Interment of Tony Cayless - Friday, January 25, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC
Interment of Tony Cayless - Friday, January 25, 2019
Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul

Acts 26:9-21
Galatians 1:11-24
Matthew 10:16-22

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

The Rev. Frank Anthony (Tony) Cayless,
Companion of the Order of the Holy Cross,
circa 2012

Today, we receive the ashes of the Rev. Tony Cayless for their immurement in the crypt, under our church, also known as St Michael’s chapel. It is an honor to receive Tony back where he served this Order and this community so well. Welcome home, Tony!

I got to know Tony and Suzette Cayless in my first years as a monk here at Holy Cross Monastery between 2004 when I entered the monastery, and 2008 when they moved to Chapel Hill, in North Carolina.

I remember those days fondly. Tony and Suzette were a great help to our community. Besides great service to the Order and neighboring parishes, they also warmly entertained the community and family members at Huntington House where they lived. Going up the hill on a Sunday night to spend a good evening at Tony and Suzette’s was a great way to start a weekly Sabbath.

Of course, this four-year stint at West Park, was but a grace note in a long career of eminent and loving service to the church in the UK, in Barbados and in the US.

I thought of Tony as the quintessential gentlemanly English parson. His diction was perfectly clipped. His words properly weighted and adapted to his audience. He was always kind and cheerful; which didn’t stop a glint in his eye to accompany his deft handling of humor. 

One often met him walking the dog Bruno on the grounds of the monastery. He would always stop for a bit of caring conversation unless of course, we were in the middle of greater silence or Bruno had to chase a gaggle of wild turkeys without further ado.

He was an example of benevolent and beneficent pastoral presence.

*****

Tony died of complications of Alzheimer’s disease. My mother died of complications of Alzheimer’s disease too in 2013. Benign early signs of the disease were discernible by the time Tony and Suzette moved to Chapel Hill to be nearer their beloved son and his family. From my then ongoing experience, I knew what this family was in for in the years to come.

Losing a loved one to Alzheimer’s has been described as the long, long, long goodbye. The life of the caretakers has also been described as made of 36-hour days, as eventually, constant attention and care is required. Taking care of an Alzheimer’s-afflicted loved one is a course of endurance. Fortitude is needed whether one feels one has it or not. Eventually, we learn that our strength to care is greater than we know, if at great costs to our heart, mind and soul.

As the illness progresses, few indignities are spared the sufferer and his caretakers. One of the hardest parts is progressively losing the personality of our beloved. Another is the fraying of old and deep connections as memory gives way to oblivion.

*****

This illness is so cruel to both sufferer and caretakers that eventually theological doubts arise. Does God care about our loved one, or about us, the caretakers? Is anyone punished here? Who is our beloved in the resurrection? The man in his prime who knew us and loved us or the man who no longer knew who he or anyone else was?

It is often difficult to remember that the true self, the soul of our beloved is unaffected by the illness. That very soul is held in love all along by God. And death is a liberation into the new birth of resurrection. It is but a new stage in the ongoing becoming of the soul. 

It may be of comfort to imagine our loved one in the resurrection; unshackled from the impediments of Alzheimer’s, in full bloom of what their true self is in closer union with God.

***** 

But that comes only progressively to soothe our grief, after the passing of our beloved.

Long before that, Alzheimer’s initiates the process of grieving precociously. While our beloved is still alive, we get to grieve every stage of cognitive and behavioral impairment. We learn to grieve the loss of what relationships were before the slide into oblivion. We progressively lose the one we knew so well even before their natural death. 

And after that death, we find it hard not to let the painful last years of decline overwhelm sweeter memories of earlier stages of his life and our relationship with him. Eventually, the better memories will reclaim their due place in our remembrance too.

*****

There may also be unearned guilt in the caretakers for the times when we lost hope, we lost patience, we lost our temper. The unremitting nature of this illness means that it is nigh impossible to be the perfect caretaker at all times. And in remembering those times, we need to turn to God’s love for us in our frailty. God is fully reconciled to us, no matter how flagging our care may ever have been. We are not superheroes at all times, we are human and that is amazing enough.

Whatever our pain and grief is or may have been, we need to remember that “Instead of explaining our suffering, God shares it.” (Nicholas Wolterstorff)

God is with Tony now. At no moment was God ever away from Tony; not in his moments of utter joy, nor in his moments of pain and sorrow, nor in his moments of withering consciousness, nor at the time of his death. God was always with him at all those moments.

In the Kingdom of God, in which we - maybe unwittingly - already live, death is not a private, but a communal affair. Tony died surrounded by a loving family and a caring hospice team, supported by the prayers of loving friends.

Tony died like an infant is baptized. He was carried, supported and loved by a praying, caring community. We are all part of the body of Christ, mortals living and dead, saints and sinners. We are still united in the communion of saints. And Tony was and is always remembered by the body of Christ and by God himself. And when we pray for the dead, we are part of God’s remembrance of those God loves, whether alive in this mortal life or alive in the resurrection.

Amen.