DABDA

When I was an undergrad at Susquehanna I took a class called “End of Life Issues.” During this course each student was paired with a person who was nearing the end of their life.  I had Dotty who was in her 90s and I often wondered if she knew why I was there.

The class was filled with students who were pre-seminary or who had lost loved ones.  Others were going to be funeral home directors or were pre-med.   It was during this class that I memorized Elizabeth Kubler Ross’ stages of grief, which I nicknamed DABDA:  Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.

For the last few days I have been floating back and forth between these, never quite making it to that last A.

I have often spoken about the size of my home congregation.  We are a family church.  A lay-led Fellowship.  We have no minister and we are kept alive by a few families who make up a larger chosen family.  It is challenging and beautiful.  It is faith-bound and illustrative of who and why I am.

As a child and youth, I was the only Unitarian Universalist in my school.  At church, there were no other kids in the religious education classes except me and Austin.  Austin True Comando.  That’s right, True Comando.  (His mom’s last name is True and his dad’s last name is Comando — perfect).  Austin is a year younger than me and there is not a moment of my church upbringing that I remember without him.  There is not a moment of my Coming of Age – in its different forms – that I  remember without him.

When I began dating my first ‘serious’ boyfriend in high school (a boy from another school – the school Austin went to), Austin acted like a brother.  He didn’t give the okay at first but eventually came around, happily.  I waited a year to go through the UU Coming of Age program so we could do it together, making me the oldest of the group even though I looked to Austin who was one of the youngest.  When we were kids I remember Austin chasing me around his house with his Insulin needles, telling me it didn’t hurt a bit.  I watched as a injected himself and listened as he explained his Diabetes.  As we got older I grew to accept but never like his girlfriends.  He was the first of my peers to tell me that my call to ministry made complete sense and that I’d be good at it.  The summer before I left for college we tried going on a few dates, but our love for one another was hardly sexual.  I think at that age we didn’t understand how we could love one another deeply, how to be partners and keep the other in our life without it being sexual.  And this … whether it be embarrassment or disappointment or just confusion, took us some time to move past and back to friends.

But we did, though not as it was since we were now both in college and states away.  Then seminary and different relationships and new families of friends being built.  Still though, holidays brought both of us home and to church and those moments catching up in the pews, or first seeing one another with such sincere joy, erased the time we had been a part.

I do not romanticize this relationship.  Austin was my brother and friend.  He was my chosen family and my given family.

On Saturday Austin had a stroke or heart attack (still unknown officially, but due to his diabetes) while driving.  He accelerated and swerved into on coming traffic, hitting a car head on.  Austin was dead at the scene.  He was 24.  He was the first to tell me my call to ministry made sense; he was excited for me.  And on Friday I will help lead his memorial service.

Denial is a strong, powerful and at times saving emotion.  Anger, the same.  I do not know what I can bargain with, or to whom.  But it is in these stages of grief that I rest for now.

Your prayers are welcomed.

Peace to each of us.