Based on Luke 23:33-43, November 23, 2025 
Rev. Mark Seifried @ Haydenville Congregational Church, UCC

Previously, I’ve spoken to the congregation about my late partner’s cancer journey and my struggle with grief after his death. However, I haven’t shared details about the death itself. I’ll get to that in a few minutes. 

First, I should tell you when Gregor was diagnosed with advanced neuroendocrine carcinoma, we were told that few people with that disease live longer than a year and that with intensive chemotherapy and radiation to shrink the tumors that were consuming his vital organs and growing on his brain, he would likely only live six months. Hearing that shocking news, Gregor was stoic and had very little to say. 

I was a mess. At that point in my fifty five years of life, Gregor was the only partner in whom I experienced faithfulness and complete support. I wailed and was inconsolable at the prospects of him being so ill and dying. After a while, though, I did pull it together enough to tell him he had a choice as to how he would live and die. I told him I would do everything in my power to help him and support whatever path he decided was best. He decided to proceed with treatments so that we could have more time together. 

And so, for the next few weeks, we talked about what a good life would look for him. He told me he would like as much privacy as possible, and since the hospital was only a few miles from our home and the church I was serving, he asked if I would take him to treatments and then pick him up to return home. I was serving in a ministry that was truly life or death for that community and Gregor knew I found great meaning in my work so he told me he wanted me to continue to work. 

Gregor was an extreme introvert and confided that the time alone at home would be well spent. He wanted to read books he never had the chance to read. He wanted to organize the portfolios of the interior design work he had done over the last thirty years. He wanted to make art and write in his journal. He wanted to connect with a few precious friends and family members. 

At the time, we had subscriptions to the Handle and Hayden Society in Boston as well as a chamber group called A Far Cry. During our eight years together, we went to a concert about once a month. Gregor said he would like to hear as much music as possible while he was still alive and he hoped we would be able to take one more trip to Puerto Rico which is where we had planned to retire together. If he was unable to do that, he wanted to go to Provincetown where we had visited a couple of times a year throughout our eight years together. He wanted a lot of quiet time with the two of us together in front of the fireplace in our apartment living room. And he wanted to die at home.

As it turned out, his cancer was so advanced that he was ill and quite weak throughout most of the six months he lived. He slept a lot and didn’t have much energy, but he was able to do all of the things on his list except to visit Ptown or Puerto Rico because seatbelts put too much pressure on his distended abdomen. And the only concerts he heard were on the radio except for two that I will tell you about. 

You see, I have a friend who is an accomplished baroque music harpsichordist. Gregor adored his music so we made arrangements for Andrus to bring his instrument to our apartment along with a colleague who played the viola da gamba. Right around Christmas time, they played a private two-hour concert for us in our home while a fire crackled in the fireplace. The experience was transcendent for all of us, the musicians included.

I won’t go into much more detail about how Gregor managed to live his best life when he was well enough to enjoy it except to say that he did one or two things on his list almost every day. For example, he averaged reading about three books a week and he catalogued photos of his design projects. After he died, I discovered a large portfolio with dozens of abstract pastels, enough to gift to each member of our immediate families and to his closest friends.  

And then he got so sick and weak that just about all he could do was sleep. It was shortly after that he decided enough was enough and we asked his medical providers to arrange for hospice services. I immediately began a leave of absence from ministry. 

Three days after he began hospice services at home, he had a medical emergency which was beyond my capacity to manage. So, I had to call 911 to get help. Medics transported him to the hospital. Once medical staff determined that he was stable, they said Gregor could either have a room at the hospital that would include hospice services, go back home or go to a hospice center. Gregor told them he did not want to be admitted.  

At that point I had wrenched my back helping him transfer from the bed to a commode and was exhausted because I couldn’t sleep at night due to the fact that I sat vigil by his bed in case he needed me. So, we decided it was too much for me to manage his needs at home. He would go to a hospice center on the south shore of Boston. 

Once there, we learned that they had music therapy available. So we arranged to have a cello triplet play for him in two days, which was amazing. That was his second concert. Knowing it was his last, I grieved throughout much of the performance. And then I was overwhelmed with gratitude punctuated by sobbing when the musicians played the hymn tunes to Amazing Grace and How Great Thou Art. 

When they played a piece by Debussy, Gregor closed his eyes and later told me he was transported to Paris, where, having visited numerous times, he had wonderful memories. He declined quickly after that. 

A couple of days prior, I had called his mother and sisters who lived in Kentucky, Ohio and Colorado. I told them they needed to get there ASAP if they wanted to see him alive. I also called two of his life-long friends: Kathryne, who lives in Cincinnati, and Ruth who lives in New Orleans. His family and a few other friends got there in time to see him while he was still conscious and had a sense of humor. 

