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12/17/16

AN EXAMINED LIFE OF A RARE MEEK MAN , part 4



Part four of four parts   

By Robert R. Schwarz

And He [ Jesus ] has  said to me, " My grace
is sufficient for you, for power is perfected
 in weakness. " ….For when  I am  weak,
 then  I am strong.  ( The Apostle Paul, 2
  Corinthians 12: 9,10 )

Meekness is an attribute of human nature and behavior.
It has been defined several ways: righteous, humble,
teachable, patient under suffering, and willing to follow
 gospel teachings….Meekness means restraining one's
own power, so as to allow room for others. (Wikipedia,
                        the online encyclopedia  )

           
A few  introductory words [  from Part  I ]… Dear Reader, with these few  thousand words  I have presented to you Bruce Kuss , a kind of man whom  many of  us  have met and instinctively trusted.  Yet, for some reason, we tend to instinctively avoid friendship with people like Bruce and forever avoid asking  why. 

I am a journalist and former  facilitator of interpersonal  communication   workshops ,  influences which spurred me to find out why I was one of those who perceived Bruce as someone I could trust  yet  never tolerate as a friend.  
***
XII         
Bruce in his rehab  room nowadays 
  Bruce persevered with his rehabilitation at Avanti. For two weeks , he declined to see me.  "I've got a cough , and I don't want to give it to you, " he said. It was a typical and  selfless consideration of his. He did his best to  avoid getting close to people in the  dinning room. Unfortunately, one woman with  undetected pneumonia did got too close him . Bruce contacted her illness and a day later fell to the lunchroom floor . At Lutheran General,  doctors also discovered he had  had a mild stroke and,  for some time , also  an    abdominal hernia .  They couldn't  operate because of Bruce's still- weakened  heart.  Bruce found himself back  at  Avanti and on a diet of  pureed food .  He hated every swallow of it. 
            I visited  Bruce weekly at Avanti ; it as an expansive,  two- floor building  with a few hundred patients , many of them without private  funds and  placed there by  families  barely able   to afford the monthly fees . The hallways swarmed with nurses aids of Philippine or Latino descent.  Bruce had lost so much weight that his clothes took on a clownish appearance. He was daily swallowing  14 meds.  At first he was in a wheelchair, then shuffled down  hallways  on a walker. His nights were often  sleepless because his  partially demented roommate would wake up  during the night screaming. " For heaven's sake, " I told Bruce, " try at least to talk to your roommate about it, talk to the staff. " But Bruce did not want to cause any more discomfort to  his roommate.  If had  remonstrated with him for  what I thought was  excessive  charity,  he wouldn't have understood . Always the gentleman,  Mr. Kuss dismissed the cliché:  the squeaky wheel gets oiled .    
Bruce  slid into  deep depression; his face became grayish, he walked slower, talked less and  often  took a full minute  to  voice a thought . Sometimes  he just stared at me, wide-eyed .    I once lost my cool  and  pleaded loudly for  him to say something, anything. My imposing behavior put me on a guilt trip until  Bruce  one day reminded me of  the metaphor which  the prophet Isaiah used to describe Jesus :  a lamb that is  led to the slaughter…so He did not open his mouth.   
            The first time Bruce was  given an  antidepressant , his legs froze the next morning. For months he wasn't given any antidepressants  to combat his depression.  A few times when we prayed together , Bruce would come " alive" for a few moments, only to relapse into depression.   I once asked him what he wanted most in life,  hoping it would be in my power to help him obtain it. His  barely audible reply was ,  "I'd like to get my personality back."
 I wanted so badly  to see my  coffee buddy become a "person" again that  I broke the few  rules I now knew about caring for a clinically   depressed  person.  I told him to face his depression aggressively as he did  when being trained eight weeks  by that tough  Army drill instructor   to fight aggressively . I lectured , preached , pleaded . If he  got angry, that  was okay… anything to make him come humanly alive . Finally I said,   " Bruce, have you gone to your  knees and begged God to heal you ?  Have you " ? !  A dumb question ?   
He nodded his head. " What the  does that nod mean?"  I demanded.
" All I want is some friendly conversation,  "  he whispered. 
Of course, I thought. Of course ! . " Bruce,  I miss our friendship."
" I understand, " he said .
I welcomed those  two words  , for they told me he had forgiven me for those  strident exhortations.  But then  Bruce gently chastised  me as forgiving father might:  "You know, Bob, people have to work out their illnesses in their own way. "
Now I got it ! 
I reminded an attendant that my friend's fingernails were horribly long and if she would please cut them. She did.  On my birthday, Bruce mailed me a greeting card , and I swallowed  hard when I saw how barely legible his signature was; the letters were tiny and squeezed together.  It was the first symptom of  Parkinson's  Disease.
Bruce was given a wheelchair and a new regimen of meds for his depression and now Parkinson's Disease. He had no car, no money, no health. He wanted badly to be returned isto Asbury , but it had a regulation against re-admitting a  resident whose meals had to be pureed.  My friend's face had  turned ashen and  his speech  slow and throaty  and  hard to understand.  He did  look like a lamb  being led to the  slaughter . One evening, after reading this epigram of Saint Francis de Sales, a great figure of the 17th Century rebirth of religious  mystical life, I set it  aside for a possible eulogy for my friend: 
                        I am a poor, frightened little creature,  the baby of the family,
                        timid and shy by nature and completely lacking in self-
                        confidence; and that is why I should like people to let me
                        live unnoticed and all on my own according to my
                        inclination,  because I have to make such enormous efforts
                        about shyness and my excessive fears….I have been
                        slighted and I rejoice: that is what the Apostles did. So to
                        live according to the spirit is to do what faith, hope and
                        charity teach us to do, whether in things temporal or things
                        spiritual….So, rest in the arms of God's mercy and fatherly
                        goodness. 

