The Last Rose: Saying Goodbye to Helen Claire Carr

The Last Rose: Saying Goodbye to Helen Claire Carr
By Mark Dankof
January 22, 2003

If on this 22nd of January, you find yourself in the outer limits of tolerance when it comes to incessant news coverage of The Abortion War and Mr. Bush’s impending Middle Eastern showdown with Saddam Hussein, join the club. As someone retained by an Internet news service to comment on these issues as they arise, I am struck not only by the obscene volume of print and electronic communication extant on the items in question today, but by the failure of most of this voluminous corpus to articulate any new ideas or insights either port or starboard. Nothing I might add to these debates will possess any more inherent value than that already served up by my journalistic colleagues across the ideological spectrum, engaging in the incessant drone of words printed or spoken. And perhaps in making the conscious decision to isolate myself from the scene for a day, I am also betraying a major case of fatalism and resignation regarding the direction being chartered in American domestic and foreign policy by our self-appointed Insider Elite—finally conceding consciously that my pen and word processor will never alter these grim inevitabilities. This is where it really is.

So I jettisoned all of this futility today to do something as noble and as worthwhile as it was heart wrenching. It was my duty, honor, and privilege in the early afternoon to gather with approximately 20 other souls in a freezing, windy cemetery in Philadelphia called Ivy Hill, to bid a temporal farewell to an 85 year old woman named Helen Claire Carr.

My path first crossed that of Helen Carr in October of 1998. She was a resident of a Philadelphia retirement community known as Fort Washington Estates, located in the heart of the earliest historical roots of America. I had just started at the Estates as a security officer, to supplement my meager income as a Lutheran pastor in residency as a post-graduate student of systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in the City of Brotherly Love.

Destiny materialized that fall when summoned to her apartment to fix a problem whose nature I no longer recall. On the main wall of her living room was prominently displayed a picture of a young American Air Force officer sitting at his desk. Another picture of the same man depicted his helmeted, Steve Canyonlike ascent up a ladder to the top of an F-4 Phantom aircraft. Supplementing these photographs was what appeared to be a framed copy of an aviation award or certificate.

My father was a USAF lifer, a full-bird Colonel upon retirement after 3 decades plus in the military. In this context, I was particularly interested in the biography of the figure pictorally depicted on the wall. Guessing on vintage and chronologies, I ventured the observation that the young officer looked like a veteran of the air war in Vietnam. Helen Carr’s countenance exhibited the beaming radiance that was her trademark, followed by the proud affirmation of her only son’s dedication to king and country in Southeast Asia. He served for several years with noted distinction and a laundry list of commendations. Managing to return to the United States miraculously intact after the Gehenna that was the lot of the Air Force aviator in Vietnam, he married his awaiting fiancé in California, subsequently accepting the gratitude of his military superiors as expressed in a transfer to a coveted post with 8th Air Force in England.

A handful of months later, on December 11th, 1970, it came to a fiery, apocalyptic end over a small English village. Captain Thomas Carr, the F-4 Phantom navigator on a routine training mission, perished along with his pilot for reasons never entirely understood or elucidated in the official Air Force investigation that followed. Helen Carr and her husband would receive a synopsis of this investigation from the Commander of 8th Air Force, followed by a letter of condolence from then Air Force Chief of Staff General John D. Ryan. The loss of her son enshrouded her for the remainder of her life, thankfully eclipsed only by the evangelical Christian faith that enabled her to peacefully rest in His sovereign love and judgments. She would spend the rest of her days in the linear movement of time ministering to others depressingly mired in the mysterious vicissitudes of life’s tragedies. This was always accompanied by a transcendent grace and kindness undoubtedly bestowed upon her by the Holy Spirit of God.

But as for Helen and me in the fall of 1998, our destined intersection and subsequent relationship of four years duration was cemented for her by a newly ascertained piece of information in the puzzle of life, obtained in her living room at Fort Washington: that in the years of her son’s most dangerous missions flown out of Thon Sa Nhut Air Base in Saigon, there was a second Air Force officer stationed at the base, a full Colonel from the Air Force Logistics Command in Dayton, responsible for the administration of the entire logistical support program and infrastructure designed to maximize the chances of her son’s success and survival in the skies over North Vietnam and Cambodia.

It was my father. He was in his final years of active duty Air Force service prior to becoming a logistical director for the Shah of Iran’s Imperial Iranian Air Force (IIAF) after the ignominious conclusion of America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia. For Helen, and for me, this did seem to be beyond reasonable coincidence, and in the realm of mysterious divine direction and predestination.

In the years that followed the fall of 1998, I continued to wonder how much longer a person of my background and educational level could continue to serve and survive in the Security Department of the Estates. I pondered whether or not in my life’s circumstances God’s hand and direction could still be ascertained or even affirmed as existing. I was plagued by recurring doubts. The notion that the best and most meaningful days of my life were already past continued to revisit my soul. With Helen Claire Carr, I could and did share these dark thoughts and nights of the soul in complete confidence on an ongoing basis. The fellowship and maternal counsel received was invaluable and endless. Her intercessory prayer on my behalf was without ceasing.

Several years ago she made a prediction oft repeated in the days that followed. In the context of the loss of her departed son, she said she was convinced that God had brought me to Fort Washington Estates in her final years as a compensation for the loss suffered in the sudden and explosive devastation of three decades before. As a corollary to this thought, she added that the Lord had somehow shown her that I would serve there until her departure from this life. And that the open door for me and the final chapters of my own life and world history would then follow. She never elaborated on the method of the Lord’s revealing. I pondered this many times in my heart.

Especially today in a bitter, icy cold that enveloped Ivy Hill cemetery during the final committal of the body of Helen Claire Carr to the earth, to await a glorious resurrection from the dead as a saint of God sealed in the blood of His Lamb. The graveside pastor’s words affirmed these truths as the green tent erected above and around her resting place continued to flap audibly in a determined, incessant winter wind.

Red roses were distributed to the 20 people present. There were instructions directing each person to place their single rose on the top of the casket as a final act of remembrance and temporal farewell. As each person made a final approach to the elevated rectangular edifice stationed on a metal frame above the destined grave, my thoughts kept replaying her predictive prophecy about my destiny yet to be fulfilled in this life.

I was the last person to approach the casket. The last rose added to the moving configuration of red was mine. When I finally departed the gravesite and the covering above it, my mind replayed a thousand conversations and pondered predictive prophecy once more. In the audible background, I kept hearing my own steps in the frozen tundra.

And the beaming radiance of the countenance of Helen Claire Carr looked down upon me from the vantage point of the Kingdom of Heaven. The twinkle of her penetrating eyes, the reassuring smile, and the confident nod of her head told me that she knew what I had just learned in these last days. A literal fulfillment of her prediction had occurred, concurrent with the weekend of her departure from this life.

I will ponder this impenetrable mystery, and her life, in all the remaining days of my own.

(Mark Dankof is a writer and researcher for the Internet news service News and Views at GoOff.com. An ordained Lutheran pastor, he now returns to active ministry as the chaplain of Lima Estates, a retirement facility affiliated with ACTS Retirement-Life Communities, Inc. headquartered in Philadelphia. He has pursued post-graduate study in systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in The City of Brotherly Love in recent years, while pursuing a career in commentary and investigative journalism. In 2000, he was the Constitution Party’s candidate in the United States Senate race in Delaware. His web site, Mark Dankof’s America, may be accessed at http://www.MarkDankof.com)