It is a Pilgrimage

 

Photos courtesy of my Storyblocks subscription

I have been consulting with my friend Webster about the word ‘journey’. The word is all around us these days and I’ve thought about it quite a bit but recently two young friends lost their mother and referred to their experience with her failing health into home-hospice care to its conclusion as a journey.

Now, Noah and the Merriam brothers have given me some formal meaning to journey. As a noun, three descriptions: 1 – Something suggesting travel or passage from one place to another, 2 – an act or instance of traveling from one place to another (trip), and 3 – in a chiefly dialectal sense, a day’s travel. As a verb, intransitive and transitive respectively – to go on a journey or to travel over or through. They go on to give me all sorts of great information about the word but that’s not my point and I don’t want to derail my thoughts.

Journey is an apt and excellent word to use when describing path taken with a loved one from hale and hearty through illnesses and their treatments to hospice and working hard to graciously escort the loved one to end of their time on earth.

My problem with the use of journey is not in their usage but in the banal use of the word for everything from a person’s rise to stardom from the ashes of poverty (not a bad place for the word) down to their ‘journey’ to the pet store for cat litter. Since when did the commonplace act of getting into the car, driving to the pet store, waving their Apple Pay at the device, and coming home with cat litter become a journey? Unless the person got in a wreck, was arrested for dangerous driving or maybe got into a road rage incident, and barely made it home alive and just in time for the cat, it was not a journey. And even then, there are more apt and exciting language to use for those types of things. We have cheapened the word ‘journey’ with overuse and stale thinking.

My trek for a descriptive word for what we go through as my young friends have done took me from Webster and friends to Roget and on through basic internet searches. I won’t overload you all with the many alternatives I have come across, that is for your own excursion. I’ll get right to the word that struck paydirt for me – pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage, defined by Merriam-Webster as a noun is: 1 – a journey of a pilgrim, especially one to a shrine or a sacred place, or 2 – the course of life on earth. It works as a verb as in, go on a pilgrimage. For the Christian, or any religious order believing in an afterlife or next-life, pilgrimage works wonderfully. For the atheist, not so much – there is only life, then death and whatever good the body is put to afterwards. Alas, no sacred place for them so not too much of a pilgrimage.

When we accompany someone along the inexorable path of life that leads from living to the doorstep of the next life, whether if be as a family member, a friend, or as a nurse or volunteer at a center to people previously unknown to them, we have been given one of the deepest of privileges. It is an honor to serve as a guide, a companion, or even as a crutch to a person on their last leg of the pilgrimage of life. It is crushing to hold their hand as they breath their last and hear someone say, ‘she’s gone’. Crushing until we can sit back and understand the courtesy we’ve been afforded by being present when our companion is in ultimate rest after so much pain. Better to have held their hand than to have had them taken from our presence only to pass away a short time later.

If we are tasked with walking side by side with someone in the final stages of their pilgrimage, we need resources to draw from – other friends, family members, and a higher power – in my case and in the case of the two young friends I wrote of at the beginning of my post, Jesus Christ whom we know greets our loved ones and welcomes them home.

While considering these things, I have come to a better understanding of what I went through with my mom and dad a few short years ago. I see it now in a more favorable light as though a photographer of great artistic talent captured the true nature of their subject. It’s easier on the eyes and warmer in the heart to believe their pilgrimage was successful. I am more thankful now for the courtesy afforded to me by my Lord to have been alongside my folks to see them home.

I hope and pray that this helps my friends find a greater measure of peace when they read this as I hope it does other readers. May God grant that this reaches the mark.

With peace in my heart and I in His grip,

jerry