> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://mereorthodoxy.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # When Everything Is Forgotten - URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/when-everything-is-forgotten/ - Published: 2026-09-01T11:00:27.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-01T11:00:27.000Z - Author: Mere Orthodoxy - Tags: Joseph Orso, Formation, Book Reviews, Family *The following excerpt from Joseph Orso,* [*On the Threshold of Worlds: Tending My Father Before and After His Last Breath*](https://josephorso.com/book/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) *is published with permission from Front Porch Republic Books and Wipf & Stock.* \*\*\* These things can go poorly. Some time ago, another resident in the memory care facility died and the family cared for the body themselves. Though surely well-intentioned, they were unprepared. The details are not important, but workers were asked to do too much. Stories spread, and one young staff-member tells me the experience still gives her nightmares. There’s no blame here. Our civilization has commodified all aspects of experience and relationship, and provides little support for our sacred responsibilities to each other. Most of us have never washed a breathless body, nor dug a grave, nor sat round-the-clock vigil with a loved one’s body after death. Our parents have not done this, nor our grandparents. Rather, cultural norms have neglected these responsibilities and replaced them with secular, economic transactions. In such a context, tending our dead ourselves is no simple task, and mistakes aren’t surprising. That said, knowing what happened, we realize early on that caring for Dad after death, without a funeral home, is going to involve repair in this place. We speak extensively with the director of the facility, the nurses, and the staff about our plans—about how we are in touch with a community organization that supports families in doing this, how friends and family will be here to help us wash Dad’s body when the time comes, to carry him to a waiting vehicle, to sing as we carry him out. When the time comes, we tell them, nothing will be asked of them, though they will be welcome to be present if they choose. \*\*\* Dad’s breathing goes on beyond the hospice nurse’s guess of seventy- two hours, and the days feel liminal. During this dying time, it has taken no beckoning for the sacred to intrude upon our days. Dad is dying, and the thing to do has been obvious: sit around him as we’d sit around a fire, gazing at the flames, and telling stories and making music and eating cake until the flame burns out. Yet there’s also work to do. Ages upon ages ago, a prophet cried out, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” The command stands, an ever-present calling for every generation. If we do not want to hand over death to the nearest industry, there are indeed preparations to be made. Cultural patterns no longer exist for how to tend Dad between his death and his burial, so knowledge must be recovered. We must remember skills our ancestors took for granted. We make plans and back-up plans and to-do lists. We email friends about helping carry his body from his room to the vehicle. We prepare Mom’s spare bedroom downstairs for the vigil; prepare the gravesite at the edge of the woods on our land; clean up behind the garage; pick up the ice packs for keeping Dad’s body cool during the vigil, put them in the garage freezer, and make sure someone can bring several to the facility when the time comes; get the paperwork ready so we can transport Dad’s body legally; talk to friends about helping us organize the vigil, in which people will take shifts sitting and praying with his body. And there are questions: Do we know enough to wash the body ourselves? If it snows—and there’s a blizzard in the forecast, and the blizzard will come—how will that change things? And how are we going to lower Dad’s body into the grave? And when his flame goes out, is it possible for someone from Threshold Care Circle to be here—in case we need help washing the body, in case we need someone who has done this before to help us with something that comes up that we haven’t thought about and are totally unprepared for? “Prepare the way!” cried Isaiah. I call Susan from Threshold again, and she says someone can certainly be with us when the time comes, but that we won’t need them. She is sure of this. “Do you remember when Adrianne birthed your first child?” she asks me over the phone. “She knew just what to do. And when you first had to bathe her? You knew just what to do. Maybe it didn’t go perfectly, but you did it, and you can do this, too.” She goes on, describing how tending our loved ones in death is a natural human experience and dwells in our cellular memories. If we lead with our hearts, she says, we can do nothing wrong. And we should also remember that we can’t hurt him. If something goes imperfectly—and it probably will—it might even be humorous, and that’s okay. Everything will be okay. Just lead with our hearts. Her words fill in for lost knowledge. They conjure a culture, prepare a way. They remind me of what Adrianne’s midwife said to her over and over: Don’t worry. Your body is strong, wise, capable. When the time comes, you’ll know exactly what to do. And she did. And so will we. \*\*\* “Prepare the way of the Lord,” Isaiah says. Yet in the rest of Isaiah 40, he goes on to describe a God unfathomable, who “sits above the circle of the earth . . . Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in” and “brings the princes to nothing.” Before God, nations are less than nothing and worthless, a drop in a bucket, the dust on the scales. Before the Creator, people are like grasshoppers, withering grass, fading flowers. And yet the holy voice still commands us: Prepare the way, grasshopper. Align with starlight, you speck of dust. \*\*\* Death is a fire we sit around, something warming and mysterious, something transcending comprehension, a journey no one living—not even the wisest—has completed. It is a cosmos beyond our cosmos, an experience beyond our experience. Convictions and identities loosen their grip as we sit before this holy fire, his flame growing brighter than us even while his breath fades like a flower. The prophet speaks: “Prepare the way!” But we sit here like wood, consumed in total awe. We sit here like ashes, not knowing what to do. Yet the prophet speaks: “Prepare the way!” And we sit here like humans have always sat here, tending the fire, watching it flicker, grow, die down. “Prepare the way!” he says. It is evening now, and we are all sitting with Dad while he sleeps. They say when his feet begin to grow cool, the end is near. But his feet are still warm. At Adrianne’s suggestion, we open the laptop, go to YouTube, and find a video about how to lower a body into a grave. The easiest way, this video suggests, is for some people to step into the grave themselves to receive the body. We’re all convinced. When the time comes, we decide, this is the way we will do it. We will stand in the grave together. We will go into the grave before our father, receive his body from above, then gently lay him on the earth.