"And the Stars of Heaven Shall Fall," Chapter 1

"Live Backwards, If You Can."

Dear readers: This installment of Political Questions is nearly 10,000 words long, and as such demands a considerable commitment of time to take in. You may want coffee. . . or whisky. Or something. . .

Back in September when I launched this Substack, I posted here the second chapter of an experimental book project I am calling “And the Stars of Heaven Shall Fall.” It is memoir/biography of my life-long best friend, cut short by the early passing of said friend, Kelly Clark. At the time I said that I had a complete first chapter, but that I wasn’t sure whether I liked it or whether it is the best way to begin a work such as this, so I decided against posting it here.

Scenes from over four decades

As I say, this is a very different subject matter and style of writing for me, not least of which is that it is deeply personal, and while I intend for it to be largely biographical about someone else (which is my comfort zone), it necessarily risks emphasizing the memoir aspect that inevitably becomes more about me than I would like.

But I did recently happen across a suitable though seemingly unlikely literary model for exactly what I have in mind to do: Gershom Scholem’s memoir, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. I call this an unlikely model because its two figures—Scholem and Benjamin—could hardly be any more different than me and my spiritual companion Kelly. Benjamin was of course one of the key figures of the insidious Frankfurt School when it was first taking shape in the 1930s, and Scholem is best known for his work in the Kabbalist tradition of Jewish mysticism, and as one of the early leaders of Hebrew University in Jerusalem when it was launched in the 1920s. But as I read through Scholem’s narrative, the theological differences between Christian and Jew, and the philosophical differences between pre-modernist (me) and post-modernist (Benjamin) dissolve behind the more elemental story of a deep shared purpose of inquiring into the most serious things in life. At the end of Scholem’s preface for the book, which was published in 1975—35 years after Benjamin’s suicide, he writes: “The picture of Benjamin offered here is undoubtedly very personal, shaped by the experiences and decisions of my own life. I hope it is nonetheless authentic.” That’s tracks exactly the disposition I want, albeit with much less confidence still.

The critic Lee Siegel puts it thus the introduction to a new edition:

“The Story of a Friendship depicts a numinous figure, a man ‘whose ideas had a radiant moral aura about them.’ . . . If [Scholem] can regenerate his friend by recovering, through memory, his friend’s religious longings, then he can revive the living truth of Judaism. He can make the mystery of a human personality proof of the existence of the soul; and he can make the imperatives of the soul, and not the dirty expedients of politics, proof of the need for a Jewish state.”

This is—with the exception of the “Jewish state” part—exactly my own purpose with this project. (There likely can be no Christian equivalent of Zionism, as will be discussed in due course.) And I was startled in reading through the book how many perceptions, motivations, and practices tracked so closely our own. I found astonishing how many aspects and key moments of the Scholem-Benjamin friendship were near exactly the same as ours. “In those first weeks,” Scholem wrote, “we had many more conversations lasting for hours, sometimes until well after midnight.” I mentioned in the draft chapter previously published here how Kelly and I would drink coffee late into the evening while we pretended to study (but seldom did). Benjamin said to Scholem once: “A philosophy that does not include the possibility of soothsaying from coffee grounds and cannot explicate it cannot be a true philosophy.”

Beyond these superficial parallels were near identical intellectual, philosophical, and theological ones. As young men still in college or in graduate education, both Scholem and Benjamin were obsessed with engaging with—and criticizing—leading Jewish thinkers of the moment such as Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, just as Kelly and I were fixated on leading contemporary Christian thinkers such as C.S. Lewis, Richard John Neuhaus, and Thomas Merton. Scholem’s memoir also contains long excerpts from the many long letters he and Benjamin exchanged over the years, as will this account. “With few exceptions,” Scholem described Benjamin’s letters that could apply equally to our correspondence, “they are distinguished by complete frankness, a frankness based on trust.”

I could go on and on about the remarkable parallels I discovered in Scholem’s memoir, and perhaps I may write them all up in a separate chapter or appendix or something. But this is enough for now. The opening chapter that follows begins the book at the end of the story—a literary model I have seen before (in fact, from one of Kelly’s favorite books), and it hints at many “plot points,” so to speak, of the larger story that will be told along the way. As I say, I’m not sure this is the best way to begin this project, but I was moved by the positive reaction I received from readers to the earlier chapter I posted. So here goes. . .

Chapter 1: Live Backwards, If You Can

“. . . this friendship which together we fostered, as long as God willed, so entire and so perfect that you will hardly read of the like, and among men of today you see no trace of it in practice. So many coincidences are needed to build up such a friendship that it is a lot if fortune can do it once in three centuries.”

—Montaigne, “Of Friendship”

December, 2013. Portland, Oregon.

This true story—which is about love, friendship, faith, fall, and redemption, tragedy, and so much more—begins at the end. Maybe this is a bad idea. On the other hand, statistics show that most people don’t finish non-fiction books anymore, and I think this story might be best understood backwards. But I don’t know, because I know less and less the older I get.

And thus I begin with a memorial service. (And right away will probably lose 10 percent of readers.)

