The following is an excerpt from Ada Brownell's book, Swallowed by Life: Mysteries of Death Resurrection and the Eternal
The end of Chapter three will be published tomorrow, July 25, 2015
3.
Carolyn
The music was
the part that worried me.
When our
daughter, Carolyn, suddenly became ill, she kept telling her husband, Michael,
about the music.
As a toddler,
Carolyn created songs on one of those little toy grand pianos like Schroeder
plays in the comic strip Peanuts. She
picked out “Jesus Loves Me” when she was three or four years old.
By the time she
was five, she was playing her older brother’s piano lessons by ear. When he
slid off one end of the bench after practicing the thirty minutes I required,
she slid on the other and played all the songs by ear.
Her older
brother, Gary, became an excellent musician, too, but he gave up trying to
compete with Carolyn on the piano.
She was eager to
have piano lessons herself. By the time she was eight or nine she was
accompanying Gary when he played his trumpet.
Carolyn played
difficult Bach and other great composers’ music when she was in the early
elementary school grades. Her only restriction was her tiny hands, which
couldn’t reach the span for some of the more advanced music. She not only could
read the music, if she heard it, she could copy it.
It was when she
was nine years old we learned she had perfect pitch. Not only was she able to identify
any note played on a musical instrument or sung, she could tell you the pitch
of the vacuum sweeper’s hum or the note that rings from a fine glass.
One time before
we knew she had perfect pitch, she embarrassed us considerably when she
approached the organist after a church service and informed her she was playing
an E-natural where an E-flat should be. It was true!
Sometimes
Carolyn would fill bottles with varying amounts of water, then show her smaller
brothers and sisters how to play a tune with them.
In her early
teens, she accompanied the Damascus Singers, a gospel singing group of which I
was a member. Much our music came from recorded albums instead of a book. Carolyn
listened to the keyboard accompanist on gospel recordings and exactly copied
what the keyboardist played.
In college, she
majored in music. The hours of practicing and the hazards of roller-skating,
however, set her back when she had a tendon injury to her hand.
Unless she was
away at college and until she got married, our home was filled with her music—classical,
jazz, and gospel.
Interestingly,
she never realized what a special gift she had until she was in her
mid-twenties. She didn’t want to be different or noticed because of her great
talent. Often when she played a piano solo in church or another performance,
she’d bow her head so her long hair would cover most of her face. She also had
a deadpan expression on occasion. Once she was playing a whole orchestra of
music on a synthesizer with a choir production and everyone kept craning their
necks to see who was playing those instruments. They couldn’t even tell she was
playing by the look on her face.
The flute was
the instrument she played for band. She also had a wonderful soprano voice that
could hit a high C with no effort, right on pitch because of her talent and
wonderful ear.
After she
married Michael Coney, a classmate at Bethany Bible College in Santa Cruz,
California, she began playing the organ and was the organist at her church
until her illness.
“She’s the only
white person I’ve ever known who could really play soul on the organ,” said the
church’s black music minister. He had just led the youth choir in a special
production and she was the accompanist.
She thought
maybe the workout using her feet (yes, both feet) on the pedals might have something
to do with the pain in her side. Before the tests were completed that showed
she had Burkitt’s lymphoma, her body began to swell from a huge tumor in her
abdomen. She was taken to the hospital and when I arrived in California from
where we live in Colorado, her normal weight of one hundred ten pounds had
risen to about one hundred forty.
Michael told me
she had been hearing beautiful music that no one else could hear.
“It’s not like
any music I’ve heard,” Carolyn told Michael.
In the many
nights I spent at her bedside in the hospital, sometimes she would ask me where
the music was coming from.
I was expecting
a miracle. I told myself I was just having hearing problems because I couldn’t
hear it.
In the end,
there was music I could hear. On Sunday, January 28, 1990, after two months of
chemotherapy that was marvelously effective at first but also had horrendous
side effects, cancer cells became immune to the drugs. The cancer cells made an
immense attack on her body, this time causing leukemia and spreading cancer to
the liver and spleen. Pneumonia developed in her lungs.
We were
gathering blood samples from our other four children to find a match for a bone
marrow transplant. But that afternoon, Carolyn told Michael she felt something
was going to happen right away, and she was scared.
The family that
was there gathered around her bed to pray. As I began to pray, I started to
quote from Psalm 34, “I will bless the Lord at all times. His praise shall
continually be in my mouth. My soul shall make her boast in thee Lord: the
humble shall hear thereof and be glad. O magnify the Lord with me, and let us
exalt his name together. I sought the Lord and he heard me, and delivered me
from all my fears.”
“What’s that
you’re saying?” Carolyn asked. “It’s a song. Sing it.”
We began to
sing, and she sang with us. She was so ill, but her high harmony blended with
ours with amazing strength.
Suddenly she
stopped and began encouraging us in a loud voice. She’d never done anything
like this in her life. She was always shy about public speaking. She expressed
her faith and gave us words of encouragement and hope, stressing the soon
return of the Lord Jesus Christ. I almost expected her to get out of bed,
completely healed.
Instead, in less
than twenty-four hours, she was gone. The next few hours were filled with shock
and disbelief.
That night we
gathered in Carolyn and Michael’s living room and found what is meant when God’s
Word talks about peace.
The first night,
the teenagers ministered to us by reading from the Bible. Our youngest
daughter, Jeanette, and Carolyn’s stepson, Robert, found appropriate scripture
passages for our needs.
The next day as
other relatives came in, my oldest brother, Dr. Virgil Nicholson, and his wife,
Mildred, who both taught at Evangel University for years, shared a long list of
Bible verses with us. We wrote them down and began reading them and other
passages God revealed. We read several times a day those first few days.
After I went
home, when I could feel my peace slipping away, I’d go read the Bible and pray
awhile.
I went to sleep
at night repeating the name of Jesus or quoting, “And the peace of God which
passeth all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ
Jesus” (Philippians 4:7).
Although I lost
my mother when I was twenty-one, and other heart-wrenching deaths snatched
loved ones in my husband’s and my families, I knew in the pit of my stomach
this would be the time when I discovered whether or not I believed what I
thought I did all these years.
THE REMAINDER OF CHAPTER THREE WILL BE PUBLISHED TOMORROW
Purchase Swallowed by Life: Mysteries of the Eternal: HERE
