Keep Death Always Before Your Eyes

MPR photo

It was a hard week in my neck of the woods. Last week a police officer was killed in Cold Spring, in an alley behind Winner’s Bar, about six blocks from where I used to live. The case is very mysterious, and it doesn’t yet add up. The word the media is using is “ambushed.” He was there to check on a man who lived in an apartment above the bar, whose parents called the police, worried that he was suicidal.

funeral procession past Rocori School in Cold Spring (MPR photo)

In the bar it was Bingo night, and there was an unusually large pot, so the bar was crowded. When Steve told me that detail I said, “Are you sure it wasn’t a meat raffle?” I always wanted to go to a meat raffle at that bar, though I wasn’t brave enough. It’s not that it’s a tough bar– it is a bar that draws a crowd for the chance to win meat or a Bingo pot. It’s that the space felt sort of like it was for native residents only. I wouldn’t know what to do.

Thinking about the murder, Steve says all he can think of is the film No Country for Old Men. You have to be a ruthless killer to shoot a cop. And he was shot with a shotgun, which hasn’t been recovered. Listening to the Cold Spring mayor and the Bingo story made me think of Fargo, and again, a ruthless killer coming through an otherwise sleepy town, the cop in the wrong place at the wrong time. We only have films to inform us.

When a police officer dies, we all feel the pain. He was dedicated to protecting us, and he was killed for it. In a place like this, we rally. The funeral was on Wednesday at the Saint John’s Abbey Church, on the campus where I work. The Cold Spring Catholic Church is very large– the parish has 5,000 families and the town is only 3,500. But it’s not large enough to hold a funeral like this one. Thousands of police officers from across the state arrived in a long line of patrol cars that stretched down I-94, and they marched up the main drive to the church in a column. It was a bitter cold day.

Yesterday I was in the meat market buying some ground pork, because I’d been charged with making chili for Steve to take to his parents in Sleepy Eye. I ran into Father Cletus, the Cold Spring pastor, who presided over the funeral. I know him well from teaching in the religious ed program.

“Cletus, how are you doing? What a hard week this has been for you.”

He smiled his shy smile and said, “I’m still on my feet.”

He was wearing a grey sweater and I complimented it as clearly handmade. “Yup,” he said. “Was it a gift?” I asked. “I made it myself,” he said, with that same smile.

Behind the counter the butcher was asking him about the rack of ribs he had ordered. “Father, how would you like these ribs? Would you like them cut up, Father?”
“No, no, just like that is fine,” he said. Later, Steve asked if he was buying meat for the cook. I said I don’t think he has a cook, as I know he and the young priest who used to share the parish with him cooked a lot. “I think the days of priests with cooks and housekeepers is over,” I said. “They’re even knitting their own sweaters!”

The Benedictines are fond of a direction in the Rule of St. Benedict, “Keep death always before your eyes.” I never know if it is a source of hope for reuniting with Christ, or a source of humility, for we are but dust and to dust we will return.

The next day on my way to work I passed, as I always do, the Abbey wood shop. Through the lit window on this dreary day I could see a row of coffins they were building.