In my end is my beginning

“There is significance in the end of things,” my son Jacob once said, long before young men should think such thoughts, much less have the courage to utter them aloud. His words came to mind again yesterday as I attended the funeral Mass of Father Adam Schmitt, the eldest priest of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend and the uncle of our own dear pastor, Father Tony Steinacker.

There comes a point in every man’s life when funerals seem more frequent than birthdays, and the obligation to pray for the dead becomes a part of the rhythm of every day. I passed that point a few years back, around the time I turned 50, and now every November — the month of the Holy Souls in Purgatory — is especially filled with thoughts on the significance in the end of things.

My mother passed into eternal life last year in the early morning hours of All Saints Day. I was sleeping in the chair next to her, waiting for my 4 a.m. alarm to go off, to give her another dose of medicine. When the alarm woke me, she had already slipped away quietly, after six weeks of in-home hospice. We knew the end was coming, though we did not know quite when, but the significance of such ends often only becomes apparent once they have occurred.

My Great-Uncle Eldon, the last of his generation, had passed away just two months before. Death did not pause its inexorable march but moved on to the next generation, taking my mother, my uncle, and then — too early — the husband of one of my elder cousins, all within the space of six weeks. Memories flooded back of Thanksgivings and Christmases and Easters at Grandma and Grandpa Richert’s, when we were young and thoughts of death hardly ever entered our minds. Grandma and Grandpa’s house no longer rings with the joyful sound of young voices but sits empty most of the year, owned now by my Aunt Pat, whose husband, Uncle Al, passed away less than two weeks after my mother.

Isaac Watts’ “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” has always been one of my favorite hymns, and one I wish to have sung at my own funeral Mass, when the day comes. He captures the significance in the end of the things, but he also reminds us (as Bruce Springsteen, a bad Catholic like the rest of us, recently wrote) that “death is not the end”: “Time, like an ever-rolling stream / Bears all its sons away; / They fly forgotten, as a dream / Dies at the opening day.”

For those of us who have been united through baptism to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the last day of each of our lives does not fade away into eternal night but opens onto a new day, at the height of which we will rest in the glorious splendor of the perpetual light of God, every moment of our lives on this earth held in his eternal memory. For most of us, the early hours of that new day will be marked by toil and strife, as we make our way through the purification of Purgatory, so that we may enter into that perpetual light with — as Isaiah wrote — souls no longer stained scarlet by the effects of our sins but as white as snow or the fresh wool of a new, and redeemed, lamb.

Our time in purgatory, we pray, will be short, in part because of the prayers of those we have left behind. And so, as we wish to be prayed for, we pray now for those who have gone before us, and through our example of prayer teach the next generation that there is significance in the end of things because Christ has shown that death is not the end.

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