We try, these days, to brighten these melancholy observances by calling them “a celebration of the life” of the decedent, and it may work in the case of the person who lives out their allotted three score and ten years, where some sense of completeness amends our natural sadness. But what of the case of a vital, vigorous 56-year-old, whose decline and passing was so sudden, shocking, and mysterious? The extended circumstances of this death are such that the cliché of “closure” is hard to affect.

No one among the standing-room-only crowd of mourners that gathered at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral’s large main sanctuary three days after Christmas in 2013 for the memorial service for Kelly Wayne Gordon Clark III—Kelly Clark to everyone—could summon up much celebration, for the loss left everyone feeling diminished. Shock and disbelief was the dominant theme. That Kelly was seriously ill was widely known, but it was inconceivable that he was really gone. The other surprise—for me—was the disparate composition of the crowd. I thought I knew or heard about all of his significant friends and acquaintances, but there were many I met there for the first time, many I’d never heard a thing about. People lingered late in the afternoon at the reception after the formal service, longer than usual I suspect. Meeting some of these unlikely people for the first time, I heard their stories of how deeply they had been affected by this man. I was also surprised that most of these strangers knew much about me from Kelly. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised; I was always saying to people when I lived back east, “Let me tell you about my great friend out in Oregon...” It helped that he was sometimes in the national news.

So I shouldn’t claim special status for myself, except to say that Kelly was the greatest and most compelling human being I’ve ever known. He wasn’t my best friend; he was my deepest friend—sprung straight from the pages of Montaigne’s classic essay, if not Aristotle. We were fond of quoting Aristotle’s definition of friendship: two people with one soul. Any claim of a superior right of bereavement might fairly be attributed to selfishness, or vanity—the vanity of supposing myself the only person who could unravel at the last the paradoxes and depths of this maddening, magnificent man. This may be presumptuous, yet I have to try.

Kelly could be by turns an epic narcissist, and the most humble, generous, caring, and self-sacrificing person you’d ever be lucky enough to know. He could be weak, vulnerable, lonely, and needy in the extreme, but he also had massive amounts of courage and a longing for contemplative solitude. He could be exhausting to be around, and entirely invigorating at the same time. He was often overbearing or “intense”—those are the words everyone most often used to describe his bearing—but no one had more infectious joy. He never relaxed; even his leisurely moments were energetic affairs, usually with much premeditation that extinguished spontaneity. Even his whimsies had depth and meaning. He was an immense burden to his friends at times, but a burden you felt honored and delighted to carry. He was a rigorous and precise lawyer, but also a poet with great range and passion. He could seem disorganized and hectic, yet somehow his desk was always neat, and no one got in more purposeful action and meaningful results out of a day’s time. “Particularly in the matter of natural gifts,” Montaigne wrote of his great friend Etienne de La Beotie, “I know of no one who can be compared with him.”

Of his many talents his greatest was a talent for instantly forming a friendship—deep, intimately trusting friendship. (I’ll come shortly to what must be the explanation for this.) No one was a casual friend with Kelly: if you knew him you were a Friend, a comrade in arms, a fellow medieval knight of faith. And he knew a lot of people. Even people who weren’t necessarily his friends or acquaintances were moved by having come into contact with him. One of the more remarkable aspects of his passing were the number of opposing counsel from difficult and wrenching lawsuits who paid tribute to his excellence as a human being.

I realized at his memorial that a single day hadn’t passed since we first met 35 years before that I hadn’t thought of him—even during a most difficult and painful period when I wasn’t speaking to him.^* [*I’ll tell this whole story in order, but there’s a fragment from a letter of mine late in this period—around 1992—that belongs here: “You should know that despite the hardness with which I approached you at times during this ordeal—the residue of which may linger on a while—not a day has passed that you weren’t prominently in my thoughts.”] And I still think of him every day now, a decade after his passing. We were always starting conversations about important things, but seldom finishing them, because we were never satisfied that we were close to the bottom of a subject. We were governed by Kierkegaard’s axiom: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” It was always understood that we’d have to revisit everything later, after we’d grown old and read more books. A central conceit of baby boomers, who have unlimited conceits, is that you’ll always have time. Time to read the too many books you have bought compulsively over the years. Time to figure things out. Time, especially, to spend sitting with your friends. Kelly had built a fabulous backyard fireplace, ideal for cigars and conversation, and he excelled at both. We had the intent of sitting together patiently and understanding things backward, especially our biggest question, which . . . well, that will get its own chapters.

I have other great and very close friends, and we’re already making the transition into the mode of old men who nonetheless remain gregarious about what we now know about serious things, but who conceal it from the generation succeeding us, just as Aristotle observed. In addition to good friends of long standing, I fancy myself a self-starting intellectual, and have known or benefitted from close association with many extraordinary thinkers, writers, and academic colleagues, including several Nobel Prize winners. I’ve managed to meet and get to know a number of my intellectual and literary heroes from my formative years. I have to confess it is still a thrill when George Will calls up to find my opinion about something or quotes me in one of his columns, and I’m still bashful when I meet a young person who regards me with the same awe I regarded my literary heroes in my college years. But Kelly occupied an incomparable place in my life; he pushed me to think harder than anyone else.