XIII
With his niece Connie (left ) and rehab nurse Emmie
 Bruce had come back to life  the next time I  visited him . In in his room, he talked to  me for at least 20 minutes , enjoying memories of a past trip to Las Vegas with his mother and sister. "Can I bring you a book or a magazine ?  I asked. He said reading made him nervous.  He declined to watch television in his room  but ,  taking his caregiver's advice to be  stimulated mentally and physically,  he had begun to play a disc-pushing  Nintendo bowling game , though worried he might throw his arm out.  "Don't quit ," I exhorted him . He said he wouldn't. Bruce  was now incontinent .  For a man accustomed to  emotional privacy all of his adult life, I can only imagine his reactions during those first few days of the nurse's aide helping him to  and from his bathroom. 
            When I returned home  after our visit on Sept, 26, 2014,  I made the following notes;  though Bruce has not yet that morning  taken his antidepressants , his eyes appeared  focused on      what he wanted  to tell me , and when he did, his voice was calm and deliberate like  that of an announcer on a public radio FM station , a man  whom you trusted to do you no harm. 

Played  the silly child game of who could stare the longest at one another without breaking  up.   Now and then he shifted his head and moved his eyebrows only slightly. Did this for at least 5 minutes.  He kept staring straight ahead and I  kept praying: "Lord, please stir some emotion in him. " But none came. Most of the time his eyes  focused on a spot halfway between his chair and mine. Arms remained dangling straight down from his sides.

Finally, realized  this could go on forever   and said :" Bruce,  do me a favor: Tell me: what's going on inside you?  What are your thoughts? What are you feeling? Please say something

No response. Then, at least two minutes later, he says: "It's hard to put into words." He stumbled for more of an answer. He finally says:  " I realize I'm not the best of company." 

I made some reference that he and I had been staring at each other like  two dead  men.

" What do you want, Bruce?  Tell me." 

"Nothing much." 

" Where  would like to drive to if you could?"  

He mentioned Big Spider Lake,   but I failed to draw him into any more  except for how  he used to take  his rowboat out  alone. But  never fished. Never did ask why ? 

" Do you care if I never visit you again ?" I was reaching .

" I wouldn't like that. "

 Told him his words were first really human expression I  heard from  him  in months!"  I pointed to his TV. "Even reacting to something on television that angers you or gives you joy is good for you. But If you don't  respond to people talking to you, they think you don't  like them …..You know, nobody will talk to you like I do  "

Gave him a choice of my reading to  him a booklet from Alexian Brothers behavioral center or  the  bible about heaven .  He chose the booklet,  " When God doesn't answer your prayers. " I read for 10 minutes.

I say, "Did you like what I read? " 

"Yes."

I left the booklet on the table. We  prayed, me first, then he did. He says,  " God, help us to speak the truth. " 

I rose and said: " I think you're on your way to recovery  ! "

" I hope so." 

