From the NKJV of the Old Testament of the Bible (Tanakh to Judaism) come these lines from the Book of Ruth:
"Entreat me not to leave you,
or to turn back from following you;
For wherever you go, I will go;
And wherever you lodge, I will lodge;
Your people shall be my people,
and your God, my God.
Where you die, I will die,
and there will I be buried.
The LORD do so to me,
and more also, if anything
but death parts you and me."
After the exile from Babylon, Ezra and Nehemiah struggled with the seeming unfaithfulness of YHWH to Abraham's descendants who lived out of the promise that their line will live on forever. They returned strangers to what they claimed to be their birthright, the source of the racial divide that characterizes Palestine to this day. The conservatives blamed the intermarriage of Jews to people not of the promise land, and birthed a movement toward racial purity that still echoes among the Jews to this day. The story of Ruth the Moabite from beyond the Jordan balances that ethnocentricity, for in her line would come King David of Bethlehem, and later, Jesus the Nazarene.
It was January this year when Angelo V., not quite my shadow mayor of Saipan yet, published a prayer for our biblical namesake Ruth Tighe (in her own words) in his blog. Ruth was in Honolulu dealing with cancer tissues in her lungs, and reporting about it. Now, before anyone jumps to “Oh, my God, did she die?” Ruth is very much alive. If people recall Norman Cousins of the Atlantic Monthly who was given less than a year and lasted a decade to tell about how one's frame of mind makes a lot of difference, Ruth is very upbeat and feeling much better, thank you! My take is that I want to say “thank you” and “goodbye” while she is still in full control of her faculties.
A colleague who ran a well-received and celebrated “rites of passage” youth curriculum in Washington State, had a heart attack two weeks ago. He was getting ready for a Sunday communal event when he had the stroke. His family and friends watched caregivers at the local ER try to revive him to no avail.
“It was violent for him but also beautiful in that we saw how he responded to attempts to care for his life. He had only one death to die, as he had only one life to live. He experienced the fullness of both,” his daughter would inform the rest of us. Members of the family and alerted friends, while this was going on, gathered, cried, and laughed together as they recalled tidbits of his life, sang songs that were dear to him together-both religious and secular, and regaled each other with stories of events and incidents in his life that were impacting and significant to those doing the reminiscing.
The staff of the trauma center would later thank his family and his friends for “showing us a different kind of mourning, a rejoicing in the midst of grief, a celebration of the completion of a life.” There were no recitations of cheap consolations, nor were there offerings of escapist platitudes; there was only a profound and graceful acceptance of reality in total awe of its full mystery and wonder.
“The secret is how to die,” begins The Lost Symbol, the sequel to Robert Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Indeed, in a time when what passes for comfort is an escapist avoidance of reality, and the balm for struggle is to anesthetize the suffering and numb the pain, the issue of who is in charge of one's dying has become a live issue in the hallowed battle ground of communal obedience and individual freedom. It is also a matter of treating one's death, ala Carlos Castaneda, as a friend, rather than as a foe!
Ruth L. Tighe continues to report on her health and her occasional need of oxygen, and though I do not run into her anymore, I hold a picture in my mind of a woman who approaches the one death she will ever struggle to die, with tranquility and equanimity.
A librarian out of Columbia U in NYC, with a bent for the governance of law rather than the whims of humans, she had exhibited in her columns an objective obedience to the legislated consensus, and has not hesitated to call everyone, particularly elected officials, to account before communal mandates. She will remain an accountability structure to many, I believe, to her last breath.
If she has shown fidelity to the law, she has not hesitated to speak to power. Her exercise of her understanding of freedom extends not only in her columns, letters to the editors, and public pronouncements, but also to direct responses to requests for public comments, not to mention her constant cajoling for the rest of us to pay attention to and mind the commons-environmentally, socially, and culturally. These are not her words but she exemplifies one who holds the creative tension between obedience and freedom, and in ethical terms, that translates to a heightened sense of responsibility.
Two incidents leave me beholden to her care. When I first started submitting articles for publication, she bothered to point out lapses in grammar and syntax. Not that I have ever conformed to the standard usage of English, but she had made me conscious of my thinking patterns and how I organize my thoughts the way they come out on paper. Then, when her column was pulled out of the Sunday edition of the Tribune because it was already online on Friday and sent to readers by e-mail, I alleged political interference behind the decision, and resigned. The late ST publisher John Pangelinan promised that never would I ever be censored, nor my articles refused publication because of its content. The paper kept its word, and I had not missed a beat since.
This is my penultimate submission for this year. My valedictory article(s) will come next week. After that, should I ever pick up on doing social commentary again, it will surely be in honor and in the fearless tradition of Ruth L. Tighe, On My Mind! Thank you, Ruth, and let the “goodbyes” come when they come!
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