There can be only one explanation for this man. He had charisma—the real thing, not the image and popularity version that we confuse today with celebrity, or as modern dictionaries have transliterated it, “compelling attractiveness or charm.” Charisma in the ancient Greek of the Bible means “the gift of grace” or perhaps even “the breath of God.” Above all it is divinely conferred; it is a spiritual gift. It cannot be taught or acquired. Even as hard bitten a thinker as Max Weber recognized it as authentic, while essentially mysterious.

While there can be some mystery as to the nature of Kelly’s charisma, there is no mystery about its ultimate source. Sure he was exceptionally handsome and had a golden voice. But so does Brad Pitt, and no one confuses his “charisma” with profundity. Kelly’s was the kind of charisma that changed a room when he walked into it. And while his presence was authoritative, his charisma was the kind that bestowed grace on others. You never left his presence without feeling larger in some indescribable way.

You did not need to know him long before perceiving how serious he was about his religious faith. It was central to his life, the more so when he was falling short of his duties to himself and others. He’d be the first to admit that his own shortcomings and self-willed personal disasters compromised his faith, when it did not render it hypocritical. He was insatiable for pathways to deeper faithfulness and theological understanding. G.K. Chesterton may have been right when he wrote that “A young man knocking on the door of a whorehouse is still seeking God,” but Kelly never repaired to excusing himself by recourse to paradox. But I think the same insatiability that contributed to his personal failures fed his intense longing to know God, to fulfill the injunction of Psalm 19:14: “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.”

Not six months before his death I had written a letter on his behalf to the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon (Kelly was planning to leave his highly successful law practice and take up formal holy orders), in which I asserted: “Were it not presumptuous I’d be tempted to make out the hand of Providence in Kelly’s life, in that his own brokenness has enabled him to perform significant work [on behalf of others] that he never anticipated or sought out.”

* * *

This extraordinary yet deeply flawed man, who had literally—as in actually—saved the lives of others, was unable to save his own. But that was a familiar and seemingly life-long pattern, except that in middle age he had at long last contained his demons and conquered his worst defects; he was able, as Pascal recommends, to sit quietly and contentedly in a room by himself. His books—he left me many of the theological titles—all have a heavy aroma of cigar smoke, as well as his copious marginalia, from his nightly visits to his library. Sometimes he read what is called “recovery” literature; the manuals of the 12-step world. But he also read serious works of theology and history. Calvin’s Instituteswas in the stack sent to me. Did he really read this dense, archaic text? Yes, he did. In between complex and gut-wrenching court cases on behalf of victims of childhood sexual abuse, he was composing academic papers about Karl Barth, ancient gnosticism, and other subjects, for an advanced degree in theology. His nightly sojourn to his library partook of that image from Machiavelli’s famous letter to Francesco Vettori; like the great Florentine, Kelly in middle age took to his nightly study with reverence, entering into the courts of ancient and modern men alike, asking them for the reasons for their thoughts and actions, and taking in their reply as though they were present with him. Then he would rise at 5 am to study Greek and Latin before heading to his law office.

He had reconciled with many whom he had at one time hurt or offended (myself included) over the years. He had achieved professional prominence as a lawyer—that earned him a feature obituary in the New York Times—along with the financial security that comes with it, after having been jobless, bankrupt, suspended from the bar, and living in his sister’s basement not that long before. That is only a small part of his downward arc around age 30—a story to be told at length later.

This is a man who knew what it meant to be broken, and recover. He had finally, on his third try, achieved a happy marriage to Sabine Moyer, the important step being the coming to grips with the causes of the failure of his first two marriages. Those failures weren’t all his fault, but he fully owned his responsibility. Sabine was quite different from his two previous wives, and most of his many girlfriends, which I took as a sign of maturity at last. Up to that point I had gotten used to inquiring with a weary sigh every time we met, “So, tell me about who you are dating now,” knowing that it wouldn’t work out for some reason. This was palpably changed with Sabine. I had never seen him so happy and content in a relationship; his prior marriages and many dating partners had always been fraught affairs. At last he had turned the corner, with a lively and formidable woman who matched up to his energy and complex personality in just the right ways. And he was madly and unconditionally in love with her, in a way that he’d never been able to achieve with his first two wives. He finally found someone he could love faithfully and without complications, and who could cope with his thymos. (The first time I met Sabine, she took me for a spin in a BMW convertible so we could each smoke a cigar while we talked and got to know each other a bit.)

Kelly and Sabine

And yet this is when the final tragic chapter began.

* * *

“I am not at ease, nor am I quiet,

And I am not at rest, but turmoil comes.”

—Job 3:26.

Our professional lives placed us far way from each other; me on the east coast in Washington DC, Kelly out in Portland. I would visit at least once a year, for a special annual event that Kelly organized chiefly for my benefit—a big gala dinner he hosted for about 300 of his law firm’s Portland area clients and friends, where implausibly I would serve as the entertainment portion of the program. (The tradition actually began as a book party for me in 2001, and grew into an annual institution.) It was an unusual way of making sure that best friends would get together regularly. My visit in November 2012 started off with an undertone of worry. Always when he collected me at the airport we’d start the drive to downtown by catching up on the most important new things we had going on—my latest writing project or behind-the-scenes political intrigue; his latest big case. And his cases were usually really big, sometimes precedent setting, but often harrowing in their details. This time his news was entirely personal.

