A Eulogy For My Wife

 

 

 

Kay Leslie Brown

6 July, 1952 - 25 November, 2017

Funeral Eulogy

St. Margaret of Scotland Anglican Church, Barrie, ON, 3 December, 2017

Bishop Shaw, dear colleagues, friends, fellow parishioners, on behalf of my family and Kay’s family, I thank you all for joining us today to pray for and to remember an extraordinary person and faithful Christian, Kay Leslie Brown.   Kay received so many acts of kindness and compassion from so many of you during her long illness that any words of gratitude I could offer would be wholly inadequate.

 

Kay was always tickled that when we were married, three priests and a postulant, so, for you non-Anglicans,  three and a half priests, officiated at our wedding.  I think we have that number beaten today, as there must be a small platoon of clergy and chaplains present.  Kay would enjoy that fact.

 

As I wrote this eulogy, I was mindful that Kay would probably not have had much interest in what I said about her, because she would never have wanted to be the focus of this event.   Kay designed this funeral, chose the readings and the hymns, so that it would be about her God.

 

For Kay, the words of the liturgy, the proclamation of the word, and the faithful preaching of the gospel were what mattered.  That was the exacting standard that she held my own sermons up to.  If I saw her frowning face in the congregation, I knew I wasn’t doing well.  Sometimes, in the car on the way home, she’d say “You did OK.” When it came to preaching, she was my fiercest and best critic.

 

In that respect, Kay always reminded me of the figure of John the Baptist, as painted in the Isenheim Altarpiece in the 1500s by Matthias Gunewald.  John is depicted off to the side, pointing to the figure of Christ on the cross.   The theologian Karl Barth loved this painting.  I know that Kay would be rolling her eyes at my working a theologian into her eulogy, but darling, you always knew that I was a geek.   

 

Barth said that the church must always be like John in that painting, not calling attention to itself, but rather directing attention to the cross and to Christ’s work there in defeating our enemy of sin and death.   That was Kay, like John the Baptist, always pointing to the cross.  Anytime she spoke up in the life of the church, you could be sure that would be asking, often impatiently, where was God in all our human activity.

 

However, darling, I am not here as a priest or a preacher.   I am here to talk about you and about what a privilege it was to be your husband.   So bear with me.  I’ll speak about you briefly, and then get out of the way of the church’s true business, as you would want.  

 

Kay fought a two front war with cancer and diabetes, and in the last year of that struggle she wrote a bible study on how our faith helps us to deal with pain and suffering.   She spoke on that subject with great authority.   People often told me how they were in awe of Kay’s calm, even serene, composure.  As she liked to say, God gave her “the peace which passes all understanding”.  

Despite four significant surgeries in three years, and long hospitalizations, Kay was gracious and kind with others.   As her body slowly failed her, she never gave in to self-pity or despair.   I saw her comfort other patients, nurses, and even embrace the young doctor who burst into tears as she told Kay that she had reached the end of what medicine could do for her and that she would soon die.  A priest friend of mine told me that he went to the hospital to bless Kay, and he came away blessed.  So while I regret that Kay never got to lead that bible study on living with pain and suffering, a friend pointed out to me the other day that, in a very real way, she did teach that lesson, just by the way she lived and died.

 

Kay would have been the first to tell you that her peacefulness and calm did not come from within, but rather were spiritual gifts.   Kay was not a saint, and she was not always a person of faith.   In her youth, she liked to say that she was, in her words, “a flaming atheist”.   In her passion for research and for the scientific method, Kay convinced herself that she had to jettison her faith, but God had other plans.  In the twenty years I was at her side, I saw Kay struggle with God’s call.  I think God had the upper hand in that struggle, because God simply reminded Kay of who she was and of who she had always been.

 

Kay was always a person attuned to God’s justice and grace.  Growing up in the southern United States in the 1950s and 60s, Kay saw things that would stay with her all her life.  She often told me how, as a girl, she didn’t understand why there were separate water fountains for coloured people.   At the same time she saw her father, a devoted civil servant, give the same care to black clients as he did to white ones.   Martin Luther King was one of her early and lifelong heroes.  Kay always believed that the moral arc of the universe bent towards the good, even if she stopped believing, for a while, that the moral arc came from and led back to God.  

 

Despite being a profound introvert at times, she attracted the misfits and the hurting, who sensed her compassion and patience.  Kay had deep reserves of empathy and kindness.   Even while she was still a self-proclaimed “flaming atheist”, she paid the tuition of a friend so she could go to seminary.    She gave freely because she had a big heart, an innate sense of decency, and an ability to see the other’s point of view.

