Years of Tears

“I’m getting very emotional,” I told my wife, as I watched the John McCain funeral procession in Phoenix yesterday.  Thousands of people stood in line for hours in 106 degree heat to pay their final respects.  National Guard, law enforcement, firefighters, and military men and women in full-dress uniform stood at attention saluting the flag-draped coffin as it was carried into the Arizona Capitol rotunda.  Yes, I got emotional.  Tears seem to come much more readily in these autumnal years.  I can’t seem to hold them back—but I’m not in the least bit embarrassed by them any more.  

I tried to pinpoint the reason(s) for my emotion and the ensuing tears.  Was it the crowd of admirers?  Was it the loss of John McCain?  Was it my love for this nation? Was it the men and women in uniform?  Yes, it was all of these, but it was also much more.  It was the culmination of my life history—it was all the events of the years bundled together in one moment of time.  It included the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy in 1968.  It included that  night in 1973 when I was visiting at the hospital in Wilmington, Delaware and recognized Delaware’s newly elected Senator Joe Biden, grief-stricken over the loss of his wife and young daughter in a car accident that night. (It included, too, the pain and grief Biden experienced in the death of his son, Beau, in 2015).  It included the remembrance in March 1973 of those POW’s released from years of deprivation—including John McCain. It included the shock and horror of 9/11—it included everything, everyone, every joy, every sadness, every tragedy, every hope I’ve experienced over my three-score and ten plus five years.  It wasn’t an emotion about a moment in time and it wasn’t tears shed for a moment in time—it was an emotion and tears covering every moment in my time.  I hope you can understand.  Maybe you have to be 75 or older to get it—I don’t know.

This morning my tears are welling up again in sadness and in joy.  Joe Biden will deliver a eulogy for John McCain in Phoenix today.  (Former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama will deliver the eulogies at the National Cathedral on Saturday).  In a time of loss there is gain.  In a time of sadness there is hope.  In a time of deep political polarization there is a togetherness—“bless be the tie that binds”—that ascends.  In a time of tragic dehumanization there is yet, and still, those who seek the fulfillment of humanity, who seek community, who want to live together as brothers and sisters.  As John McCain reminded us just months ago, he now, in death, reminds us again.  We must not “abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe…for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.”