The Strangeness of Dealing with a Death in the Family on a Long Sunday

We had a long Sunday a few weeks back. Firstly, I was scheduled to host coffee hour, and had bought all the doughnut holes and cookies the night before. The weather was bad enough that I wanted to take the long way to church over the better roads, and thus we needed to leave early... and I left the food on the counter. No big deal, there is a grocery store down the hill from the church and I was able to replace the stuff.

After worship and coffee hour, we had a pizza lunch with the youth and then a youth group activity.
Somewhere in there my cell phone went off, it was my mother. My uncle was dieing of complications from heart disease. Now granted, we had warning of this, he was given less than a year last winter and he took a serious turn for the worse right before Christmas.

Here is where I put my plug in for all of you to take your health seriously. Pastors have a significantly higher rate of heart disease. Take care of yourself.

So we began a modified capture the flag game my wife calls Christians and Romans.
Now if you are expecting important phone calls, you don't go turning the ring volume down or off. Wouldn't you know it, right as I was hiding in enemy territory, and one of the kids on the other team was not 10 feet away, my phone goes off. My parents were leaving on the 8+ hour drive out to Minnisota. Yes, I was "captured", or converted, as these game rules went.

Next up on our long Sunday docket was our monthly nonprofit fund raising concert.
Oh the irony... it was for the local hospice. All of my grandparents had died under hospice care, and it made the experience a lot easier. My uncle however, had been refusing hospice, even refusing to believe he was dieing till that afternoon.

I was covering the nursery with help from our daughter, and right after changing one of those poopy diapers that you can smell just by me saying "almost blowout with a tinge of green" I received the call from my cousin.

"Dad died," she sobbed, "there's 20 cops here, a fire truck, and an ambulance, I'm standing outside the garage because there's too many people in the house. The whole neighborhood is lit up like a Christmas Tree."

Did I mention she was in Minnesota? And its January!

When my uncle died, my cousin couldn't find the DNR(do not resuscitate) and medical power of attorney paperwork, so when she called 911 they went all out trying to save a man whose death sentence was written when while having congenetive heart failure, he convinced himself that gangrene was athletes foot.

Note to self... keep medical paperwork in an easy to find location.

The 911 call went something like this...

"My dads blood oxygen level is at zero, he's not breathing, I think he's dead."
"You need to get him on the floor on his back"
"I can't"
"You need to get him laying on the floor NOW"
"You don't understand, I can't, he weighs over 450 pounds... I CAN'T DO IT!"

So while my cousin was going through this nightmare, my wife raised $400 for hospice.
I know she talked about what was going on. I'm not sure what she said, I had enough to deal with at the time.

I drove out to help on Monday, and my family joined a few days later. My wife did the funeral that Saturday and caught a flight back Saturday night so she could lead worship Sunday morning and do 3 baptisms.

New Life, Death, and everything in between.

May Gods peace be with you.