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COMMENTARY
April 2, 2005
Deaths
The Pope is dying; may have died before this appears. In that case among the many obituaries will be one I wrote as an Anglican a few years ago: a very admiring short portrait of His Holiness John-Paul II. I was offered the chance to amend it but declined for if I were to write it again today as a Catholic the beginning middle and end would be different. I do not however disagree with anything I said about the Pope back then when the article was commissioned during an earlier "death watch". It has been clear that this watch is the last: the signs of failing life spreading from organ to organ and limb to limb. The most credible reports suggest the Holy Father is serenely at peace with his circumstances. His refusal to be moved to hospital from his apartment overlooking St. Peter's Square was his proclamation on the subject. For some time now he has been making a profound act of solidarity with all the sick and dying in the world; Catholic and all other. Like the prayers in Gethsemane a moment comes when one must finally offer oneself up on the Cross with our Saviour and choose to live one's own death as the final act of human freedom. All over the world my fellow Catholics were streaming into their churches on Easter Friday -- the one Friday in the year that is not a fast. And today Easter Saturday is when we complete the reversal of the events commemorated in Holy Week before; transforming our despair into our elation. By any standard John-Paul II was a great man; we must always wait at least a generation to know how great. To my mind at present his greatness could be summed in his phrases culture of life and "culture of death" which will long outlive him. * "Choosing to die" on man's terms in defiance of God was the theme of the last moments in Terri Schiavo's life as she passed away Wednesday from the effects of judicial murder. As I learned from myself attending the bedside of a friend dying in similar conditions five years ago dehydration is a terrible way to go for a person who has any consciousness at all. My friend Bob Olson who was as brave as they come involuntarily pleaded for the sponge and the ice chips right to the end. "The law is a ass a idiot in the opinion of Mr Bumble. It was an opinion that could be shared by many millions of helpless onlookers, as the Schiavo case unfolded inexorably through Holy Week, pregnant with Christian symbolism. The Congressional events of Palm Sunday; the innocent victim; the thirsting for water. The crowds. A loving God finally brought Terri back to life. And once again human justice had been dispensed by the learned and charming Pontius Pilate. * On the same Wednesday, I attended the funeral, at Holy Blossom synagogue in Toronto, of Florence Rosberg, a grand, a magnificent old lady. Readers may place" her as the mother of the late Barbara Frum and therefore grandmother of two fine friends of mine Linda and David Frum. But she was grandmother too not only to several other branches of family but to an incomprehensibly large number of odds and sods including the countless intelligent and talented who passed through the ambitious "Sunday Seminars" she held in her flat through her later years. I think she may have been through those the hostess of the last true Salon in the history of the Western world. (And the last was not the least.) Her 90th birthday party last year had to be turned into a kind of literary vaudeville in a university theatre to accommodate all the people whose greetings required a stage. I loved that woman: she alone could strong-arm me into for instance delivering a public lecture on a subject I knew nothing about. And she alone could make me feel afterwards that I had somehow pulled it off. I have never known anyone with so many best friends. She had a special relationship with each one of them -- hundreds -- and every one adored her including me. For she taught me as much as anyone ever did except my own mother about a woman's worth: the genius with which she made good things happen in so many lives. All deaths must be endured; some though in pain are glorious. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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