"He gave His beloved Son…"
Hello good friends,
When Jeremy Mains became ill with
lymphoma last June, Karen remembers speaking with the Lord and saying,
“How can I withhold our beloved son from a Heavenly Father who has some
plan in mind I cannot understand when He did not, out of His great love
for us, hesitate to give His beloved Son for the working out of a plan
of redemption I can still barely understand?”
Jeremy
died this November from an aggressive lymphoma that returned after
toxicity from chemotherapy made it impossible for the
hematology and oncology teams at Rush University Hospital in Chicago to
continue his 4th cycle of chemo treatment, which would have led to a
bone marrow transplant that promised the possibility of remission and
cure.
 Karen with Jeremy Needless
to say, this has been a harrowing five months for us and for Jeremy’s
wife, Angela. He leaves behind three beautiful children: Eliana, age 6,
Nehemiah, age 4, and Anelise, age 1.
In the world’s eyes
(and truthfully, in ours as well) this is a tragedy. At the end, though
our son was a valiant warrior and fought manfully to survive, between
the chemotoxicity and the recurring lymphoma, he couldn’t open his eyes
or even speak due to bilateral facial paralysis (although his mind was
active, and we communicated through hand squeezes and alphabet
spelling). He weighed less than 130 pounds, down from 210, and was too
weak to sit up or roll over by himself.
Jeremy’s
death and what will eventually be uncountable medical expenses (nearly
five months in the hospital with weeks in the Intensive Care Unit) has
blistered on our minds the fact of the obscenity of death.
His death has also given us an acute awareness of the reality of the Christmas story. God so loved the world—these words are so familiar to us that they almost become trite. God so loved the world that He gave his beloved Son…
Karen’s
sister, Valerie Bell, in a phone conversation, repeated this quote,
which she attributed to C. S. Lewis: “Death is Satan’s greatest
triumph. But death is also God’s greatest triumph.” Forgive us for
quoting it loosely. Weariness, these days, prohibits certain normal
behavior—good research, for instance.
God so loved the world that He gave his beloved Son
that whosoever believes in him will have everlasting life.
This
Christmas, and perhaps for all the rest of the Christmases of our
lives, the birth of this holy baby will always be intertwined with the
giving of that beloved to the obscenity of death so that He would
eventually overcome, conquer, triumph, banish and vanquish it.
That
is a message worth celebrating this Christmas. In our raw agony, we are
a long way from the saint who cried, “Alleluia! All my gashes cry!” But
we want to be able to praise God, who did not spare His own Son what
our son has now experienced.
Jeremy
was on life-support for about 24 hours. The local family gathered, and
we were with him as the ventilator was removed. His heart beat for
about five minutes more. When we and Melissa Timberlake, Jer’s sister,
stood beside his body in a quiet room, Karen said, “Apart from the
hospital gown or the wound of the tracheotomy, he looks like one of the
medieval artists’ renditions of Christ’s body on the Cross. Something
by Matthias Grunewald, perhaps.”
We end this e-newsletter to you,
our dear friends, with this rendition of the painting of “The Body of
the Dead Christ in the Tomb” painted by Hans Holbein the Younger
somewhere between A.D. 1520-1522. Down through the centuries, suffering
parents mourning their loss have chosen to identify deeply with the
extraordinary love of God. For some reason, God has entrusted the Mains
family with this fellowship of suffering. The joy of Christmas is
really pointed toward the Cross, toward agony, toward the grave. Think
of that. Just think of it. In some way we have been here.
Then
think, through the lens of your personal grief (whatever it might be),
as we can certainly imagine through our own pain, of finally speaking
these words, “He lives. He’s alive!”
Have a holy Christmas,
David and Karen Mains
NOTICES
Karen's Writing Projects
This
year has been a year that we have considered our morbidity—the fact
that David and I have probably 10-15 good years, if God grants us
favor—to do the work of the Kingdom that has been given us to do.
Jeremy Mains, our beloved son, died a month ago, and this Tuesday, the
word came that David’s brother, a well-loved orthopedic surgeon in our
local area, died on Monday, December 9. Doug Mains, a Renaissance man,
had suffered for many years from Alzheimer’s, so we are glad for him to
be released from this halfway existence. However, it has caused us to
deeply consider how best to employ our skills and abilities in the
future.
