Salvation

by Anthony J. Otten



Uncle Junior was always dying. He had been about to die for almost eight years, and if he had been logical, he would have done it long before he did. His legs were swollen and dark with diabetes, and he weighed as much as the couples he married in church. He was just one huge diminutive waiting for heaven to summon him to its gates. But he spent his later years teasing the Grim Reaper, tiptoeing to the edge of the unknown. He would call all the relatives from his hospital bed to let them know his time was imminent. He would pray, wail out his repentance, then go home and stay quiet for a few months, skitter away as if death were a mole the doctor had scraped off his neck.

When I learned he had died, I thought it was a trick and asked my mother if the mortician was going to build a custom casket. But he was really gone—the slick-fingered, moon-eyed presence at everybody else’s funeral, who always wanted you to contribute to the Junior retirement fund. He had once asked his widowed niece, only half joking, if she would buy him a Mercedes now that she didn’t have to get groceries for her husband. But I also knew him as the jolly divine who had preached my parents’ wedding. He stood at the pulpit that Sunday and warned his flock against “the tentacles of Satan wrapping around you,” except that he said “testicles” and made the family weep with laughter while the rest of the church sat in confused silence.

Later I heard that he was crying at the end. I don’t know why, whether it was from pain or fear, though he had spent his life introducing people to God and helping them grab their ticket to heaven. Those in the ministry, perhaps, are more vulnerable to dread about the afterlife. They have built their selfhood on definite outcomes, transactions, holy contracts. Regardless of the confidence in their brains, they may cringe in a secret space in their hearts when faced with a reminder of their own fallibility, the recognition that they are dust. To die and be wrong is not just a mistake for them, but an insult, a scar on the ego. Of that I can only say the same that any grizzled pastor will tell a neophyte—that no one should preach to save his own soul.