Remembering Don Swayngim

Isaiah 40:28-31 (NRSV)

²⁸ Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
    the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
    his understanding is unsearchable.
²⁹ He gives power to the faint,
    and strengthens the powerless.
³⁰ Even youths will faint and be weary,
    and the young will fall exhausted;
³¹ but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
    they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
    they shall walk and not faint.

I would guess that if Don had been given a choice, in the later years of his life, to either keep his car keys or maintain his pilot’s license, he would have chosen the latter, and at some point, during this memorial service, we would find ourselves playing back footage from the time the 9 News featured the story of an older gentleman loading up a small bag of groceries into his Edge 540T in the local King Soopers parking lot.

It seemed like for a while, every week Don would stop by my office, full from breakfast and fresh off flying, to sit in the rocker next to my desk. There was something of a mutual comfort experienced by the routine of his visits, as if we both appreciated the symbolism of the visit; that we had not been forgotten as we long as we both could take time to sit and remember.

This is not a ritual I would have ever thought to initiate on my own behalf and so, when driving was no longer an option and flying no longer his routine, it was I who came and sat with him. After Mary left us, I realized that while my presence would not cure his broken heart the witness to his worth despite his great loss was even more essential.

In his novel, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, Fredrik Backman writes, “Death’s greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.” For months after Mary’s death, I saw Don live as though a thousand weights laid resting to his soul and I wondered if the grief that had fallen upon him would outlast the time he had left on this earth.

The hardest task, I decided, in any life, would be that of sitting with a heart so broken that neither road trip nor plane ride could distance one from the other -- and this task, I imagined should require the care of a committee. A committee of courageous caregivers who understood that some days require ice cream for breakfast, napping to the sounds of passing cars, and confessions of a life perceived to have lost all meaning.

This was never the way we saw it, of course. The things Don lost were never subtractions from the connection we felt from him. If anything, they were additions. Moments of awareness for the courageous life he lived and the deep love he had for that life.

I have sat beside many beds where people have laid transitioning into new life but none of these beds have shown such a struggle as Mary’s. And never her side did she leave. Through screams of horror, ceaseless thrashing, and overwhelming cries, day after day he remained reminding her that there he sat and of who she was when it was as if she was lost inside some horrible dream.

We are called, in this life, to sit in these places. With men who wish to die. With partners wrestling to live. When I think of the Don’s courage it was in these stories of his later years. When he stayed present to grief and never gave up even when we, for his own sake, we wished he could give more.

The miracle, the rising, I see in Don’s life was that Mary’s death did not become his own because for a long time I believed it would as it often does with some many couples. In the wake of his grief, I don’t think he felt any assurance that joy would ever return or purpose would ever again be present in his life and he yet trusted in each sunrise enough to live through it. He trusted in something he couldn’t see because of something greater that he believed in.

“I don’t know what God’s doing with me…but I guess he still wants me around.” Mumbled words with eyes fixated out the window of his small apartment window. Eyes swollen with tears. Frustration lining the shallowness of each breath wrapping the words of that sentence.

It’s so hot in here, I think to myself. I can feel sweat forming on my forehead. I stand up and say, “Let’s open this window.”

I feel the fresh air slowly seep in to a room isolated too long. No one, I think, should have to sit in their own grief.

Even in Don’s greatest loneliness, he was never alone. A committee of caregivers surrounded him, cared for him, corralled him and encouraged him. I was honored to serve on this committee, alongside each of you…here today because you knew him as your grandfather, your father, your friend, or maybe just a man whose story struck you as being a man worth showing up for.

The biblical witness in this scripture, that we are witnessing in this moment of remembrance, is that from age to age, God hears the cries of his people and empowers them -- in exhaustion, in brokenness, in the moments of our greatest need -- toward resurrection. God shelters us with a committee of caregivers offering shade in the blistering heat of grief and hope for one final flight when surely it will be Christ who bestows on each of us wings of our own.