Sabine probably wouldn’t be joining us at the dinner that night. In recent weeks she’d suddenly begun having difficulty walking, and she was starting to slur her speech. She was already using a cane to steady her walk. Their regular family doctor wasn’t sure what it might be. Parkinson’s was the leading guess, but it didn't look like the typical symptoms. Visits to specialists would start soon. Kelly and Sabine had been married for less than two years.

A visit to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, confirmed the dread tentative diagnosis of the Portland specialists: ALS—Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, “Lou Gehrig’s disease.” Worse: the Mayo doctors thought it appeared an especially aggressive case. Prognosis: a year, maybe a little longer. Sabine was 48. I sent an email:

I don’t know what to say. We can never know God’s designs, if He has any for us lowly individuals. But of all your life’s trials—how many now?—make you the best person to see Sabine through. That is small comfort—except that it is. It is as though you were prepared for her. No one could ask for a better partner for such a fate. It has taken me a half hour to type this out. I keep stopping to sob uncontrollably. I think I’ll re-read the Book of Job tonight.

He replied from Rochester:

The thought of all the previous trials being preparation has crossed my mind. I just know I wish I could carry it for her, or trade places. I have no young child, she does. Barring a swap, I can be strong, that much I know. Thanks for your friendship. It means more to me than you possibly know.

We spoke a few days later on the phone. Kelly held it together better than I did. He was subdued, but steady and realistic. He mentioned again how he wished he could trade places with Sabine. Clearly impossible. Or so I thought. But above all he was determined. He emailed a photo of a smiling Sabine out to dinner in Rochester immediately after the diagnosis at Mayo, both willing from that point to celebrate every day of her remaining health. Blithely we speak of “living in the moment.” Kelly, who had, by his own admission, squandered his first marriage, and fought bitterly in his brief second betrothal, was determined to make sure every moment counted while there was time, and to bestow the maximum kindnesses and comforts and personal joys that a human being can. Partly this was a natural extension of the “one day at a time” philosophy of AA, which had become as central to his life as his own religious faith, which would now also be put to supreme trial.

He put his law practice on hold. He and Sabine got outside and traveled while she still could, to the Cayman Islands, to Hawaii, to the mountains and the Oregon coast, golf (she’d drive the cart, and later ride when she could no longer drive), to the movies, live music, museums, and at home, cuddled on the couch every night with ice cream before a roaring fire. He could have hospitalized Sabine, or placed her in a long-term care facility. Could have. It was never a possibility for a single moment.

The Mayo doctors were not wrong in their timeline. Sabine’s condition deteriorated with great speed. From the Cayman Islands in February, only three or four months into her ordeal, came an email from Kelly:

Her body is failing her rapidly and she is mostly now in a wheelchair, though sometimes behind a walker for sort distances. She remains amazing in spirit: most days she puts a smile on her face and simply says, “let’s do this.”

I replied as best I could:

I think I said once that you know how to make moving clocks run slow (like Prof. Deery taught us in physics); now you get to put that in practice.

As spring yielded to summer, Sabine could no longer walk, or swallow. She lost the ability to type on her computer, the beginning of complete loss of the use of any limbs. The decline in her breathing capacity was precipitous. She began sleeping with difficulty, at irregular hours, often interrupted with shrieks and cries for help. Kelly was intent that she live out her remaining life at home as comfortably as possible, but even with a stream of hired caregivers the strain on Kelly took its toll. In some cases ALS causes dementia, and Sabine was one of those rare cases. Like many suffering from dementia, she could be mean and abusive, toward Kelly, the caregivers, everyone. The difficulty grew so great that Sabine’s 12-year-old daughter from her first marriage no longer stayed the night at the house. Joint custody with Sabine’s first husband provided a refuge.

In early September 2013—about eight months along—he sent a fragment from his journal (a lifelong practice of his) to me and his other closest friend, Jack Stewart, about the toll Sabine’s dementia and overall decline was taking:

Guys, I cannot stand it any more. I have to reach out to you guys, who know me so well. . . just to document what is happening. I expect in the future, after Sabine is gone, I will need to come back to these notes to make sense of it all. . .

What is a surprise, and what I never saw coming—and what is the source of my own distress—is a demon called “frontal-temporal dementia” that affects about 10% of ALS patients. It is a change in the brain chemistry that controls personality, moods, affect, temperament and empathy. What it means is that this lovely and gentle woman is often unpleasant, mean, even cruel, to those around her; that she often has no interest in or concern about others; that she acts inappropriately to friends, caregivers, and even strangers; and that, much of the time she is relentlessly angry at or critical, especially of me and my efforts. Now, it is surely true, as the doctor explained to me, that “this is not simply bad behavior; this is not your wife being a bitch.” But that’s exactly how it feels, how it registers with me. It is how I experience it, especially when I am spending so much time and energy trying to take good care of her. . .