 

What led Kay back to God is a long story.   I think partly it was circumstances, the people and places that God led us to, and I think it was also the frustration of her hopes to make a career in science and academia.   Kay had dreamed of winning a Nobel prize, and her academic career ended in frustration, partly due to bad luck and partly due to Kay’s struggles with mental illness.  I was attracted to Kay because of her warmth, humour, and creativity, but I soon realized that these moments came at a cost.  She had violent swings into depression and despair, and her darkest period was when she had to walk away from the university environment that she had built her identity on.

 

I don’t doubt for a second that it was God who led Kay out of that dark valley.  It took years for us to build a new life together.   Her career was ending as mine was taking off and that was a source of tension as well.   We learned the hard way how to build a marriage based on mutual respect, careful listening, giving and taking.  Early on I mostly took, and Kay gave, a lot.  She found satisfaction in building elaborate and beautiful gardens, in which she combined a scientific method with the flair and soul of an artist, and then she had to walk away from them, repeatedly.   Becoming a military spouse, at an age when most people are looking forward to settling down and staying in one place, meant that she had to move, frequently, and that got harder and harder on her.   Soldiers get the medals, but really the medals should go to spouses like Kay, who gave so much to advance my career.

 

I think the last ten years of her life were probably the best.  Kay found the right psychiatrist and the right medication, and the black clouds of her depression mostly lifted and vanished.   She made friends, and opened her house to others - wandering chaplains, military people far from home, strays and misfits - all were welcome at her table.  Kay thrived in a series of churches - St. Barnabas in Medicine Hat, St. Columba’s in Waterloo, and, of course, here.  I have no doubt that Kay could have made significant contributions to the life of St. Margaret’s and St. Giles in the years to come, had it pleased God to leave her with us.  I also have no doubt that God completed his work in Kay, by bringing her to a good place in these years.  Kay’s deep and integral goodness, her joyfulness and compassion for others, her plain speaking and prophetic voice, all these things came through strongly.  Kay was no longer a flaming atheist, she was simply flaming, a bright beacon of God’s power to bind up and restore.

 

I will always be profoundly grateful for the privilege of being Kay’s husband.  In my mind’s eye I will always see her as she was, her strong and capable hands weeding a garden or paddling a stream, her mouth quirked in wonder or humour, her eyes wide and seeing the beauty of the world and the people around her.   In her last years, as she grew increasingly sick and frail, Kay would talk about the resurrection body that God would give her.   She hoped that when she got to heaven, that God would give her some challenging scientific assignment, like designing a new plant species, or managing a supernova.   No sitting around playing the harp for Kay! I have no doubt that one day we will look on Kay again, in whatever form God pleases to give her, and that she will burn as bright and fierce and glorious as any star in heaven.

Book Review: Brian Castner`s All The Ways We Kill and Die

My military ProD reading lately has included Brian Castner, one of the writers to have emerged from America`s post-9/11 wars. A US Air Force EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) officer, Castner commanded teams of EOD operators in Iraq. In 2012, he wrote The Long Walk Home, a memoir of his time there, and his struggle to make peace with his memories, emotions and PTSD. In 2016, he published All The Ways We Kill and Die, chronicling his attempt to make sense of the death of a fellow EOD operator in Afghanistan. This second book is by turns a memoir, a piece of journalism, and an of-the-moment military history of the Improvised Explosives Device (IED), the signature weapon of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both books feature an unsparing honesty and a clear, bitterly beautiful prose style. Civilian and military readers alike will want to get to know this writer. I am very happy to say that my review of Castner appeared today in the online military journal, The Strategy Bridge. You can find it here. MP+

Mental Health In The Military: From Generation To Generation

Today in Canada a very welcome national conversation is happening on the subject of mental health.  As part of that conversation, You can follow it on T|witter using the hashtag #BellLetsTalk. It's very encouraging to see the Canadian Armed Forces taking this conversation seriously.

As part of that conversation, the Globe and Mail is reporting on a study, "conducted by the Department of National Defence and the University of Manitoba, (which) found that exposure to child abuse and trauma among soldiers is proportionally higher than in the civilian population."  (See also CBC coverage of the study here).

The study finds that that exposure to childhood abuse for members of the Regular Force is "47.7 per cent – and higher still in reserve forces with 49.4 per cent, compared with 33.1 per cent in the Canadian general population".

The study does not speculate why these percentages are higher than in the general population.

