The Church always celebrated the day of martyrdom as that on which the Saint was truly born, and not what we call the birth-day. The following translation from an old writer may serve to explain this view.
"We celebrate not the day of birth, since it is the entrance to sorrow and all trials; but it is the day of death we celebrate, as the lying down of all sorrows, and the escape from all trials. We celebrate the day of death, because these die not when they seem to die."
— Comment, in Job. Lib. 3.
Tractarian Movement, Records of the Church No. XII – The Martyrdom of Polycarp, n.10 (Dec. 17, 1833).
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I write to remember my dear Cindy Lou, a year after she reposed in the Lord at 12:49 pm MDT, June 3, 2022, and so you can remember her, as well. Some of this I may have shared before, but I want to make sure Cindy’s good qualities are known.
As I've often said, I loved Cindy Lou since the moment I first met her. From the start, we were both quite taken with each other, finding in each other a true resonance of heart — a perfect match. She was my better half for more than 40 years.
We were a couple for almost three years before we married in 1984, and I had nowhere near enough time spent with her over the last four decades. Not even close to enough time . . .
My wife was a treasure: nice, kind, colorful, loyal, creative, persistent, courageous, vibrant, bright, bubbly, sensitive, so very smart, level-headed, skilled, an artisan, articulate, a wordsmith, diligent, caring, giving, lovely, fun, perceptive, intuitive, patient, observant, faithful, friendly, fair, and so much more. Still, most of all, she loved the Lord and sought His ways for her life. She was ever the Virtuous Woman described in Proverbs 31.
An intensely private person, Cindy would likely chide me for sharing all this, but it’s a tribute she deserves.
Cindy Lou and I were in a sense very different kinds of people. She was very arty and an excellent, engaging, expert writer. Me, I flunked basic design in high school and have a cumbersome writing style . . . Yet, what we shared is that we had both thrown ourselves into the Arms of God, as we did what we could to overcome trauma we had suffered as children. We could understand each other in ways incomprehensible to others, and were soulmates from the beginning, mutual advocates, confidants.
We had a good life together. Certainly, we had our rough edges, rough spots and heartbreaks, and faced setbacks, but we had each other and we fought our battles side by side. When we got sideways (for such is a reality of married life), our hard and fast rule was to not rest until everything was worked out. And, no matter what was happening to us, Cindy could always spot the blessings in our life. She was the richest gift a man could ever hope for.
She ever had a ready laugh, and a warm smile. Besides being husband and wife, we were best friends.
In the Faith tradition Cindy and I share, it is posited that our lives are on loan from God — to ourselves and to our loved ones. I always knew that about my Cindy Lou. I could have lost her before we married, when she was rear-ended in stop and go traffic on I-25 by a Trans Am going full speed. And, I could have lost her in childbirth in 1986, when her blood pressure plummeted during an epidural. And so on and so on, over the years.
No, I was long spared her departure, and God extended the loan of her life to me far more than I deserved. As Cindy observed, in a list of praises, more than 7 years ago: “The Lord has restored my soul and my health and has saved me from death so many times and I can trust Him to make me strong and to go the rest of the way.” And He did make her strong, and she did run that race and finished her course . . . just not for as far or as long as I wanted.
In the midst of all our well-meant scurrying about (busy as Martha, Lu. 10:40-42), five years before Cindy died, came trials we'd never expected. Cindy and I had the most surrealistic and distressing turn of events. We’d faced challenges before throughout our marriage (some of them quite devastating); however, we’d always been able to see how to trust God, to find a path through, and time and again we would see His unimaginable providence unfold. This was a different set of events altogether, and we found ourselves in great distress, “pressed out of measure, above strength, insomuch that we despaired even of life.” II Cor. 1:8.
I share a summary of all this for one reason: Cindy never lost Faith, never grew bitter, and instead fought a good fight, and finished her course. 2 Tim. 4:7. Treasures like Cindy’s unshakeable Faith are best viewed in that harsh light of flame, which (failing to harm) has served only "dross to consume, and . . . gold to refine." Indeed, as the old hymn teaches, the Almighty strengthened Cindy, helped her, and caused her to stand, upheld by His righteous, omnipotent hand.
❖ Mid-2017, I was devastated by a prescribed anti-allergy medication, ruining much of the year, and by July 2018 resulting in a body-wide collapse of small blood vessels. By September 2018, I was hospitalized. This was a very frightening time for Cindy, as she confided in an old friend: "Please pray that Chris' life is spared, that he lives through the night, and that he remains with us. We love him and need him very much. I cannot be separated from him."
––––– I lived, but I came out of the ICU with cognitive functions less than that of an elementary school child. I had to stop practicing law. Cindy called this my “scarecrow” phase, and her kindness towards me as I was an idiot was truly phenomenal.
