Lucky Garvin’s brother Dennis is a Urologist practicing in Salem who also possesses his brother’s great gifts for writing, teaching and healing. This column by Dennis was shared with us by Lucky.
I have been seeing the Rev. Henry for some years now. Twice a year the reverend appears, stooped with age, shuffling into my office with the bemused expression of one mildly surprised by actually ending up where he intended to go. Bestowing vague smiles of greeting to the staff he passes, he settles into a familiar chair in my familiar office. Not for us the typical health care provider – health care consumer interface.’ Our conversation by now liturgical, we are still a doc and patient.
`How are you, Reverend?’
`Oh fine, just fine. Just gettin’ old. Really, I have no complaints.’
The clinical interchange proceeds, with part of me stuck – as always – on his last statement, `Really, I have no complaints.’
You see, Rev. Henry has prostate cancer, in such form and at such an age that the best option to arrest its growth is castration.
This had been done. Nevertheless, the surgery had failed to stop the upward spread of tumor growth, the resulting bladder irritability caused the reverend to experience many interruptions of sleep.
As I look at him, I see whiskers unevenly cut on one side of his face, hidden from his morning shave. Poor lighting? Failing vision? He wears a double-knit suit, festooned with little pulls of thread, dotted with long-established food stains. The vintage of the clothing tells me when his last pastoring of a church mandated the wearing of current fashion. The stains and pulls on his coat tell me when his wife’s vision began to cloud with cataracts, allowing a vagrant blemish on his apparel to proceed out the door with him.
While his appearance has escaped her vigilance, his heart has not escaped her unfaded allure. I have only to ask after her and his smile blossoms like a prom corsage.
If I limit myself to his diagnosis, the reverend also has arthritis, a heart condition and assorted other clinical misfortunes. Yet… yet… he has no complaints. Or, perhaps more accurately, he has allowed no complaints.
It occurs to me that a complaint, a malady, an infirmity… must be a participatory activity. A circumstance becomes a problem only with the acquiescence of the involved person. Rev. Henry has simply not given his permission that any of his diagnoses become `complaints.’
The Reverend is, to me, a quiet hero of that species that evolved somewhere in the time between Beowulf and John Wayne. No slaying of rough beasts from nether regions, no outdrawing bad hombres in Dodge city. The Reverend has a thoroughly unmarketable courage, because it leaves no trail of corpses or exploded buildings.
Yet, I would rather be another Reverend Henry when my time comes to face equivalent trials. Were I to contrive my courage in the prevailing vogue, it would be a weak and palsied parody of the Reverend’s. I too, would like to prevail over my infirmities by refusing to dignify them with the status of `affliction.’
I have been most fortunate in my life and it would be an affront to an indulgent God if I ignored the blessings of the Reverend Henry and related heroes. They have redefined valor for me, making it less muscular, more seemly, less confrontational, more tolerant.
On a more personal note, the quietly successful prosecution of his life makes me curious about what the reverend has chosen to revere. As a minister, he supervised as many funerals as christenings, as many deathbed vigils as weddings. He no doubt spent many hours hearing indictments against the God he serves, indictments borne of grief over the failure of divine intercession to save innocent life. His faith simply cannot have gone untested.
Stock car drivers test the strength of a weld by hitting those welds with sledgehammers. They don’t trust their lives to any weld which will not stand up to the hammer.
“Valedictory,” a loving God again says to me, “Watch and learn, for you are in the presence of a life well lived.” I am persuaded that the Reverend didn’t trust his life to a faith any less challenged.
The term `baptism’ is said to derive from the act of immersing cloth drenched in a dye such that the fibers are suffused with and inseparable from the dye itself. Like a coal miner with anthracite dust imbedded unalterably in his skin, the reverend has his faith inseparably grafted into his life; and into his soul.
What we chose to allow and not allow defines so thoroughly the life we are given.
– Dennis Garvin MD