I grew up in an alcoholic home with a raging woman who screamed and yelled irrationally and habitually, and it left deep scars in my soul. So to be in it again, and to have it often directed right at me, is paralyzing and—yes, I’ll say the word—re-traumatizing. I suddenly become about 11 years old again, small and scared and shamed. I’m trying very hard to be mind-ful, as the Buddhists and the best Christian mystics talk about it, or “conscious” as the recovery crowd calls it, and to tell myself that this is not then, that I am a strong 56 year-old man with skills and presence, and that this is dementia, not bad behavior, it is about her illness and not my shortcomings, etc etc, but I only make halting and fleeting progress in this.

At the end of September Sabine’s doctors thought she could go on for another four to eight months. Despite her inconstant mental state, Sabine was distraught: “I cannot do 8 months; I don’t think I can even do four months more. What are my options?” Physician-assisted suicide is legal in Oregon, but even in her desperate agony Sabine’s religious principles led her to reject the idea out of hand. But she did embrace the option of refusing all further nourishment—of dying a relatively natural death in hospice care. It was the one thing left that she could control. The only question at this point was how soon.

Kelly’s journal entry for that day read:

I read at church this morning, and was strengthened and encouraged so by the hymns, the sacrament, the hugs and kind words of a dozen people.

Like most people with an extreme illness presenting with episodes of dementia, Sabine still had her good days, too. A couple days later Kelly sent along this fragment of the previous evening:

Me: (during very real conversation w beloved Sabine)--"well let's just do one day at a time. Just each day as it comes. Lets just enjoy this evening we have together; ok?"
Long pause.
Sabine (slow, halting speech, with Cheshire grin gradually appearing, accompanied by that twinkle in her eye):
"well... That may require much more ice cream..."

An email a few days later, close to the decision point: “Sabine and I are committed to doing this one day at a time, so we can stay present. This afternoon after the doctor, we took a long drive up Skyline and watched the sunset kiss the autumn leaves, and remembered a hundred other such drives, hikes, and Autumn picnics. . . Sabine is thinking that by the end of this weekend or early next week she’d like to be on her way. She wants to go.”

* * *

“My spirit is broken, my days are extinguished,

The grave is ready for me.”

—Job 17:1

About two weeks later, Sabine decided the time had come, and she refused further food and water. Even with powerful painkillers, it was not peaceful. Not for Sabine, and not for Kelly, who kept vigil, with the help of Sabine’s friends. Sabine’s circle of women friends organized for one of them to be with Sabine round the clock in two-hour shifts—“Angels ascending and descending Jacob's ladder,” Jack Stewart wrote me. I wanted to visit some time during Sabine’s final weeks, but couldn’t get away from a demanding new job in Colorado, and Kelly told me I’d be more useful helping him with his grief after Sabine was gone. I called on the phone instead, directly started sobbing, mumbling apologies for being no help at all. Once again Kelly was more composed than me, and he thanked me.

Toward the very end, another email to Jack and me, on October 20:

Jack and Steve: We are now in day 6, still no coma and still no real peace. Sabine is often agitated and at unease. I don't know if this is just physical, spiritual, or both. With heavy meds, we can now no longer understand her at all, which is so frustrating for her.

Sabine died two days later.

Her passing, though tragic beyond words, brought no relief. Quite the opposite. In the final two weeks leading up to her death, Kelly had started experiencing numbness—peripheral neuropathy—first in his legs, and then in his arms, too. In fact his October 20 email said “I’m even having a hard time typing this, for the neuropathy is in my arms, now nearly matching that of my legs.”

What’s this? Symptoms that strangely parallel Sabine’s ALS? Could this possibly be? There was something else in his long October 20 email—something extraordinary. Please bear with the length of this; there is simply no cutting this down if I am to convey the depth of what was taking place:

Living alone with muscle dysfunction would be difficult, I think... So pray, if you can, once more for one more challenge here. I realize I am way overdrawn in the prayer balance, but then we are all indebted to each other and to the Lord who unites us far beyond our ability to balance the ledger.

But there is another piece of this that I did not talk to you about. I was reminded of it when reading the other night Alister McGrath's excellent new biography of C.S. Lewis. He is describing the marriage to Joy Davidman, bizarre in so many ways, almost universally greeted with skepticism by Lewis friends, contemporaries and admirers since—by all, in fact, except Lewis himself who seems to view himself as changed and saved by it.

Anyway, discussing her illness and death, McGrath says this: “Davidman returned home to the Kilns in April, with the expectation of dying within weeks. Lewis himself was now suffering from osteoporosis, which caused him considerable pain in his legs and made it difficult for him to move around without the use of a surgical belt. Lewis took some small pleasure in the thought that as his pain had increased, Davidman’s had decreased. This, he declared, was a ‘Charles Williams substitution’ in which the lover bore the pain of the beloved. For Williams—and later for Lewis—‘one had the power to accept into his body the pain of someone else, through Christian love.’” McGrath then goes on to describe how Davidman then rallied and her cancer remitted for a year or so. I had never read this idea of “substitution” as per Williams and Lewis, at least I don't think I have.

So what I have not told you guys is that back when Sabine was first diagnosed, I bargained with God to let it be me and not her. My daughter raised, my professional life accomplished to some degree, my life fuller, richer, more rounded, than hers—especially given Olivia’s [Sabine’s daughter] tender years. After a few months, when it became clear that this trade was not going to happen, I made a sub-bargain: that God let me carry some of the physical pain and suffering, me instead of her. It never occurred to me until night before last that my pain and symptoms may, in fact, be a direct response to that prayer.