My immediate reaction to these figures is that they may be explainable, at least in part, due to the fact that military service tends to run within families.   Military families are prone to stressors - frequent absence of parents (usually the father) due to deployments and training, separation from extended families and other support networks due to frequent postings, alcholism and divorce.   If a father has a mental health injury due to experiences of combat or time in war zones, and never sought diagnosis or treatment, that can only exacerbate the problem.

My own father was a veteran of NW Europe (WW2) and Korea, and spent almost thirty years in what we today would call the old Army.  His father was also a professional soldier who served with the US and Canadian armies and saw in the Spanish American War, the Moro Insurgency in the Philippines, and then the First World War, when he was wounded multiple times.  I never met my paternal grandfather, and dad never talked much of him.  One photo of the two of them survives.  Grandad is a big burly man, his arm resting on the slender shoulders of my dad, who was then perhaps ten years old.  Grandad is a big presence in that photo.  I have no idea what my dad's childhood experience of him was.

I love my Dad and respect him, and whatever demons he carried, he kept them at bay most days, but during my childhood he was a functional alcholic who could turn mean.   Mine wasn't a bad childhood, and my own experience of abuse was doubtless far less than many.  But, as a third generation soldier, I can look back and identify a chain of mental health issues that went largely unrecognized and unaddressed. 

So if you're part of a multigenerational family, it's important to examine and deal with your past and your family of origin issues, because you've got enough weight in your rucksack as it is.

What Sarah Palin Got Wrong About PTSD

I confess that I am not a great fan of Sarah Palin. Part of me thinks she embodies everything that is wrong with political discourse today, though I am grateful for her return to the media spotlight in the perverse way that one has when witnessing clowns engaged in a custard pie fight on a burning train careening towards a collapsed bridge. in other words, it's difficult to parse the horrific from the entertaining.

One thing I didn't know about Palin was that she is a military mom. That came to the spotlight this week when her son, a US Army reservist and Iraq war veteran, was arrested on 18 January after being charged with domestic assault and weapons possession while intoxicated. There's a bit of a fact sheet on this here.

The only reason I am mentioning any of this here is that Ms. Palin went public this week and appeared to shield her son from responsibility by blaming neglct President Obama and the US government for neglecting US veterans with PTSD.

“It’s a shame that our military personnel even have to wonder, if they have to question, if they’re respected anymore,” the former Alaska governor said. “The question, though — that comes from our own president, where they have to look at him and wonder, do you know what we go through?” 

These comments prompted a ton of comments from the US Army people I follow on Twitter, who noted with varying degrees of outrage that PTSD was never a blanket excuse for personal responsibility. Others felt that by invoking the stereotype of the "damaged vet", Palin had reinforced public suspicion that veterans are inherently violent and unstable.

As an alternative to that stereotype, I refer you to this thoughtful article, which includes some voices of veterans who have successfully confronted their own PTSD.

Bottom line: Ms. Palin got it wrong about PTSD. While she may feel protective of her son, he bears responsibility for addressing his condition, and his family has enjoyed the financial means to seek treatment above and beyond what may be provided. Using this issue politically, and blaming the government while ignoring the battered girlfriend, has no part of honesty, honour, or decency. MP+

Book Review, Redeployment by Phil Klay

Redeployment by Phil Klay (Penguin 2014)

 Redeployment may be the strongest and most literary work of fiction to have emerged from America’s recent wars, deserving comparison with Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds .  It is a collection of short stories, presenting different voices of soldiers, all back from war and all trying to process their various experiences.  Together the voices have the quality of a person directly after an accident, still trying to ascertain the extent of their injuries.

The author, Phil Klay, served from 2007-2008 as a Public Affairs Officer in the US Marine Corps in Iraq.  While he describes his own experience as “a very mild deployment”, it is clear that he was a skilled observer of military experience.  His characters seem highly believable as they go through the many stages of returning home, including emotional numbness, anger, heightened alertness, and disillusion.

Klay is clearly writing for a civilian audience, to whom the minds and experiences of new veterans are largely inaccessible.   In some stories, he shows readers how an experience at home can trigger memories and re-traumatize them.  In the first story, a Marine, a dog lover who had to shoot feral dogs in Iraq, finds that his girlfriend has kept his ancient and sick dog alive for his return. He refuses the services of a veterinary, and decides to put his dog down himself.  “That’s how it should be done, each shot coming quick after the last so you can’t even try to recover, which is when it hurts”.  In other stories, characters struggle to make themselves understood to civilians, sometimes using their “war stories” as weapons to wound and alienate their listeners.