❖ Cindy, by 2019, probably from the stress, cracked a tooth and had to have it pulled — it wasn’t salvageable, despite the diligent efforts of multiple specialists.
❖ Cindy, late in 2019, developed an extensive, unrelenting painful rash from all the antibiotics used because of her tooth (a resultant condition that her dermatologist opined would likely persist for "a year or so"). Thankfully, my cognitive functions had returned by that time, and I was able to get her novel, curative help by February 2020.
❖ Just then, March 2020, our whole family got Long-Haul COVID-19, which lasted until September 2021. That was a very hellish year and a half, with ever-changing, yet, constantly debilitating symptoms.
––––– Although we largely all had the very same progression of terrible COVID symptoms, Cindy suffered even more than Jay and me. She was stricken with a viral varicelliform eruption (i.e., was covered in boils). I imagine only Saint Job can understand the pain she was in, and how sorely she was tried as a result. At the time (horrified as I was), I never told Cindy Lou that the death expectancy was far above 50%. The ER doc even told her, “come back when your skin starts falling off.” Not the best bedside manner, but an honest and likely prognosis.
––––– Instead, for months and months we treated her skin several times a day with emollients, anti-pathogenic compounds, and growth support. She didn’t have her skin die, and (praise God) she didn’t even suffer any pockmarking. Just some discoloration, and even that was fading over time. Finally, thankfully, we were able to kick the virus by September 2021. We then rehabilitated, and had a lot of plans to get back to living a “normal life.” I even got my law license back to active status by January 2022.
❖ Yet, January 2022, we contracted Omicron COVID-19. Cindy never bounced back. She may have beaten the virus, but between March 2022 and April 2022, she went from zero oncological problems to a highly aggressive, inoperable Stage IV cancer. She collapsed April 30th and never returned home. She passed June 3rd.
Cindy was heroic.
She fought hard to recover right up to the very end. She took it moment by moment and endured beyond belief. She even rejected as much narcotics as she could, just to try to stay more lucid and to keep up her blood-pressure. Anyone who knew her would have been proud of her. She was valiant.
Perhaps naively, I thought either science or a miracle would save my Cindy Lou and postpone the inevitable winnowing that awaits us all. Yet, the cascade of bad medical events was unrelenting. My Hope was right, but the answer was far different than I wanted.
Cindy never left the hospital after being taken there by ambulance on April 30th. Despite the fact this cancer apparently didn’t start until around March 2022, the oncologist expressed that this was the worst cancer he’d ever dealt with — a hyper-aggressive, rare leiomyosarcoma, which very quickly had taken over much of her abdomen. From the get go, the hospitalists kept trying to persuade me to agree to a DNR or to just move Cindy to hospice care. Yet, neither Cindy nor I wanted hospice or a DNR for her, and instead she bravely strove to get better. She went for broke to the very end. She was like that. Always, she lived large, indomitable.
The whole month last year that Cindy was in the hospital was surrealistic and her physical state persistently tenuous and dangerously precarious, requiring almost nonstop coaching from me to get her through the ordeal. Yet, those last fleeting moments with her were invaluable, and allowed me to walk by her side as she undertook her final journey. As much as Cindy’s death must have been totally expected by the doctors and the nurses, it sure came as a shock to me.
As I sat with her body that first Friday afternoon in June, waiting for the monks to come and take her to the small monastery up in the mountains for burial, I kept thinking she'd wake up. She looked so peaceful. There was a soft smile on her lips, like I’d seen so often over the years when she was napping. But, she did not wake. Not then.
It's hard for me to accept that I’m so powerless to prevent such a horrible outcome as Cindy dying. Something this truly awful begs to be defeated. The ancient Paschal refrain exclaims "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the graves bestowing life!" The Lord assures us, "Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus." Rev. 22:20.
I encouraged Cindy throughout her travails that she was just trudging step by step to the mountaintop, one step at a time. Little did I know that was to be exactly the spot of Cindy's burial amidst the glory of her Rocky Mountains, at the top of a rise on the dormitionskete.org church property. Dormition Skete is where she always wished to be buried, though I “shushed” her every time she’d bring up such "nonsense" over the years.
Without embalming or the distance of mortuary (since our Old Calendar Orthodox Christian fellowship rejects the same), we buried my soulmate on Saturday, June 4, 2022. I kissed her sweet head for the last time, and held her tiny hand. We bid her farewell in the age-old burial service of the Church, and gently laid her in the earth. Hard, but healing.
As I exclaimed when Cindy Lou died, "Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy." For now, I groan and travail with all creation, but in the faith and hope that “the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” Rom. 8:21.
In remembrance,
Chris
