Exodus Trekkers: 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."