“With the saints give rest, O Lord, to the soul of Your servant departed this life and let her memory be eternal” (Funeral hymn)
Vera was part of our spiritual family from our very beginning. Before there was a church, she prayed with us when only the basement of our rectory was converted for worship. Forty-seven years later, she contracted a most fatal form of cancer, a sure fast track to death. Our deacon and I with our wives had been to the hospice to pray the poignant prayer of anointing. Before that the others left her room for her last Confession and Holy Communion. I suggested she lay in bed, but she took my hand to turn in a sitting position. We held hands for a long conversation—technically her confession, with appropriate prayers; however, what didn’t I already know about her life? Unlike many in her situation, she talked in a gentle voice of her passing into eternity as if it were an adventure to some foreign location, which of course it would be. The blessing of priesthood is to share the experiences and act as a catalyst of transition in such circumstances. No other career that I know has such a glorious opportunity for providing a Christ-like comfort in such circumstances.
Our choir members traditionally visit our beloved in hospitals and institutions as well as other shut-ins during the Christmas season to sing hymns and carols. They visited the hospice where Vera lay waiting for the inevitable, composed and at rest. The nurse on duty told our carolers that it would be best not to enter her room. For several days there had been no response from Vera, who lay in the semi-dark room with the door ajar. The carolers decided to sing in any case, and then as they softly sang, two young ladies looked in the bed and noticed there was a stirring. They opened the door wider and went beside the bed, engaging in a conversation with Vera. Between their hymns the carolers all had the opportunity to speak with her, an experience they felt to be a gift from the Holy Spirit.
Once a non-Orthodox at the funeral of her father-in-law commented: “It was as though Dad was being transported on the wings of your songs.” Precisely. We tend to call the prayers for our beloved deceased a Requiem. That term comes from the first word of the Roman Catholic funeral, meaning “quiet rest.” Yet the proper Slavonic term Otp’evanie is ot meaning “away” and p’evanie meaning “singing.” Thus, we the Church are “singing away” the soul of one we love; or it could be thought of as singing with the saints and angels. What is happening then is that the soul once baptized alone now makes a journey alone—but not quite alone. She who was part of our family, with whom we had shared the precious gifts of Jesus Christ from the holy chalice, is transitioning to another form of existence. It doesn’t mean she is no longer one of the family. We sing her away as if we were at the airport bidding her farewell.
Just as Vera was lying inert on her cot, her attending nurse assuming she was already on her way out of this lifetime and probably didn’t want to be disturbed, her mind was not lifeless. She heard the familiar hymns sung outside her doorway. Hearing, as all who have to do with the unconscious and dying know, seems to be the last organ functioning. Many times I’ve been told by survivors that they heard my prayers but were unable to respond at the time.
So they pass from life as we best know it into life everlasting, the songs of the Church on earth singing them away lest they feel alone and unaccompanied—and then they hear voices on the other side of death’s doors singing them in like living beacons, or more conventionally, like the control tower of Heaven. Those who are “in Christ” are never truly alone unless they want to be.