    Dear Friends,  I hope this letter finds you all well and enjoying the Christmas season. I want you to know that I think of you often ! I have had some health problems ….Due to Parkinson's Disease and a minor stroke, I have weaknesses in my legs  and some trouble with speech… I am hopeful for a healthier  2016 ! I miss living at Asbury Court, but am getting good care here and  don't worry about any more falls.   While the food    is not always as delicious as at my old favorite  restaurants, I do have nice people to talk to  and I get lots  of visits from my old friend, Bob Schwarz,  and my niece Connie, and her family. …Wishing you a happy 2016, Bruce Kuss .

XIV
A former co-worker delights Bruce with memories and a greeting 
  In late 2015, Bruce's  anti-depressants were doing their job 24-7. He wrote this letter to me and  others: 
     Truth was Bruce could hardly stand . Nearly all the people around him had dementia. His family visits, except from  Connie,  amounted to occasional phone calls from a nephew in Texas and another  niece , who lived in Pennsylvania.  He admitted  he'd  be "lost" without the friendship of Connie and me.  Yet Bruce exuded a quiet independence from everything on earth . Paradoxically, he had a love affair  with a   phenomenal recall of every  bit of news or  data that  had entered his ears about distant friends—dead and alive—since his retirement . Again and again  I  would hear him recite even the most trivial , recent events in their lives  he had learned from Connie or during one of those  long-distance phone calls with his nephew  or other niece .  It seemed that simply talking to me  about friends and family was a manifestation  of life itself  for Bruce. When asked what friends he had  made here, Bruce shook his head , saying, "They are pretty much to themselves. "
         I  had observed , however, that Bruce and the nursing staff liked and respected each other . Remarked  Connie, "Almost everywhere I have taken  him, when people find out  he is my uncle, they say 'he's the nicest man ! ' "   Staff people here , she noted, " never hear a bad word from him ."   As for  memories of Bruce  as an uncle of her children , Connie added, " He was   a wonderful, doting uncle for us, taking us out for miniature golf and bowling . I really love him. "      
     Yet, contrary to what Avanti visitors might read on  Bruce's face,  he  was ( by  his own admission)    content .  His life enjoyed a security which I believe he had not known since the death of his father  and mother.  "The depression meds help," he told me , "As long  as I have someone around me who's worse off,  I'm okay…like  when I saw that man here the other day , over six feet tall with a cane and losing his mind. " Twice monthly a retired Protestant minister  drives down  from Wisconsin  to teach an hour-long Bible class in the visitor's lounge for  six or seven residents. There are few questions ; Bruce asks none , but I've seen him listen attentively.    Two or three times a month volunteers come in to sing old time favorites or tap dance.   The food, except for breakfast , was so distasteful to him that Connie had provided for him a constant  supply of vitamin-enriched  snacks. 
     When I again  asked Bruce what his goals were and what  he wanted to be remembered for, he replied: " Staying alive, keeping my mind sharp to the end,  as was my mother's mind, and that I cared for people."  His  wishes to be buried in the cemetery of his  father  near the Indiana farm of his father's childhood.  Our  prayers sometimes end with me asking God to help Bruce be a "ray of sunshine" to all the Avanti residents patients who sit around him in the dinning-recreation  room all day long.  "Thanks for that prayer , Bob, " he'd say to me . " I needed that. "  In replying  to my question years ago about his faith life,  Bruce had told me,  " I believe in the power of prayer, but I don't pray about trivial things..and right now I'm praying about my back pain. "   
      I firmly told Bruce that he was mentally alive much more than all the others on his second floor wing and never to forget  the  mission I was sure  God had given him  to be a blessing  to  these people. " If you don't, no one here will ," I  told him.  Bruce's usually ended his petition to God  with, " Help us to be the people you want us to be. " It became one  of my favorite prayers.  
        That night  at home, I came across these words that  prefaced  a  liturgy read that morning in  my church . It commented  on what Jesus had to say about how some of  us will be  last  to enter Heaven , others the first to enter.   What makes some first ? is asked. The reply:  Could it be because they obeyed  the deepest desires of their hearts—and that  obedience   unfailingly   led them to do the will of God  ? 
        Recently,   I drove  Bruce one day to  the food court  near  his  former employer, Sears Roebuck. While wheeling Bruce through the shopping  mall, he had me stop outside a barber shop he once frequented. The barber and Bruce  chatted happily for a minute or two. After lunch, Bruce couldn't resist revisiting the  Sears shoe department. I never asked what his thoughts were as  he gazed at salespeople and customers interacting and  but did wonder  if he saw a credit card application being tendered . My friend  signaled he wanted to leave ,  murmuring over his shoulder, " I miss the people but not the work . " He considered  the highlight of his career was  the friends he had made at Sears.  
" My career highlight was making friends
[ like these two ] where I worked "
On a summer-like day in November , 2016, I  put Bruce and his wheelchair into my car for  nostalgia drive to his old haunts.  We  stopped at Sears , and I asked two former   co-workers of Bruce if they would  kindly leave their shoe department and come out to the parking lot and see  an old friend.  I never saw Bruce smile so widely  as when they greeted him . I took photographs.   One co-worker,   Mrs. Jesus Figueroa , who worked with Bruce  for eight years,  hugged him twice. She remembered Bruce as a "good , and happy employee, always on time. "  The other former co-worker, Paul Boldt , 65, worked with Bruce for 20 years . He overstayed himself  in our presence  to reminisce about  Bruce and telling us how Bruce  "got along with everyone  , always had a good story to tell,  and never had a bad  word for anyone  because he saw the good in everyone. "  Bruce was of the "old school of sales, " he said, " and made sure the customer got what the customer wanted. " 
        Driving back to Avanti, Bruce broke a long silence with a remark so unexpectedly charitable    that I twinged.    "Sears was very good keeping me as long as they did , " he said.  "A lot of companies  wouldn’t have done that. " He actually considered this  to be a major highlight of his life.  "But  44 years was enough ,"  he added . " I just wish I had learned more about computers.  But I was glad  to get away from registers and do stock work. "
     When I  asked Connie why her nephew hadn't been  proactive about  his year-after-year worsening situation at Sears, she explained  that, yes, she had been aware of changes at Sears  with which Bruce had been struggling . " When they first hired him," she said, " Sears was more like an old fashion department store . We always knew Bruce  was uncomfortable with computers and changes in cash registers.  But I think Bruce felt that  if he just kept working hard and being a good person,  life would go his way. "  Then  she added  that  when her nephew realized   life can also turn bad for good  people who work hard  and can   only  be changed if  the individual makes a major change in his or  her life,  he  felt threatened  by that possibility.  Most threatening was the fact that to get that pay raise  he had been without for  18  years, he'd have to become a  different kind of salesman, a different kind of man.   To rid himself of this threat , Connie believed her nephew denied the full  reality of his health, his ageing, and  his finances.  " Because Bruce was so private  and  independent,  it was hard for him to stop and hear someone who might have some good advice,  "  she said. 
       Bruce jolted me  once with his good will remarks  towards a company which , by standards of human justice,  had treated him wrongly for so many years. "They were as gentle as they could be to get the job  done of getting me out of there . "
      I asked , " And that didn't hurt you ? ! "
     "Not really, because there's so much competition  out there that if you don't  have people who know what they're doing …you don't keep them on . "  He had obviously been thinking about  his inability to operate a  computer.
    Sounding like an unsatisfied  courtroom attorney, I asked my friend,  " You believe that Sears treated you fairly ? "
     "I only wish they had given us cost-of-living raises .  Gasoline in my years there went from 32 cents a gallon to three-dollars and seventy-two cents.  That hurt. "          
          While taking an evening walk a few days later,  I began to question all that life had taught me about  the  difference between  human weakness and strength .