Redeployment is a distinctively American book and the experiences of US Marines in places like Fallujah do not closely match (thankfully) those of CAF personnel in Afghanistan.   However, as a starting point in learning to understand the many ways in which contemporary war both wounds and stays with its survivors, it is a useful book.   Two stories will be of particular interest as they both feature chaplains.  In one, “Prayer in the Furnace”, a Catholic chaplain finds few words of comfort for a Marine who wonders how “somebody can live and fight for months in that shit and not go insane”.   As a Catholic himself, Klay imagines the priest’s pastoral and theological struggle with great sympathy and integrity.

While a work of fiction, Redeployment offers some understanding of the traumatic effects of war and the post-traumatic effects of survival and return from war.   For chaplain readers of this blog, since we who are called to walk with soldiers, and seek to understand their often concealed interior worlds, it is a useful book to have on our shelves.  Using war fiction as a means to explore issues of moral injury, spiritual resilience, and ethics may also be a useful way for chaplains to connect with other CAF members through one-on-one conversations, study groups, or talks.  Other recent fiction which chaplains should know about include Kevin Powers’ Iraq war novel The Yellow Birds and two classics of the Vietnam War, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn.

MP+

The Christian Century on PTSD as Moral Injury

 

The June 2015 issue of Christianity Today features a cover story by Annalaura Montgomery Chuang entitled “War Torn: PTSD Is Not Just A Trauma Of The Mind But Trauma Of The Soul”.   The article follows a psychiatrist, Warren Kinghor, whose work in Veterans Administration hospitals led him to the conclusion that theology and spirituality offer deep insights into our understanding Post-Trauamtic Stress Disorder as a moral injury.  Kinghorn’s work led him to doctoral studies in theology and a faculty position at Duke Divinity School where he works with veterans of America’s recent wars.  Here’s an excerpt from the article.

 "Kinghorn’s training had taught him to focus on fear.  But his patients didn’t talk primarily about fear.  They talked about right and wrong.  He realized that the focus on fear had blinded him to veterans’ deepest struggles.  Those with severe, long-lasting PTSD, “the burner under the pot” was often “a combination of fear and guilt and shame”.  Those potent emotions came not only from what they had witnessed, but also from their own actions in the morally confusing situations of modern combat. 

Michael Yandell, a veteran, wrote for The Christian Century earlier this year.

“For me, moral injury describes my disillusionment, the erosion of my sense of place in the world.  The spiritual and emotional foundations of the world disappeared and made it impossible for me to sleep the sleep of the just.  Even though I was part of a war that was much bigger than me,  I still feel personally responsible for its consequences.  I have a feeling of intense betrayal, and the betrayer and the betrayed are  the same person: my very self."

Complete article is here.

One Human Cost Of The Drone War

While amusing (at least, amusing i suppose to pilots) the caption of this image suggests that it can’t be that easy being an Air Force drone operator.   Besides the disrespect from pilots of manned aircraft, who are legendary for their egos (Air Force joke:  how can you tell if someone is a pilot?  They’ll tell you) even as they may be an endangered species, it turns out that there are psychological and even spiritual costs to operating unmanned aerial vehicles.   These issues have been explored in a recent film, “Good Kill”.  That film was reviewed fairly positively in the New Yorker last month, though Anthony Lane felt that its pursuit of its themes “depersonalized conflict, collateral damage, and modes of modern imperialism” was done in ways that “strain to insure that its meaning is as clear and as cloudless as the Nevada skies”.

Two days ago the New York Times published a story on how drone operators are subject to operational and post-traumatic stress, and how drone operations are being cut back because of high attrition rates among operators.  The article includes mention of how US Air Force chaplains are among a “human performance team” of mental health professionals who have high level security clearances in order to meet with any operators in the facility at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada “if they are troubled”.  That would make for some heavy pastoral lifting, to be sure, and hopefully the chaplains are doing more than just encouraging people to get back in their seats and fly another mission.  

I said in my title that drone pilots and operators are “One Human Cost of the Drone War” but of course there are other costs.   A 2014 installation in the fields of Pakistan aimed to show US drone operators the face of a child orphaned by a drone strike.  In November of 2014, Steve Coll wrote a memorable piece for the New Yorker on what it is like to live in a region where drones operate regularly.  Since at least 2011 various third parties, including the Columbia University Law School. have been calling for disclosure of civilians, primarily in Pakistan but more recently in countries like Yemen, who have been killed in drone strikes.  Earlier this month the NYT reported on how some US lawyers are seeking to get a US government apology for two Yemeni men killed by mistake in a drone strike in 2012.   The relatives of the two men were apparently offered a bag of cash, sequentially numbered US currency, but to date the only US apology issued for an accidental death from a drone was issued to the families of two Western hostages.  In November of 2014, the Guardian reported that civilian deaths in US drone strokes numbered over 1100.