This is probably bad theology, or at least edgy theology, for I know of no grounding for it really in the Fathers or the Scriptures, although I suppose one could easily weave together an understanding of it through redemptive suffering, one another’s burdens, and the cruciform nature of our discipleship and love in Christ for one another, even apart from any marital theology, which I am sure could add some insight. But in any event, I thought I would put this out there. I need and probably will get no answers, and probably should not even ponder this very much, but I am still spinning a bit after reading the McGrath.

Thanks for being here. It was a real lift. I love you both, KC.

No one failed to notice Kelly’s frail condition at Sabine’s memorial service the first week in November; his difficulty walking to and from the pulpit, his weak and raspy voice as he offered his personal memorial. Could this really be an answer to prayer—shared pain, a redemptive sacrifice of some kind? A Calvinist or some other species of predestinarian might make out some kind of divine balance of suffering, not merely for Sabine’s sake, but perhaps for his own life of many catastrophes and errors. I’m too theologically modest to say. But I couldn’t help but be driven back to the Book of Job. Is it strange for Job to be someone’s favorite book of the Old Testament? It is mine.

“Oh that my request might come to pass,

that God would grant my longing!

“Would that God were willing to crush me;

That He would loose his hand and cut me off!”

—Job 6:8-9.

Short of divine providence, could this be psychosomatic, or perhaps guilt-induced in a subconscious way? More than one person said to me, “I think it’s all in his head.” No one would blame him if it was. Whatever the cause, it was perfectly understandable that the strain of the long ordeal had exacted a physical toll, but I thought surely this vigorous, highly athletic, and resilient man would recover after a prolonged period of grieving. I tried to hold my judgment, mostly out of disbelief, partly out of my natural optimism—and partly out of denial.

Kelly was hospitalized less than a week later.

* * *

For affliction does not come from the dust,

Neither does trouble sprout from the ground,

For man is born for trouble,

As sparks fly upward.

—Job 5:6-7.

The doctors at Portland Providence hospital were baffled. Kelly continued by degrees to lose function of his legs, arms, and shoulders. Within a week he could no longer lift his arms above his shoulders. He sent out an email to his larger circle of friends:

Starting a few weeks before Sabine’s passing I began to have some nerve problems in my legs and later in my arms. Since Sabine left us I have been in the hospital for the last 3 1/2 weeks to try to get a handle on what is happening.

The v. hard bottom line is that I have lost most of use of my arms and about 50% of use of my legs. We do not have a definite diagnosis yet and so they're still looking for answers while they keep me on high doses of steroids to try to slow the deterioration.

The good news is that in my mind is clear, my spirit and humor is good. My core strength is good and this is simply peripheral neuropathy...they tell me that I have some decent eventual chance to regain some or most of the function in my arms and legs but this is a long-term rehabilitation, perhaps months or years—Again assuming they can get a diagnosis and make sure that they have the problem solved.

I finally managed to get out to Portland about two weeks into his hospitalization, and arriving at the front desk at Providence Hospital reassured me in an odd way. Portland Providence is a very large complex, with nearly 500 beds and a staff of over 3,000. But when I asked for Kelly Clark at the busy front reception desk, the woman behind the counter didn't even need to look up his room number. With a smile indicating familiarity, she said “Oh yes, Kelly Clark—room 425.” It didn’t surprise me; the unending stream of visitors, from such a wide array of humanity—clergy, lawyers from his office, devoted clients, members of his various AA groups, and plain old friends—made certain that he was the best-known and most-visited patient in the hospital.

His hospital room was very Kelly. He had made it his home. He had his laptop and iPad; the window sill was lined all the way across with books and DVDs, as well as a pile of cards from well-wishers. He was keeping his restless mind in motion even if his limbs weren’t. His sister Dixie told me he had improved some over the previous few days, and I found him in good spirits, even if alarmingly thin.

We talked over a physical therapy session—working his arms as best he could on an upright bicycle machine. He talked hopefully and confidently about adapting to life in a wheelchair if necessary. I had just the week before spent a delightful evening in the company of Charles Krauthammer, who had built a brilliant career in journalism and commentary despite severe disabilities he endured for 40 years, an inspiring example of adapting to the most extreme physical catastrophe. The example cheered him.

I sat with him for about two hours, talking easily as we always had. Conversation turned soon to his faith. He brought up the email from the month before about praying to relieve or share in Sabine’s suffering, but of course offering no conclusion about whether it could possibly be the real reason. There was no trace of doubting or wondering why or how God could let this happen to Sabine and to him. He did not speak in the accents of the conflicted father of the possessed boy in the 9^th chapter of Mark: “Lord I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” Instead he seemed to welcome this ultimate test of faith, saying, “Well, I suppose I might die from this. And that’s okay. I get to put my faith to the test, put it to work for real.” A few weeks earlier, just four days after Sabine died but before he’d gone to the hospital, he posted to Facebook a quotation from C.S. Lewis: “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.” He said he now placed himself in God’s hands come what may—why change now? He seemed relaxed and without visible anxiety. In fact I thought he seemed seldom more serene. I had no idea what to say (rare for me), in part because I was moved by the spectacle of a man whose faith was never comfortable, never settled, never reduced to the “cheap grace” Bonhoeffer warned against, expressing its essence with such stark simplicity and grandeur.