XV     I began to visit my friend  (  and still do )  on Saturday or Sunday mornings . As I wheel Bruce into the all-purpose dining room ,  I  usually interrupt  a bingo game or a  version of  the television show  "Jeopardy" . We go to the visitor's lounge and sit  and  talk for an hour.  He  had a lot of opinions about Hillary and Donald during   the Presidential election . Bruce does not read newspapers but allows  television news to scan the world for him .  The ups and down of corporate business ups was still a  favorite Kuss  topic; when I, with my limited knowledge of economics,  voiced a  few  words about the "trickledown" effect of money earned by  the very wealthy,  Bruce grew serious and a little loud :  " The trickledown effect doesn't work anymore !  I once saw a man at the Shedd Aquarium feeding fish underwater, going from one school to the other in  the same tank. Why, I asked myself, doesn't he just throw in all the food at once. No, I answered. Then the big fish  would  gobble it all up at once. And that's why it's best today to spread our wealth around wisely to people who need it the most rather than giving  big chunks of  our tax money  to  bad Wall Street boys and those  bleeding hearts in Congress . "  Though I suspected that his argument had a non sequitur or two , I loved hearing my buddy assert himself.
        But the topic that got us buzzing was  Hollywood stars and the old movies Bruce and I saw as kids.  Bruce seemed to know them all: He liked Alan Ladd ( " Shane" ), William Holden ( " Bridge on the River Kwai  , Charles Laughton ( " Witness f or the Prosecution" ) . But he didn't care that much for John Wayne—can you imagine !  We were  sentimental about the Andrew Sisters , but when he cheered Lawrence Welk , I was set to tease him about it when I saw tears  my friend's eyes as he said, " Welk  never did his shows for money, Bob , but to bring people together. "
     Connie told me she had delivered   an email to Bruce informing him of a   class action suit filed by former Sears executives who had complained to the  court  that they had been fired without  back pay for vacation and sick days. The email  stated , she said, that Bruce might be legally  entitled to as much as $1,400. Bruce read it,  but could not remember anything about unpaid vacation or sick days.  

