A guest sermon offers a postscript for Beautiful Wounds, and a eulogy for a remarkable woman.

Unitarian Universalist Church of Spokane, Sunday, December 18, 2022

The last time I was here, five years ago, it was to talk about Tell, the 2017 book I’d written with and about Margaret Witt and her wife Laurie. I’ve often described Tell as a great love story masquerading as a legal thriller—the thrill being Major Witt’s historic and successful legal challenge to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the U.S. military policy that expelled tens of thousands of service members simply because they admitted or were outed for being gay. But the essence of Tell—to which Court Judge Ronald Leighton spoke when he rendered his order that Major Witt be reinstated—was love. Not just the love between Margie and Laurie, but the love and respect Margie had earned from her peers in her medivac unit and within the family circles of her life, most notably Margie’s parents who underwent a deeply moving transformation not just to accept their daughter’s sexual identity, but to become her most ardent advocates.

While I was writing Tell, and even while standing here five years ago, I was living what became my new book— Beautiful Wounds. I remember the dinner at a bistro on the South Hill where Connie and I told Margie and Laurie we were getting divorced. They both thought we were pulling their legs.

Beautiful Wounds is a book about deep heartache coupled with a sojourn into memory and a landscape known  as the “channeled scablands.” As was my mother and older sister, I was born in the scablands and retreated there to try to regain my footing, to try to repair my broken spirits. Not just in the wake of divorce but in the wake of a long wave of heartache, the loss of two close friends to cancer, and ultimately the death of my parents in 2017 and 2019.

For much of my adult life I often thought about how I could possibly eulogize my mother, Joan–pronounced Jo-Ann–when she passed.

She had such a positive and caring spirit, despite being badly crippled in her mid-twenties by rheumatoid arthritis. I have a picture of her when she was in her early twenties, bending a knee as she climbed out of a pool.

But I never remember seeing her bend either one of her knees, because by the time my memory kicked in she couldn’t. And never once did I hear her complain.

I did get to eulogize my father, but not Joan, not my mother. This mostly had to do with the arrival of Covid and the understandable fear the gathering would spread the infection. So, I’m all the more pleased to be here today, to introduce you to my mother and offer a glimpse into a journey of love that went hand-in-hand with a journey of sorrow.

I’ll come back to this in a few minutes.

But first I’d like to read a bit from Beautiful Wounds, from the final Chapter called “Grand Chasms.”

By January 2017, just as Tell was in final editing, it became clear my parents needed round-the-clock care giving and assistance. So for sixty hours a week I became one of three caregivers; sleeping most nights on a couch next to Joan. Later that year, she was traumatized during what amounted to an experiment with an occupational therapist who was trying to find a better, safer way to bathe her. I’ll spare you the details, but the upshot is that I became her bather after that, and remained so for the remaining two years of her life.

There were physical challenges because her knees were locked by arthritis that even surgery couldn’t repair. But the main issue was trust. After the “experiment” she didn’t want to be bathed, and so three days a week I would hold her, joke with her, and sing to her, all to relax her enough so that I could give her a shower after sliding her on a bath bench into the tub space.

A few months before she passed, I made a recording of the two of us getting ready for bath time. I’ll apologize in advance for my voice, but not for hers…

My oldest friend is Willy Nowotny, one of my football buddies. We met in kindergarten and he still reminds me of the Christmas program in 1968, and how I was such a lousy singer that I didn’t make the cut to be in the choir with all the other kids. Instead, I was assigned to hand out programs, and after handing Joan her program I remember the beautifully kind smile she flashed me before passing through the doorway into the auditorium. I didn’t sing much at all after that. I got an F the next year in 7th grade music. For what it’s worth, I was also a shitty baseball player.

But here’s the thing.

 My mom loved music, she loved to sing, she was especially fond of musicals. The best way to rinse away the fear and anxiety caused by her advancing dementia was to sing to her and with her. So after 47 years of muting my singing voice (such as it is) I began to sing again, and sing a lot, and sing not because I loved to sing, but because I loved my mom.

I wrote about the scablands in Beautiful Wounds because that’s where I had to find myself, because I was broken. And, yes, the rugged earth story I walked into was somehow edifying and healing at once.

Part of the reason it was healing is that it reconnected me to Joan and her father, my grandfather Gil Hartman, who loved to sing, loved to dance, and would often take me into the mountains to fish and camp. They both taught me so much about love, and kindness, and the overwhelming importance of hope, and the resolve to find joy in our lives. Because that’s why we’re here. Not to party endlessly, but to find the blessings of joy, to bring comfort and justice to others, and to make our lives worth living, against the tides of our disappointments and setbacks, and the inevitable face-off with mortality.

I’d like to say more about how she did that, about how she made my life worth living again, but I can’t. I’ve done a dozen or so book events and each time I try to talk about Joan I turn into a human fountain of tears. I lose my voice in the process. I sound like a man who’s drowning, and that’s not what people come to book events to witness.

But I want you to know that I’m not drowning. I’m not drowning because as Joan was dying she re-built my heart.

 In her passing from this life she breathed new life into mine.

—tjc