It is hard to believe that Joe Matthews has left us physically, 6 weeks ago this week. How many times have we gone over in our heads that unspeakable moment of Joe’s “passing “? For me, it was Thursday, April 13, around 6:00 PM. The phone rang, and, I thought, it must be Joe reminding me as he always did, that we would be playing golf on the morrow, and what would be the three main topics of our discussions? And this would take at least a half-hour of jollying and crazying in the midst of world-shaking pronouncements on the meaning of reality.
Instead, I heard Carol’s voice simply saying in monotone, “Joe is dead.” I can’t remember any other details: What did I say? What did Carol say? What does that mean: “Joe is dead? Joe died?” I lost consciousness in a way I cannot explain. I began to scream in a broken whine “Joe dead! Joe died! Joe what?” I swear there is a part of ourselves that goes away for a while. Does it die and go into the unconscious world where Joe went? I don’t know. But something in me died when Joe died. That is all I can say.
But I do remember calling Fred Weigel to tell him that Joe Matthews died. Fred said he couldn’t talk to me because he was in an Enneagram group. I swear I had no idea what an enneagram group was. (Actually, I have attended the enneagram group in person and by ZOOM on the 2nd Thursday of every month for the past ten years.) Fred simply said,” I can’t talk to you now, I’ll talk to you later.”
I was so out of myself that I honestly did not know that I was supposed to be on ZOOM with the Enneagram Group. Maybe a day later, I remembered what an Enneagram Group was.
This is what they mean when they describe the sudden and unexpected death of a loved one. There can be a temporary nervous breakdown. At 94 years old, I have been told dozens of times that someone I was very close to had died. Sometimes I was even present at their bedside when they died. But they had been ill for several months, several years. They had cancer, or aids, or several strokes, or Alzheimer’s, and we had months to get ready for their passing away.
But Joe’s death was the first time anybody so close departed this life without a moment’s preparation, without a thought they might actually die. Never, never, in my wildest fantasies or dreams did I ever imagine Joe could die.
Joe and I talked about dying for several years, on a weekly basis. In fact, I wrote a book about dying while discussing it with him every week for four months. I was forever mentioning Ernest Becker and his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Denial of Death.” We knew all about everyone else in the U.S. denying death, but we ourselves lived each day in the habitual denial of death. For sure, we knew, theoretically, that we were mortal because mortal comes from the Latin word for death: mors, mortis. But like everyone else in the U.S., we were both in denial of our own deaths. As Becker writes, human beings could not survive for even one day if they constantly lived with the actual consciousness that they are going to die someday.
As Redemptorist students, we spent years preparing for death. Our founder, St. Alphonsus Liguori, was the last saint to be named a Doctor of the Church, mostly because of his teachings on moral theology and avoiding sin and his famous book “The Preparation For Death.” We all had a picture of St. Al in his room writing away at his desk with a skull snarking in front of him. When we became priests, we traveled the planet giving Missions and Retreats in various languages on preparing for death. We talked for hours about our own deaths, but we never thought that the other one of us would die. Definitely NOT in the blinking of an eye. We never imagined that after a trillion breaths in and out that a moment would come when one of us would breathe out one last time, and there would be no “Goodbye”, no “Adios”, not even a “See ya later” or an “Hasta luego”. O my God !
Joe loved to talk about the Rogation Days, or Ember Days, which took place four times a year in the Seminary. We would go out in the morning darkness before Mass, carrying lit candles, and we would chant the Litany of the Saints. “From earthquakes- Deliver Us O Lord. From the spirit of fornication, Deliver Us O Lord. Then Joe’s favorite: “From sudden and unprepared death, Deliver Us O Lord.” Four times a year, two confessors from a distant Redemptorist House would show up and hear our confessions so we would,….you guessed it…. Be “Prepared for death.”
Well, on April 13, 2023, our Joe eased his way into eternity in his pool, where he had aqua jogged almost daily for 23 years. Were all those Litanies of the Saints we chanted, ringing in his ears, like the meditation gong that I hear every morning on my Thomas Merton Podcast? We used to kid about the radio show: “Only the Shadow Knows!”. Now, “Only Joe knows.” And all of us whom he has left behind only know that this life will never be the same without Joe Matthews.
Sal Umana 