XVI  
Whatever is menial, puny, insignificant—this can expect
to eventuate into the Kingdom of God. Why? Because it
permits the greatness of God to make something out of
its littleness…  ( anonymous )
 
      Each  time I now see Bruce, he  is thinner, his cheek bones  more prominent , and his voice (due to the Parkinson's ) , is so throaty that I often ask him to repeat his words . My friend  has lost everything…but has  he ?   A few days before my brother Lester died, I knew he, too,  had lost even more than Bruce. Since a teacher fresh from college  and soon thereafter an officers' school  in U.S. Air Force,  Lester had been painfully trekking  a zigzag  trail  towards his River Jordan. 
         I asked Lester , who was  wretchedly being  kept alive in  bed with a respirator,  "Les, if by some miracle, you could have everything back today that you wanted, would you take it ? "  In those few  last hours of his life , I knew by  the many  notes he had scribbled to me,  that my brother had become  fully human and mentally  sober. In his eyes ,eyes which I had to often analyze for him for more than four decades,   I was reminded of a freedom described by centuries of Christian mystics and the Church's Desert Fathers. This was the freedom called  Dying to Self, a freedom from the  constrictions of a disordered world, from a body  with disordered  chemistry and temptations , and from a Devil who has been named  the Father of Lies.
    Before answering my question, my brother thought for awhile. He turned his head to look out the  window , then smiled, looked  briefly at the risen Christ figurine I had put on his wall, then , with a single slow shake of his head , said no to my imagined miracle— and seized  freedom .   
       This was no  surrender  in exchange for a peaceful death.  In recalling during the past year, all the tender communications  and spontaneous smiling  faces I had  witnessed   Lester and doctors, nurses, and visitors  exchange with each other in Lester's room , and then weighing that against all the impediments of body and mind that had blocked  my brother from loving both himself,  people, and God,  I now knew instinctively  that Lester had  been given the deepest yearning  of  the human heart: He could love God, his neighbor, and himself.
          When nowadays when I pray for Bruce at night, I no longer see a weak or foolish man , but someone strong and wise and who has , in unfathomable ways, always enjoyed  a fabulous freedom, something which took my brother a hellish lifetime to gain. I think of those words of the Apostle Paul:  Therefore, I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for  Christ' sake; for when I  am weak, then I am strong. ( 2 Corinthians 12: 10).  As for me, this guy Paul  reminds me—and shames me— with these words:  God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things that are strong.  ( 1 Corinthians 1:27 ) .
         Sometimes when I'm with  Bruce , I see his old boss  bullying him with shouts  of unjustified anger; and it angers me. I am soothed, though, when I  read from the Apostle Peter : …and while being reviled,  He [Christ ] did not revile  in return; while suffering,  He uttered no threats . (1 Peter 2:23 ) .
     Perhaps one tribute to Bruce's  life should be that despite all the pressures of the world  to reshape  it, to  change it in ways which  our culture claims  are  legitimate , normal, and demanded  for survival,  Bruce steadfastly opted for the better part.   
          Lastly, dear Reader,  that profound and seemingly elusive answer to the question which Bruce , Lester and many of  us have asked about why God allows  suffering , could  best be  answered by the Greatest  Sufferer of all time . And as He passed by, He saw a man blind from birth. And His disciples asked Him, saying, " Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents,  that he should be born blind ? Jesus answered, " It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but is was in order that the works of God might  be displayed in him." 




The End


All comments are welcome.
© 2016, 2017 Robert R. Schwarz






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