He teased me saying that the “Winnie the Pooh” book I was reading while he slept was age appropriate. He was able to rib one of his sisters saying, “Oh honey, you’re a mess. Your mascara is running.” and “Which second grader cut your bangs?” And he asked me to tell our dear friend, Richard, who was sitting right next to me, “Mark, can you tell Miss Thing her nervous chatter is going to keep me from dying in peace?” In Gregor’s world, if he teased you, you knew he loved you. Gregor was Gregor all the way to the end. He lived well and died well. 

Still wanting time to be alone, the night before he died, Gregor asked me to go to Logan Airport to pick up Ruth and Kathryne and then go home and have a nice evening together. He told me we could come back the next morning. I was jolted out of bed long before sunrise that morning, sensing that Gregor was struggling. I waited until 5:00 to call the hospice center and was told that he was beginning to transition. The nurse suggested we make haste if we wanted to see him alive. So I awakened Kathryne and Ruth. They dressed quickly and we got to the hospice center in short order.

When we got to his room, Gregor’s normally bright blue eyes had turned milky colored and his breathing was labored. The nurse on duty told me she was going to get morphine to help him relax. While she ran for the medication, we all told him we loved him. I held his hand and asked him to breathe with me and then began praying Psalm 23 aloud: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Kathryne, who has a gorgeous alto voice began to sing a setting of the Lord’s Prayer which she had also sung for his father’s Memorial Service: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…” Ruth, who is Jewish, chanted the Kaddish, a mourner’s prayer that glorifies God: “Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will. May His great name be blessed forever and to all eternity.” 

This was all spontaneous and the room was filled with a spiritual energy I cannot describe except to say it was as sacred as anything I have ever experienced. Gregor’s breathing slowed within seconds. And then, almost as quickly, he drew his last breath.

After crying for what felt like an hour, I was able to compose myself and adapted the words Jesus spoke to the dying man on the cross next to him, saying, “I thank God; today you are in Paradise.” I had no doubt about that. Neither did the nurse who was standing in the doorway with the syringe of morphine in her hand. She said she had never witnessed anything so beautiful and was amazed he died so peacefully after the rough morning he had. That sad and solemn experience taught me what I think the exchange between Jesus and the criminal next to him on the cross is supposed to remind us: if you sit with beauty and suffering together and not flee it, you will realize just how very near God is.  

What Gregor’s cancer journey taught me is that every day offers many blessings, even when you are sick, even when you are dying, even if it’s listening to music for an hour or two, even if it’s sitting in front of a fire for an evening, even if it’s making art that may only mean something to you, even if it’s just being quiet and basking in the love of God. One of Gregor’s mantras he shared with me after I got home from a day of ministry was “I’m glad you are home and I am grateful to have lived another day,” and then he would tell me how he used his time, to which I would respond with a hug, often in tears, and say, “Thank God for today.” What Gregor focused on at the end of his life was less about his health and more about presence. 

Poet and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs reflects on what we can learn about a practice of presence through the study of dolphins for whom proclaiming presence is a life-saving operation. She writes:

Presence is interpersonal, interspecies and intergalactic, in some ways eternal. We can rethink our presence on the planet and its precarity by paying attention to how the Indus dolphins have brought themselves back from the brink of extinction…

The Indus and Ganges river dolphins make sound constantly, echolocating day and night. In a quickly moving environment they ask where, again where, again where. The poem of the Indus river dolphin is the ongoing sound of here, a sonic consciousness of what surrounds them, a form of reflective presence. Here. 

The home of the Indus river dolphin has gone through many manmade changes. Pollution and illegal poverty-induced fishing methods. Before that, a legend about a sea monster, and more recently, a takeover of the river banks of Sindh by the Daku Raj, a group of organized gangs who effectively scared all the fisherfolk away. Through all of it, the Indus river dolphin, who clicks all day and night, has been saying, here. Here. Here. Here. In a language I want to learn. According to the scientists who have been counting the endangered Indus river dolphin population since 1972, their population has steadily increased every year. From 132 when they first started counting to 1,419 this year. Here. Here. Here.  

Gumbs invites us to consider how we might learn to be more present in the here and now, writing: In the language I was raised in, “here” means “this place where we are,” and it also means “here” as in “I give this to you.” Could I learn from the Indus river dolphin a language of continuous presence and offering? A language that brings a species back from the brink, a life-giving language? Could I learn that? Could we learn that? We who click a different way, on linked computers day and night?  

What I want to say to you requires a more nuanced field of receptive language than I have ever spoken. It requires me to reshape my forehead, my lungs. It requires me to redistribute my dependence on visual information. So I will close my eyes and say it: Here. Here I am. Here I am with you. Here is all of me. And here we are. Here. Inside this blinding presence. Here. A constant call in a moving world. Here. All of it. Here. Here. Humbly listening towards home. And here. And here. Right here. My poem for you. My offered presence. This turbid life. Yes. Here you go. 

Thanks be to God for this day and every day which offer us a bit of heaven and the promise of Paradise. Amen.