the church where we attached the defibrillator leads...
...But still no pulse, still a stillness in that bared chest and those heavy mottled limbs...
...He gasped spontaneously, then again, now several times in obvious response to our urgent cries to "Breathe, Greg, breathe...
...I recall now how theRequiem tide turns, and our voices swell with the Easter refrain, "whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die...
...That Greg had been sick for a long time, and knew-better than the rest of us-that his end was near...
...He was a year older than Greg...
...We were here, too, to finish what had been left unfinished: the song we were singing on Sunday...
...After a time, this small community has brought me to an understanding that pilgrims often grasp on the road to a religious shrine, or anthropologists absorb in their studies of exotic tribes: that I am like my neighbor, and part of my neighbor is in me...
...and to my far right, stragglers and families of unruly youngsters who took refuge behind the open doors of the adjoining parish hall...
...For the religion classes he taught, the parish outings he organized, the interests of kids he defended as council president...
...It was not just a failed attempt...
...My throat tightened as a wound reopened inside me: memories of a Memorial Day weekend in 1966 when I returned from a canoe trip to learn of my father's fatal heart attack...
...The baby I delivered to the mother who sings with me at church is married to my auto mechanic whose father brokered the purchase of my home...
...Tuesday brought the Funeral Mass and the return of the Saint Francis Youth Choir...
...The hospital was only a half-mile away, and we continued the rescue efforts there for well over an hour...
...By the sheer strength of our numbers, we can believe that, in the midst of death, we are in life...
...I was the same age as Betsy when we heard the dreaded news...
...Anger and frustration in my practice often stems from an injured or empty place in my own heart, that my patients help me to see, which because of its exposure can now begin to heal...
...It feels a little creepy...
...It is about a community of the faithful...
...The family had chosen "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands," the last words Greg had heard before he died...
...Without community, I might have choked in my grief instead of dispersing it through words of sorrow and sympathy and thanksgiving...
...As we entered, the younger daughter Betsy arrived and embraced her mother, weeping, "I knew something was wrong, something had to be wrong...
...Already parishioners were rising to leave by way of the south side aisle...
...His skin was cool and mottled even though only a minute had passed since his collapse...
...Thankfully, a colleague of mine took charge, though he allowed little hope for a reversible outcome...
Vol. 122 • September 1995 • No. 15
