from: Here if You Need Me

By Kate Braestrup

(Kate is a UU chaplain. This reading is of Kate reflecting on the time immediately after she heard about her husband Drew's unexpected death when he was in his mid- 40's.)

Perhaps 40 minutes after I heard the news of Drew's death, I was sitting in the living room with my friend Monica when the doorbell rang. The sergeant was on the telephone so Monica sprang up to answer it. A young man stood on the front steps clad in a spiffy dark suit, his hair neatly combed excluding a scent of soap and virtue. Holding out a pamphlet be beamed at Monica and said, "Have you heard the good news?"

For a long second Monica glared at him, not sure if she should punch him or laugh hysterically, she compromised by slamming the door.

A few minutes later the doorbell rang again, this time I answered it. It was my neighbor, an elderly woman I had exchanged no more than a dozen words with in the ten years that I had lived in Thomasville. She had potholders in her hands which held a pan of brownies, still hot from the oven and tears were rolling down her check. "I just heard," she said.

That pan of brownies, it turned out later was the leading edge of a tsunami of food that came to my children and me, a wave that did not recede for months after Drew's death. I didn't know that my family and I would be fed three meals a day for weeks and weeks. I did not anticipate that neighborhood men would come to drywall the playroom, build bookshelves, mow the lawn or get the oil changed in my car. I did not know that my house would be cleaned and the laundry done; that I would have embraces and listening ears; that I would not be abandoned to labor mourning alone. All I knew was that my neighbor was standing on the front stoop with her brownies and her tears. She was the Good News.

Reading of April 12, 2009