The doctors still didn’t have a diagnosis. Some obscure lymphoma was suspected, but repeated tests could find nothing. But his condition seemed to have stabilized, enough so that the doctors decided he could go home after they concluded they could do no more for him. He remarked that he already had his house outfitted for an invalid, so it was perfect for him. I was worried, but thought he had turned a corner. For one thing, he had recovered from serious illness once before.

About two years earlier, he went through a period of several months where he had difficulty with his digestion and was losing weight rapidly. There was some muscle weakness involved, too, though that seemed linked to nutritional problems. As with the present illness, his doctors were mystified, but thought he probably had an idiosyncratic case of Celiac disease. So he went on a rigid gluten-free diet and medication, and he bounced back. A few months later (the Spring of 2012) he came to visit me for a long weekend at my retreat on the central California coast, a little thinner than normal but vigorous as ever. We went running, hiked a steep mountain trail, and went sea kayaking. And sat around my deck overlooking the ocean, reading passages aloud from our favorite books. Even if he lost the full use of his legs, I thought a year later, we can still go sea kayaking. I’ll just take him out on a tandem.

Sea kayaking at San Simeon in 2012

* * *

Now my days are swifter than a runner;

They flee away, they see no good.

—Job 9:25.

Kelly was only home for a week before his condition made a turn for the worse. He was readmitted to Portland Providence the day before Thanksgiving. His problems had quickly progressed beyond muscle failure; internal organs were starting to shut down. On December 1 he sent out an email to a larger circle of his friends:

It is so ironic to me that we are going through this right after Sabine’s illness and passing and I am aware of the constant stream of drama over the last several months. . .

I continue to spend time and energy on my mental and spiritual life and this sustains me greatly. My spirits remain reasonably high and my faith reasonably strong even with the fears and setbacks. . .

I have many dedicated and caring medical professionals working hard on my case here in Portland, and the current plan is for more testing this week. We are still working to try to get me into the Mayo Clinic for a second opinion or perhaps Stanford or UCSF.

The Portland Providence doctors had no more success figuring out Kelly’s condition than the first time around, and a little more than a week later Kelly’s transportation by medical jet to the Mayo Clinic was arranged for December 8. The day after his arrival he sent a message:

I’m on the neurology floor, with highly skilled nurses. A team of 7 neurologists is working on my case, a case which they say is rare among the rare. I can see why this group is among the best in the world: they bring a different level of energy, drive, urgency and intelligence to this cause. The neurology department here has been rated either number 1 or 2 in the country for over 16 years.

On a more personal news, my doctors give me news straight up, but with care. This team told me today that whatever I have is rare — even for them.

At the Mayo Clinic, December 10

This message was dated December 10. What he didn’t convey in this note was how much his case alarmed the Mayo team. What they told Kelly “straight up” was that his organ and muscle failure was progressing so rapidly that “If we don’t figure it out and get on top of this fast, you’re not going to make it.” There began a frantic battery of tests, right out of the scripts of House—blood tests, liver biopsies, MRIs, x-rays, LPs, CAT scans, the works. It must be a tough tradeoff for doctors to make the call for more tests on a weakening patient. Two days later, Kelly’s sister Dixie took over his communications, posting to a CaringBridge site:

Today, Kelly made a darned good decision. He asked for a break in the action. No tests. No BIG Cat Scan machines. NO MRI's, X-Ray's, Biopsies. None. He was granted this wish by the chief neurologist, who understood. Thank goodness.

That was December 12. That day the phone rang in Kelly’s room. Kelly hung up after a few minutes, laid his head back on his pillow and from behind tears smiled broadly: “She forgave me.” It was the person who at one point had nearly sent Kelly to prison. The news of Kelly’s condition had clearly traveled far and wide.

Just as at Portland Providence, his charisma spread through the Mayo Clinic. Dixie send word that “a guitarist who had never met Kelly—but heard about him through a friend of ours here—volunteered to come sing to him!” His room, one of his friends noted, featured a small anomaly that was significant to Kelly: most of the crucifixes at the Mayo Clinic’s St. Mary’s Hospital were in the traditional pattern with Christ’s hands nailed to the cross. The crucifix in his room shows Christ reaching with his hands free toward God in Heaven. Kelly thought it ironic.

Kelly’s brother Clancy, Jack Stewart, and two of Kelly’s best friends from his addiction recovery groups, Patrick Donaldson (“a worker of many kinds of miracles,” Dixie said of him) and Michael Cook, a one-time gang-banger who was one of Kelly’s most unlikely young sponsorees in recovery, flew to Rochester to keep vigil, as the worst became more likely. Jack Stewart wrote to me: “One of the most impressive things about Kelly is the effect he has on young men like Michael. He becomes for them the captain, whom privates admire and emulate and for whom they would storm the gates of hell. He gives them hope, faith, and a model of renewal, redemption and restoration to health and sanity.”

