Rick
Clemenson
(March 9, 1955-April 30, 2014)
Faith Lutheran Church, West Fargo
May 5, 2014
+ For
those of you who might not know, I am Rick and Renaye’s cousin. And like most
of us here this morning, I will be blunt with you: I don’t want to be here
today. I do not want to be here this morning commemorating the life of Rick
Clemenson. We shouldn’t be gathering today to be saying goodbye to Rick, who
has been to us a husband, a father, a son-in-law, a brother-in-law, a cousin—and
most importantly to evertyone here this morning—a friend.
This
morning I can say—and say so with no apologies— I am angry. I am angry at an
illness like ALS. I am angry and frustrated over the fact that there is an
illness like this. And I am very angry that ALS is what took Rick from us.
Nobody
deserves ALS. But Rick especially did not deserve ALS. I can be angry and sad about
it this morning. I know many of you are angry and sad about it too.
But
the one who never seem angry, was Rick. And I think that tells us more than anything
who Rick Clemenson was.
Now, I
need to be careful. I don’t want to make Rick out to be some kind of saint. Let
me tell your, Rick would not be happy with me if I did that. But I am going to
say that Rick was one of the genuinely good people I knew. And most of us knew
that about him.
His
daughter Mandy shared these beautiful thoughts about her father:
My dad was a happy go lucky guy with a kind heart who would give you the
shirt off his back if you needed it. He worked hard and he played hard at his
many hobbies including fishing, hunting and golfing. He'd be the first to admit
he wasn't particularly talented at any of those things, but he enjoyed them nonetheless
Now, that
is Rick. That is the Rick most of us knew. And because it is—because he really was that
good guy we knew--it makes his absence from us this even more sad.
But
the fact, he isn’t really absent from us. He is here with us this morning. He is
here with us, celebrating this wonderful life of his with us. And as we leave
here today, we will continue to feel him with us. He will stay with us as long
as we have those memories of him. He will stay with us as we long we remember
all those good times we had with him. And
when we do that, we will continue to celebrate his life again and again. And
that is the best thing we could ever do for Rick.
I am particularly
happy this morning that Rick’s family chose this reading from Ecclesiastes. I
love this reading. As I was pondering it these last few days, I realized, more
and more, how these words really did come to speak loud and clear about Rick,
especially in his last days.
To everything there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to
die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
Rick
was a fiercely independent guy. He might not have seemed like it to some of us
who knew him. But he really was. He did things his way. And the final thing he
did his way, was his passing away.
Last
Wednesday, as that hospital bed was wheeled in, it seemed as though Rick said, “Alright.
That’s enough.” He understood fully well at that moment, yes, there is a time
to live, and there is a time to die. And now was the time to die.
Death
by ALS can be unpleasant. I will spare you the details, but Rick knew full well
what death by ALS entailed.
But, for Rick, there came that moment when he was
defiant even of that. Instead, he went quietly. He went in his favorite chair,
having spent time with his family and his closest friends earlier that day. He went in the way he wished to have gone. Because
it was time. And even in that, there was a kind of defiance. A defiance of ALS.
And a defiance even of death.
There
is a great tradition in the Christian faith, summarized in the well-known
phrase.
All of us go down
to the dust; yet even at the
grave we make our song: Alleluia,
alleluia, alleluia.
Now those words might seem
archaic. We’ve heard those words so many times probably that they don’t mean anything
anymore. But, if you listen closely,
they words of defiance. Those words speak
to us and tell us that, even in the face of all that life—and yes, even
death—throws at us, we can hold up our heads with integrity, bolstered by our
faith.
Even in the face of whatever life
may throw at me, we can almost hear Rick say, I will not let those bad things
win. I will not let ALS win. I will not let even death win.
“…yet even at the grave we make
our song: Alleluia,
alleluia, alleluia.”
Even you, death, will not win out
over me. Even in the face of these awful
things, I will hold up my head and I will face you with strength and defiance. And, because I have faith, because I am loved
and I have loved, you will not defeat me.
Today, all that Rick Clemenson
was to us—that man of strength and love and integrity—all of that is not lost. It is not gone. Death has not swallowed that up. Rather all of that is alive and dwells with us
who loved him. And dwells in Light inaccessible. All of that dwells in a place of peace and
joy, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting. And
for us who are left, we know that it awaits us as well.
See, Rick is still showing us the
way forward. He is showing us by his
very life and faith, and even his death, how to face these hardships life
throws at us. He is even showing us how
to meet these days ahead—these days in which we now must struggle with a life
in which Rick is not here with us physically any more. He is showing us to face it all with our heads held high,
bolstered by our faith and out integrity. He is showing us that, in the midst of all of
these hardships, we must do so with class and dignity and strength.
I will miss Rick. I will his smile and his kindness. I will miss
the joy he brought to Renaye and to his children and to all of us who cared for
him
But I am thankful to God that I
got to know him. And I am even more thankful for all that he has
shown me in this last illness of his and in how he met death with dignity. People like that come along only rarely in our
lives. And when they do, we are not the
same people we were before we knew them.
So, today, yes we are sad. Yes,
we are in pain over this loss. Yes, we ache deeply in our hearts and in our
souls.
But we are also thankful today. We are thankful for this man whom God has been
gracious to let us know and to love. We
are for thankful for his example to us. We
are thankful for his companionship and the love and care he showed each of us. And we are grateful for all he has given us in
our own lives.
See, even we, today, are defiant.
With all this sadness, with all this pain, we can still, like Rick, hold
ourselves and say, Yes, even now, even
here at that grave, here in the face of sadness, here, on this sad day of death
and darkness, we can still sing:
Alleluia!
Alleluia! Alleluia!
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