Time Is Love

Remembering Jack Cutrer, gone too soon

On this day in 2014, my friend Jack Cutrer died suddenly. He was 41. Here is a passage from my book How Dante Can Save Your Life, about Jack’s death:

As they near the end of the terrace of Sloth, Dante and Virgil see a mob of penitents rushing toward them. They are purging themselves of sloth by running toward God, consumed now—as they were not in their earthly life—by desire for the good, for the things of heaven. The two shades leading the pack call out, urging the group on.

“Quickly, quickly, lest time be lost for lack of love,”

the others cried behind them. “Let our zeal

for doing good make grace grow green again.”

[Purgatorio XVIII:103–105]

In his translation of this tercet, Mark Musa uses a less literal reading of Dante’s original verse, but creates a phrase that haunts me still: time is love.

Time is love. Last year, my friend Jack died suddenly. He was only forty-one years old. He had been suffering from kidney problems, but no one, least of all Jack, knew how bad they were. His mother found his body; Jack had passed in his sleep.

Because Jack was a faithful member of our Orthodox mission parish, all the men of the church who were available—it turned out to be only Father Matthew and me—had to prepare Jack’s body for burial, according to the Orthodox tradition. We went to a back room behind the funeral home, a cold, windowless chamber with a concrete floor, and three embalmed bodies on gurneys, covered with sheets. There was a fourth in the center of the room.

Jack.

The funeral director pulled the sheet back, and there we saw our friend naked and pale, his eyes closed as if asleep. There was no pretense of modesty, no pretense of dignity. This, I thought, is what it means to be dead.

Father anointed Jack’s body with an aromatic oil that miraculously streams from an icon. I was relieved for the sweet floral aroma to fill the room, temporarily driving out the antiseptic scent of embalming fluid. Father Matthew took a razor and shaved the stubble from Jack's face, with me cleaning behind him with a washcloth. Then we had to dress the naked body in its funeral attire: underwear, suit pants, a dress shirt, tie, and then a white baptismal gown.

This took time and great effort. I had not realized that dead bodies are so heavy. I understood now what the Bible means when calls our bodies “jars of clay.” There was no clearer way to feel the absence of Jack’s spirit than to struggle with Father Matthew to clothe his body.

Father Matthew gave his white baptismal gown for Jack’s burial. We could not get it on him, so, using scissors, we cut the garment up the sides, put it into place, then sewed it up with needle and thread. Father placed Jack’s silver cross around his neck, and wound Jack’s prayer rope, the one he was holding when he departed this life, around his right wrist.

Father Matthew stood at Jack’s head and recited the prescribed Psalms and prayers. Listening to Father pray, I found myself thinking, yes, this had been the right thing to do. The strange ritual that I had dreaded had not been easy, but it had been holy.

Standing there with my head bowed, having spent nearly two hours handling the body of my friend, I had felt underneath my fingers and palms the terrible chill of death, its weight, its finality. This is what Christ delivers us from. And yet, because He sanctified the flesh by His incarnation, so too do we do the flesh honor by treating the body of our beloved dead with such tenderness and respect.

After final prayers, we were finished. The entire ritual took two hours.

At Jack’s wake, his mother told me how much he had enjoyed spending time with his friends from church. He had been in a lot of emotional and physical pain in the last year of his life and needed friends around him. It occurred to me later that the most time I had spent with Jack outside of church in the last year was the Saturday morning I washed his body.

I was so ashamed. Many were the times when Jack had been so down about the end of his marriage that I’d thought, I should invite him over for a beer. I bet he could use some company. But I never had. There would be time, I had thought, once I got this project out of the way, or once I finished this other thing.

And then there was no more time. I had lost time with Jack because I failed to love him as I ought to have done. That memory is a bitter fruit of my slothfulness.

Good old Jack. I failed him. Who else am I failing by not giving them the time — that is to say, the love — that they need?

How about you? Who are you failing in the same way? Think about it. Change, while there is time. Let this story be a sign to you.

May the memory of Jack Cutrer be eternal.

In the Starhill Cemetery