I Am The Last One Left Who Was There

There were eleven of them in that back room, and there is one, and he did the arithmetic properly for the first time in February.

He has been to ten funerals. He carried at four of them. The last one was in November, a woman of eighty nine who had been nineteen when it started, and standing at the back of that crematorium he understood, in a way he had not before, that he was now the only person alive who had been in that room.

Not the only one who knows about it. Half that congregation knows about it. He is the only one who was there.

Which means something specific and irreversible: when he goes, and it will not be very long now, the thing stops being a memory anywhere and becomes only a story. Nobody will be able to say it happened to me. They will only be able to say he said it happened to him.

He has begun to feel like a man carrying something across a river, alone, in a hurry, without being sure the far bank exists.

If you are the last one left, come and sit on the boards. Nobody in that building is going to be criticized here.

Custody is not the same as continuation

Let us separate two things that have grown together in him since February, because one of them is real and one of them is not his to carry.

The first is custody of an account. He genuinely is the last holder of a firsthand memory, and when he dies that will genuinely be true of nobody, and that is a real loss and no page should pretend otherwise.

The second is the one that is not his. He has begun to believe that he is also the custodian of the possibility. That God's willingness to do it there dies with the last man who saw it, and so his own funeral is a kind of ending for that congregation.

That does not follow from anything, and no version of it appears anywhere in the book, but at eighty one, after ten funerals, it does not need to be argued in order to be believed.

You are not carrying the possibility. Nothing about being the last witness has ever made you the last occasion. I am not saying it to comfort an old man. Scripture says now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation (Psalm 71:18), which is an old man asking for time to hand something forward, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold on a porch in February.

The old man's request is forward facing

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off any of those ten.

Read what he asks for, because a different request would have been available and he does not make it.

Now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come.Psalm 71:18

Until I have shewed. Not until I have finished remembering, and not until I have made a record. The request is for enough time to hand it on, and the direction of the whole sentence is forward.

And then, every one that is to come. He is not asking to be the last one. He is asking for the next ones, by name, as a class, on the assumption that there will be some.

Your remaining time is aimed at the ones coming, and Scripture has an old man ask for exactly that. That is written into the request itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a man of eighty one on his own boards.

Nobody in that building is being blamed

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page about a congregation that let something go.

They did not lose it. Seasons end, and they end without anybody dropping anything, and the people in that building have gone on being faithful in ordinary ways for a very long time without the extraordinary thing they never asked to have taken away.

And nothing here says his memory is a problem or that he should stop telling it. Ten of the eleven are gone and he is entitled to miss every one of them.

You are asking for this again, here. The fire that stayed is the one you want, not the one you remember. Scripture says how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him (Luke 11:13), where the asking is open to whoever is alive to make it, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the last surviving witness, who determines what a building sees next.

And if these months have cost more than the neighbors on that porch know, if sleep has gone, if the funerals have started to frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.