Josephine the Singer

She introduces herself to me as Josephine the Singer.

I meet her in an Arizona nursing home as she wheels herself down the corridor, wearing a cobalt blue dress with white flower print, and singing. Always singing. This is the only way she can live. Without a song, she is just Josephine. Just an old person in a nursing home.

We sit by a window in the starched hallway, and she warbles a solo of toothless songs she has written since she came here 5 years ago. Then, she still had some family. Now she is the last, and no one visits. So she sings. Most of her lyrics are about birds and flying, I think, though the words are tremulous and thin.

Josephine invites me to her dim room. On our way she bumps into a wheelchair and tears her skin like tissue paper.

Crayon drawings decorate the walls of Josephine’s room, but they are not from grandchildren. She started coloring when she moved to the nursing home. She draws a crayon picture on one side and writes a one-page story on the other. With crayons and paper, she is an artist; she is a storyteller.

What are her tales about, I wonder? She reads them to me, but I cannot understand. Are they about Josephine

the wife, the friend, the mother

the beautiful woman who loves, who is loved

who lives in a world where colors weigh more than crayon names: granny smith apple, periwinkle, eggplant, dandelion, cotton candy, sunset, sky…

Josephine and I sit by the window looking out at a courtyard with a tree, and she sings about the time she saw a big, beautiful blackbird perch on a branch in that tree, the bird so heavy the limb bowed under its weight. Then it flew away.

I sing a duet with Josephine, “Amazing Grace”. Her request, though she is quite emphatic about being an atheist. Another resident pauses, leans on a walker to listen to us. How sweet the sound. How determined this woman’s spirit, how powerful her joy though she knows her time will soon end, with few to care about the fleeting, real, lovely moment that was her life.

Josephine says that when she dies, she wants anyone to come into her room here and take anything they want. And – though mind you, she doesn’t believe in God – she wants them to gather in her room and sing “Amazing Grace” together.

Always singing… Of course she wants them to sing.

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When we’ve been there ten thousand years

Bright shining as the sun

We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise

Than when we first begun…

“Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Psalm 90:12

Passing Away

Another year of my life is complete. Time passes so quickly, sometimes I long to stop it for only one moment, so I can take a few deep breaths. But no, time continues to hurtle me towards my end on this earth. Though I’m a Christian, I’m not immune to fears of death and aging, and I live in a world that madly, desperately denies that we are, in fact, passing away. Death is not a popular reality.

Unable to sleep a few nights ago, I picked up a poetry anthology and randomly flipped to Christina Rossetti’s “Passing Away” which beautifully depicts the emotions stirred by thoughts of life and death:

Passing away, saith the World, passing away:

Chances, beauty, and youth, sapped day by day:

Thy life never continueth in one stay.

Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey

That hath won neither laurel nor bay?

I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May:

Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay

On my bosom for aye.

Then I answered: Yea.

 

Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away:

With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play,

Hearken what the past doth witness and say:

Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,

A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.

A midnight, at cockcrow, at morning one certain day

Lo the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay;

Watch thou and pray.

Then I answered: Yea.

 

Passing away, saith my God, passing away:

Winter passeth after the long delay:

New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,

Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven’s May.

Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray:

Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day,

My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.

Then I answered: Yea.

Am I gradually passing away with the passage of time? Yes. The author does not shrink from this reality, and the World and the Soul, everything around us and inside us, witness to it in the poem. But Rossetti recognizes that root-stricken decay is not the Christian’s end. In fact, the final stanza completely reverses the sense of the poem. In the first two stanzas, we mourn for the loss of beauty and youth, “gold” and “bud.” We despair as we see the earth renewing itself each year the same, while we grow steadily more “dim” and “grey” physically.

Yet suddenly in the last lines, all we love and vainly cling to in earthly life becomes nothing more than a winter preceding the true spring, night preceding the day. For the final, wonderful reality is not death, but the Bridegroom’s call. There is a “certain day” approaching for me when I will hear it, and this is a reality both exciting and sobering, for which I need prepare, that I may respond joyfully: yea.

“He he who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” Revelation 22:20