None of the above comments are meant to demonize US drone operators.   The NYT piece reminds us that there are human costs on both sides.  Drone operators have high-definition video images to show the effects of their strikes on buildings, vehicles, and people.   It’s impossible to imagine that these images do not have the power to haunt and trouble these operators.   As media pundits debate the wisdom of putting “boots on the ground” and sending soldiers back into places like Iraq, it should be remembered that the West has been very comfortable, even complacent, in conducting a remote control war for years now, targeting the so-called high value targets (HVTs) that emerge, one terrorist leader replacing the other.  The Israelis call this approach “mowing the grass”.   In this ongoing hunt for HVTs, a certain degree of “collateral damage”, meaning deaths of civilians either caught in the blasts or targeted mistakenly, is tolerated.  Should we as citizens accept this process when it seems that increasing numbers of men and women operating the drones can no longer accept it?

No Soldier Is An Island

Just before Christmas my buddy Padre Howard, a handsome but clueless individual, called me to say that he needed some writing from me for the first thing in January. Howard coordinate chaplains' submissions to The Western Sentinel, the newspaper of Canada's Army in western Canada. Burdened by vague feelings of affection and loyalty to Howard (he has a nice moustache, a lovely family, drinks Guinness... and that's all i've got, really), I agreed. While casting about for a topic, I thought it would be quite awesome if I could quote a Renaissance metaphysical poet in an army newspaper and get away with it, and I did. Mr. Argyll, my Literature 12 teacher who introduced me to John Donne, would be proud.

In all seriousness, the submission was written while I was finishing off a series of charitable events with many good hearted folks from the base, and feeling quite inspired by them, and my feelings of despair and horror in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut, USA, in December. The intersection of those feelings lead me to Donne. You can see the piece here and then navigage to page 17. Or, to make it easier, you can read it below.

“No man is an island” wrote the English poet John Donne. If Donne was alive today instead of 400 or so years ago and been more gender aware, he would have probably written “no one is an island”, but the point is the same. Donne was saying that all of us are connected, one to another, or, in his words, “I am involved in mankind”. When we ignore this fact, our lives become isolated and stranded, like a barren island cut off from the mainland.

As I write this, just before Christmas, I am, like all of us, trying to find some meaning in the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. I have no answers. I am not sure that anyone does. What could one say? All that we can say, with any certainty, is that one person, for whatever horrible and misguided reason, rejected his connection to his fellow humans. Whereas the poet Donne felt that “any man’s death diminishes me”, Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter, turned that sentiment on its head. He, like other mass killers, seems to have gone to a place where the only meaning was in the death of others.

Our American friends and neighbours are now beginning a long and painful debate. This debate will involve individual and constitutional rights to bear arms, the need of society to protect itself, and issues regarding mental health. Some of this debate will be uniquely American, but the issues around society and mental health know no borders.

Over the Christmas season just passed, I have been inspired time and again by how my military and civilian colleagues have gotten “involved in mankind”. I’ve seen volunteers step up to help the Salvation Army, the United Way, the local food bank, soup kitchens, you name it. These people don’t want recognition. They don’t do it for their PERs or a letter from the Padre to their COC saying how swell they are. They just want to do something to help others. They realize that human beings aren’t designed to be islands, and that we do best when we are connected to one another. I’m definitely not a shrink, but I will say with certainty that our mental health depends on each of realizing, as Donne wrote, that we are “involved in mankind”. This is good advice, and not just for the Christmas season.

A while ago at CFB Suffield, we sat with glazed expressions through two days of stupefying annual briefings, but amidst this death by powerpoint I remember some good stuff on mental health. We were told to keep an eye on each other, and to check in with friends and colleagues if we see them starting to detach themselves from others. Here for me is the hope I need when stories like Newtown look so large. The truth, and the key to healthy living, is that we none of us our islands. We do best, we even thrive, when we reach out to others, because we are all “involved in mankind”.

Dr. Rich Mahogany Takes Men's Questions On Mental Health

Another h/t to the New York Times today for this great piece on a fictional doctor, Dr. Ron Mahogany, who you can find on the website ManTherapy.org. Mantherapy is a joint effort by several US agencies, including the State of Colorado Office of Suicide Prevention.

I heartily recommend this site to my chaplain colleagues dealing with men and looking for a humourous and non-threatening mental health resource for them. I think militaries, whose mental health campaigns tend to be distressingly earnest, could learn a lot from this website.