Will you pray for me (Karen) as I begin to consider
the writing that has been stacking up in my creative mind? The books
below are projects I believe God has laid on my heart:
1. Listening With My Fingertips: A Profound Journey Into Hearing and Being Heard.
The months spent in the hospital with a son who could no longer speak
due to facial paralysis has put an extraordinary point of view on the
concept of listening groups. This book is ready to write. I need a
clear month of concentrated time without interruptions.
2. We
have a contract with Medical Ambassadors International to produce a
book that explains the remarkable history and outreach around the world
of this organization to people who would love to know about the
particular success of their methodology of empowering people to empower
people. This year should be devoted to research and gathering material.
Some overseas travel will be necessary.
3. A novel with a working title, Summer Lightning,
has been percolating in my creative self for almost two decades. I’ve
just not been able to start it, although I’ve begun and discarded three
or four attempts. While looking out the windows on the city of Chicago
from the 10th floor of the Intensive Care Unit at Rush University
Medical Center, suddenly the first lines began to form in me: “All the
men in my life eventually leave me…”
4. I’ve fiddled for years with the concept of The Guest Room
as a metaphor for immigration policy positions. Now I have the files
from Jeremy’s immigration-counseling outreach in the next office. Do we
ditch them? Try to return them to the hundreds of clients he helped? Or
do they hold the records of the incredible stories I’ve heard him share
verbally that would provide the basis for a book on scriptural
hospitality with national implications?
The creative mind
can always think of more than it can accomplish, so I am counting on
your prayers to undergird me as I ramp myself out of active grief to,
hopefully, a productive decade.
Love and blessing to all,
Karen Mains
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David and Karen Mains
“Jeremy Mains, our beloved son, died on November 5th, so we have been looking at that well-known verse from Scripture, 'For God so loved the world that He gave his beloved Son…' with fresh, but grieving, eyes.”
BOOK CORNER
Making Toast:
A Family Story
by Roger Rosenblatt
A friend from Washington, D.C., who recently lost his lovely wife, send us the book Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt. It is subtitled “A Family Story.”
The writing is about his daughter Amy, a physician who died suddenly at
age 36, leaving behind a grieving husband and three small children.
David began to read portions out loud to me and just kept breaking down
and crying. So as soon as he was finished with the book, I read it for
myself.
Layered in poignant, sometimes funny, vignettes, in
a writing style that is both restrained and evocative, the Rosenblatts
decided to change the trajectory of their lives and moved into their
daughter’s home with their grieving son-in-law, in order to provide a
stable environment for 6-year-old Jessie, 4-year-old Sammy, and
1-year-old James (known as Bubbies) after the death of their mother.
Rosenblatt is an essayist for Time
magazine and PBS. His work has won two George Polk Awards, the Peabody
Prize, and the Emmy. The author of six Off-Broadway plays and 14 books,
including a guide to the art and craft of writing, Unless It Moves the Human Heart, and the national bestsellers Lapham Rising, and Children of War,
which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize. Currently with this
publication, Rosenblatt was the Distinguished Professor of English and
Writing at Stony Brook University. This memoir about coping with a
death in the family rises far above the normal treatment of this topic.
Rosenblatt is wise enough and experienced enough to let the vignettes,
stories from a year of recovery in which grandparents, long past the
years of diapers, playdates and dance classes, reconstruct with their
son-in-law a life that allows for three little children to heal, cope
and eventually flourish.
I found reading this
comforting—partly because of a common human journey—but also because of
the pure craftsmanship of a really good writer. Today, due to social
media and the possibility of self-publishing, society is inundated with
personal opinion pieces, with slice-of-life journals—all good for
serving the purpose for which they are intended, self-expression—but
what a joy to read the extraordinary work of an extraordinary writer.
Published in 2010, Making Toast became a New York Times bestseller; it is attention well-deserved.
“A
painfully beautiful memoir telling how grandparents are made over into
parents, how people die out of order, how time goes backwards.
Written with such restraint as to be both heartbreaking and
instructive.” – E. L. Doctorow.
Buy From Amazon.com
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