Requiem Mass – Laura Slade
September 8, 2008
+In the Name…
Labor Day. A national holiday
(that has lost a bit of it meaning), but nevertheless a day when all
of us relax a bit one more time before the schedule of things change.
The parish office was closed. No counters there to tabulate and deposit
the Sunday collection.
Rita and I decided to take
a long walk at Valley Forge National Park before it got too hot. So
we did so, and came back to the rectory at about 1:00 PM. The phone
rang at about 3:30PM and the caller ID indicated that it was a phone
call from Wyoming.
Sandy told me that her mother
has suffered a severe stroke and that Laura was on the way to Bryn Mawr
Hospital. She asked if there was someone who could take her father there
because she didn’t want him to drive. I said that I would call Ed,
and I would take him.
When Ed and I arrived at the
emergency room, I was the first to enter the cubicle and I saw immediately
that Laura was not well at all. The physician on duty spoke to us that
she indeed was not well, but that they were to do an MRI to see how
serious the stroke was. I anointed Laura as Ed stood next to me, and
then I took him back to Waverly Heights.
Ed said to me there and repeated
on the way back to Waverly that he had always prayed that Laura would
go before him, and that he was so thankful for the many years they had
had together.
I went to visit Laura on Tuesday
and Wednesday morning before Rita and I left for a visit to Hershey
to see my godmother who has been a mother to me and who was recovering
from hip surgery and who was dealing with her youngest daughter’s
automobile accident that has occurred recently. An accident in Altoona,
Pa – so severe that she had been airlifted to the University of Pittsburgh
Hospital where she was in the intensive care unit.
My cell phone rang while we
were having lunch at the Hotel Hershey. It was Ginny who said that Laura
was near the end of her life. I called Father Scharbach who went quickly
to Bryn Mawr Hospital to administer the Last Rites of the Church to
Laura. She died later that afternoon with Ed and Edward by her side.
God be praised that Ed’s
prayer that she predecease him was honored, that she did not linger
after such a severe stroke, and that she received what the Church offers
to her faithful children as death approaches.
But here we are without Laura,
and it was been so sudden and unexpected. Ed said to me as I dropped
him off at Waverly that he always had believed that we are to live one
day at a time because we know not what the next day has in store.
We have all lost a wonderful
and beautiful woman who loved the Lord, her church, and her family.
She now because of the faith and good works of her life has entered
what the Church calls “larger life.” She now begins to see on another
shore what the faith of the Church had taught her lies before its children.
What she and you and I see dimly, she now sees clearly. So we do not
mourn for her. We mourn for ourselves.
Those who are members of this
wonderful and complex parish have heard me say many times that we are
all unique, that we are unrepeatable individuals of God’s creating,
that there are no two of us alike, and if that doesn’t awe us, I don’t
know what does.
Laura was a woman of strong
faith and commitment to the Church. She came here during the rectorship
of this parish’s seventh rector, Fr. George Rutler, because Sandy,
an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr who has been coming here, told her mother
that she would like this church. Laura, like so many other Episcopalians
during the early seventies was dismayed with the direction the Episcopal
Church was taking. She came her (and Ed followed two years later), and
she and he became pillars of this parish which has always striven to
be faithful to the revealed religion of historic Christianity.
Laura was obsessed that what
we offer to God in our worship of Him needed to be the very best because
He deserved the best. She polished the brass elements that are part
of the church’s offering of worship with an attentiveness to detail
that to this day amazes me. Her eyes were always focused on the many
elements that constitute the richness of the Church’s liturgical worship,
and didn’t hesitate to say to me and others something was missing
or had been forgotten that diminished our corporate offering being the
best we could offer.
She so loved and respected
her husband, and took pride in the many things he had given and worked
on here at Good Shepherd. I would smile when she would listen him recount
what he was working on or had given, and her facial expression spoke
of pride in Ed’s labors. She would at other times listen to Ed as
he recounted their rich life and experiences in the military, but would
at times say to Ed as she tugged on his sleeve, “That’s enough.”
She was so proud of Sandy and
Edward, and her grandchildren. She didn’t brag about them, but when
asked, she spoke about them with love, pride, and deep satisfaction.
Some of you know that less
than two years ago, Laura was diagnosed as having dementia. This was
difficult for her (as it is for all who are afflicted with it in its
various forms) because she just couldn’t remember the names of people,
which was so uncomfortable and embarrassing to her. She came to church
less than she had in order to avoid such awkwardness and pain. It’s
an awful affliction that would have gotten progressively worse if she
had lived.
I have been Rector of this
parish for over nineteen years, and I don’t like losing people like
Laura. But I give thanks to Almighty God for her life, and that you
and I are the richer because she was given by God to us as wife, mother,
grandmother, servant, and sister in Christ respectively.
Ed, Edward, and Sandy, only
God is capable of filling the hole of your loss with a myriad of graces
that the world cannot give. He will do that because His character is
to love and provide, and because He was honored by a very dear lady
whose soul now rests in His hands.
+In
the Name…
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