I was touched by an expected death. I was touched by an unexpected death. And I am being touched by opportunity created by a third death.

I must tell you of Peggy, David and Stu. Peggy was 78 years old and suffering from a malignant melanoma that began in her feet and legs. She had given up aggressive treatment and was dealing with pain in a local hospice. She one day asked the spiritual director at the hospice if she could be visited by an Episcopal clergyman.

I spent many hours with Peggy over several visits during the months of May and June, mostly listening to her stories and attempting to become her friend.

I heard stories of her family, stories of her childhood, stories of her love of nature, stories of her smoking, stories of her disease, stories of her life at the hospice, stories of her favorite foods and snacks and her weakness for chocolate. I learned of her love of honeysuckle.

As an Episcopal lay eucharistic minister, I brought her the sacraments. She told me "that wine was awful." I made a note to inform the altar guild.

Peggy defied the academic image I had of dying. According to the popular exposition of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, dying patients go through stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. According to Peggy, she skipped the first three stages. She told me she experienced no denial, little anger, and never bargained with God. She felt the depression that accompanies debilitation and limitation, but, in fact, she informed me, "without God I could never have made it."

I will never again see a Monarch butterfly without thinking of Peggy. I went to her funeral and heard the bereaving congregation recite the 23^rd psalm, one of Peggy’s favorites, the minister said. As we recited the words, "He makes me lie down in green pastures," I thought of honeysuckle and Monarch butterflies. David and I were newspaper colleagues. The end of his shift overlapped the beginning of mine. We worked different editions of the same daily newspaper. Each night he handed off to me what his shift had edited and run in the paper, and he informed me of news stories that needed updating or watching. We were not social friends but professional colleagues with at least two hours contact each day.

A native of San Antonio, Texas, 42 years old and living alone in a condominium near Washington, D.C., David was considered by many to be a shy, private, computer-savvy, intellectually oriented loner—in the contemporary argot, a "nerd." Actually, there was nothing nerdy about him. He was smart, profane at times, neurotically conscientious about what went into each day’s newspaper, able to converse at will about politics, sports and a host of other topics, popular and esoteric, a devourer of all late-breaking news and somewhat self-deprecating. Despite being a diabetic, he kept a large jar of candy open on his desk. Passersby ate more than he. Someone told me he had recently resumed therapy to try to combat his shyness and enhance his social skills. When he moved into his condo, he posted his photograph and his curriculum vitae. He was a product of Rice University and one of the Post "Toasties;" that is, journalists whose careers went in all directions with the closing of the Houston Post.

Police still have no information regarding the circumstances of his death or the identity of his slayer.

Our newsroom was stunned and stilled. Many weeks later, most of us still expect to see him walk in and take his place in his cubicle in front of his computer screen.

If nothing else, David’s cruel and seemingly senseless death has alerted us to our own mortality, perhaps teaching us to number our days.

I never knew Stu. Everything I know of him is hearsay. Stu taught high school and served as a minister in his church. In his mid-fifties he began a battle with cancer that eventually attacked his brain. He lost the battle in August.

At his funeral, I was told, about 400 people came to pay respects:

students, colleagues, neighbors, friends. Many learned for the first time that Stu was a chaplain to the local fire department. His doctor, the physician who ultimately told Stu that medicine could no longer help, spoke at the funeral. He has never in his career been so affected by a patient, the doctor said. He told the mourners that Stu’s faith in God had challenged him and altered his thinking. He said that after every visit it was he who felt cheered by the patient.

My application to teach at the high school lay in the principal’s files when Stu died, and now I’m about to end my time in the newsroom to become a high school teacher. I am to be Stu’s replacement.

I’ve spent most of my career bouncing from newsroom to classroom and back, so it’s somewhat natural that I should once again be leaving the newsroom to take my place in a classroom. This time, however, the challenge of faith and mortality loom large before me.

Unlike any other late summer that I’ve embarked upon teaching, this time I go having been touched by deaths.

The lyfe so short, the craft so long to lerne, ...—Geoffrey Chaucer.

Copyright 2000 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.