Kelly asked that the Third Step Prayer from Alcoholics Anonymous be read to him each and every day:

God, I offer myself to Thee-

To build with me

and to do with me as Thou wilt.

Relieve me of the bondage of self,

that I may better do Thy will.

Take away my difficulties,

that victory over them may bear witness

to those I would help of Thy Power,

Thy Love, and Thy Way of life.

May I do Thy will always!

On December 14 Dixie’s update was shorter and more ominous: “The past two days have been difficult ones for Kelly with various procedures still being run that exhaust him. He is becoming more and more fragile with many physical difficulties continuing to develop.” He began to drift in and out of consciousness.

The next day, Dixie’s CaringBridge post was short, but it didn’t need detail: “Please light a candle for Kelly tonight.” I understood fully what this meant, but was still unbelieving.

Early the following morning, Clancy and Jack Stewart were sitting quietly in Kelly’s room before sunrise when the youngest neurologist on Kelly’s team came in to talk with Kelly. After asking a few questions to see if Kelly’s mind was clear and alert, he said as gently as possible: “We’re expecting to get your latest test results this afternoon. We don’t think we’re going to learn anything new.” The doctor paused to let the meaning of this sink in: they had run out of time.

Kelly responded: “Well, we did some of our best legal work on cases we lost. We did everything we could, explored every possible avenue and thought we had it right. But sometimes . . . sometimes the case just goes against you.” It was more than just an acknowledgment of understanding what he had just been told, or an expression of mutual respect from a fellow professional. It was an absolution for the doctors who had worked so frantically on his case.

Yet more than that. The Old Testament Job thought fleetingly (chapter 6) that God might lose a fair court case against him, but quickly rejected the idea because of its awful implications. Kelly the litigator knew human courts could make mistakes. But this litigator wouldn’t follow Job’s momentary rash thought. With the Psalmist he would say, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” There was to be no happy ending in which “the Lord restored the fortunes of Job.” But Bible scholars think that ending was added by a later author anyway, and for some reason I never liked it.

“But it is still my consolation,

And I rejoice in unsparing pain,

That I have not denied the words of the Holy One.

What is my strength, that I should wait?

And what is my end, that I should endure?”

—Job 6:10-12.

* * *

I was stuck out in Boulder, Colorado, in the midst of final exams at the end of my first semester of teaching at the University of Colorado, unable to go to Rochester to be at his bedside, a final heartbreak. Patrick Donaldson told me later that “he shared numerous ‘Hayward’ stories in late night moments.” I had a student in my office with the usual anxious last-minute questions about the final exam for my modern political thought class when Kelly’s daughter Katherine called with the grim news that there was very little time left, and that he was unlikely to regain consciousness. I can’t remember now what I said; I only remember that I shooed my needy student abruptly out of my office, closed my door and started crying. Then I walked down to the closest bar on Walnut Street and ordered straight whisky at 11 in the morning.

Kelly died the next day, December 17. It was less than two months from Sabine’s passing. I was told by his bedside companions that he had fleeting moments of fear and sadness as the end approached, but never a moment of despair about his faith. The Mayo Clinic conducted an autopsy—they called it a “complex investigation”—and while finding his symptoms consistent with encephalomyelitis (a brain and spinal cord disease similar but not identical to ALS), they could not identify the precipitating cause. Contrary to earlier speculation, there was no evidence of some hidden lymphoma. Katherine wrote, “It appears that we won’t ever know for sure what caused his body to shut down in the way it did or at the time it did.”

Can a person die of grief—grief at the tragic loss of Sabine? I thought so, but couldn’t bring myself to say it aloud, even to our closest circle of friends. Twenty years before, in a diary Kelly kept about his ongoing journey of achieving and keeping sobriety, he reflected on his earliest and most difficult days of conquering alcoholism:

Every night for several months, I would go to sleep sad, some part of me actually believing that I would die of the pain—“they’ll do an autopsy in the morning and declare that ‘he died from grief’”—and then, whaddya’ know, I woke up the next morning, alive as I could be.

Now that imaginary autopsy had come true. Can a cause be any less real for being undetectable by modern science?

* * *

“And now my soul is poured out within me;

Days of affliction have seized me.

At night it pierces my bones within me,

Any my gnawing pains take no rest.”

—Job 30:16-17.

I find it hard to contemplate life without him. I’ll still live forward, hopefully for my allotted three-score and ten, but there’s more to figure out backwards, now by myself. I keep going back to our final time together in the Portland hospital a month earlier, where his bearing and faith were so strong even as his body failed. Despite the seriousness of his physical condition, I had been optimistic.

As I said before, this could be chalked up to simple denial, except my reason for optimism was that I had seen him worse. Much worse. Not physically, but mentally and spiritually. It occurred to me sitting among the shocked and disbelieving crowd at his memorial that he was the person most accepting of his death. I marvel still at how he got to that point, and wonder whether I ever could ever achieve the same under similar circumstances.

But understanding that requires going back to the beginning, and telling the whole story at leisure. I’m hoping I’ll figure out some things along the way.

“For I know that my Redeemer liveth,

and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the Earth.”

—Job 19:25.

If you missed chapter 2 posted in September that starts at the beginning, you can go back and find it here. And yes, a third chapter is under way.

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