By Ada Brownell
An Excerpt from Swallowed by Life:
Mysteries of Death, Resurrection and The Eternal
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.
I don’t know if
there is any pain that equals the loss of a child. I do know I met mothers who
lost children decades before and their eyes still filled with tears when they
talked about it. I still cry sometimes myself.
Wave after wave of
grief hit me in the hours, days, weeks, months, and years after Carolyn left
us. At first, the impact almost knocked me off my feet, like the waves I loved
to ride at Santa Cruz beach when we visited Michael and Carolyn. When I’d walk
toward shore, often I’d forget to watch the waves and a big one would catch me
with my back turned, nearly causing me to lose my footing. Grief had the same
impact.
The first day back
at work after I arrived home following the funeral, I interviewed some ladies I
knew. They asked how the family was and didn’t know Carolyn was gone. I
regained my composure while I told them about her death and how the other
children were doing. Yet, as I walked to my car, my breath came in short gasps,
the pain of loss almost consuming me.
On the other hand,
I found that the Lord’s grace overwhelmed me periodically in a similar way. I’d
be going about my business when suddenly the Lord would remind me of a
scripture, or someone would minister to me, giving renewed strength and peace.
I began reading
the book of Hebrews and it strengthened my faith so much I kept reading.
Oh, how sweet the
Word is! To this day I’m still awed by Hebrews 2:9, “But we see Jesus, who was
made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with
glory and honor, that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man.”
Jesus tasted death
for my Carolyn! Jesus tasted death for me! Because of Jesus, death is no longer
bitter because He took the sting (the bitterness, the unpleasantness) from
death (1 Corinthians 15:55). When He walked out of the tomb alive, death’s
sting was left behind like the grave clothes cast aside.
I read Hebrews and
continued my intense search. I was amazed to see how much of the Bible is
devoted to death and eternal life.
Right in the
middle of the “faith chapter” in Hebrews 11, the writer stops telling about the
miraculous exploits of men and women of faith and says:
These all died in faith, not having received the
promises, but having seen them from afar off, and were persuaded of them and
embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.
For they that say such things declare plainly that
they seek a country [of their own]. And truly, if they had been mindful of what
country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have
returned. But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore
God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city
(Hebrews 11:13–16).
Even the book of
Acts, written as a history of the church, has eternal life as its theme because
the apostles’ message was Jesus Christ risen from the dead. Peter’s first
sermon talked about what Jesus did to the process of death as he said, “Jesus
of Nazareth…whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death” (Acts
2:22–24).
I followed the
paper trail left in the Bible, the writings of godly men and even the songs
from generations before us, and saw God did something about death and gives
peace to those who face it.
Sure, death means
sorrow. Oh, such sorrow! Yes, we miss our loved ones, and at times we feel our
heart is cut out.
Those who’ve never
stared death in the face are terrorized by it. I’m sure nearly everyone who
knows he is dying feels fear. But one thing I’ve discovered in interviewing
many people who have come close to death, especially if they know God, is the
paralyzing fear disappears when they get close to crossing over.
I remember
Janelle Hannifious, who received a liver transplant. Before the liver donor was found, she
came close to dying more than once.
I met Janelle
right after the transplant. The new liver worked marvelously, providing
strength and life for her formerly dying body. She’d just been discharged from
the hospital. She looked so energized and talked about how much she loved
hearing snow squeak under her feet and feeling the wind blow in her face.
But she found time
to add how the fear of death vanished in those times of sweet communion with
God as she lay on the verge of dying.
If we believe what
Jesus said to Martha, “Whosoever lives and believes in me shall never die,”
(John 11:26) everything about death changes.
Suddenly, some of
the old songs have new meaning. I have new zest for singing: “When we all get
to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be. When we all see Jesus, we’ll
sing and shout the victory!”[1]
My
faith was returning. I now believed the exit from earth is only the entrance of
our souls into our grand abode for eternity. But I wanted to know what happens
between death and resurrection. I wanted to know what happens to the body. And
I still wanted to look for scientific evidence that we are more than flesh.
There were more things to investigate.
TO READ THE REST OF SWALLOWED BY LIFE, GO TO: http://ow.ly/U11R
[1]Eliza E. Hewitt, 1851-1920., Mrs. John G. Wilson,
1865-1942, Worship and Service Hymnal, Hope Publishing Co., 5707 W. Lake St.,
Chicago,, 1966
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