State of Grace

We knew it was coming, but that didn't make it any easier to see on the CaringBridge page.

Sunday, January 31, 2010 11:04 AM, CST

Surrounded by his family, our dear John was called to his peaceful resting place early this morning. We are thankful he is now at peace and no longer suffering.

John Kunstman is my cousin and my contemporary. He was born about a year before me, but we both graduated from high school in 1981 and from college in 1985. He had been a succesful corporate executive, was a devoted husband for 17 years and the father of two children. John was 47 years old, felled by metastatic cancer that started as an innocent-looking mole on his back two years ago, but one that later spread to his lymphatic system and then throughout his body. On at least two occasions, John had thought he was cancer-free. But the cancer returned, each time with greater ferocity, despite the care and attention of world-class oncologists. While the words on John's CaringBridge site were often circumspect, one can surmise that he suffered greatly in the last six months of his life, not only from the pain he was enduring, but from the growing realization that his journey was coming to an end far sooner than he could have imagined.

John and his siblings grew up in Cudahy, Wisconsin, a working-class suburb of Milwaukee that was near the airport and is perhaps most famous for being the home base of Patrick Cudahy, a prominent meat supplier best known for supplying bacon to supermarkets throughout the country. I remember visiting John's house a few times as a kid and the roar of airplanes overhead was a constant feature of his world. John and his siblings were all excellent athletes and they were all outstanding students as well. John ended up going to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, earning a business degree, then beginning a steady climb up the corporate ladder.

I always remembered John as being a focused guy -- he would meet you with a firm handshake and a steady gaze that sometimes seemed a little intense to me. He had an excellent sense of humor, but you always got the sense that he was serious and had a plan for his life. While I didn't see a lot of John over the years, it was clear that he was living his life well; he was an avid cyclist, worked hard and was able to adapt as he moved from place to place, from Milwaukee, to Indianapolis, Atlanta, Roanoke and on to suburban Washington, DC. He was a director-level financial executive at one of the largest healthcare companies in the country and it was clear that he had achieved great success in his life. And then the cancer came.

There are no tidy answers for those of us who mourn John's passing. God has a plan for all of us and there are times when that plan seems incomprehensible. This would be one of those times. We struggle to understand why John faced such a difficult journey and such a lonely one, even though his devoted family was there every step of the way.

John's college degree was in actuarial science, which is a necessary but often joyless endeavor. I'm guessing that John spent a fair amount of his career looking at numbers and data points without ever having to consider that his own number would come up so soon, that he would end up being an outlier on the actuarial table.

We are awfully good at reducing people to numbers and data points. It's something we do every day, just as aggregate numbers of the living and dying are part of the business in which John spent his working life. We love our numbers and we hate them, too. Numbers can tell many stories. My son sometimes chafes at the notion of grades, arguing that the number doesn't tell you the whole story. But one thing I know -- John understood that the numbers stand for something greater than data points. John cared about the people in his life and challenged them to be better -- the testimony of his colleagues on the CaringBridge site and the various online memorials that I've read are proof of that.

But in the end, even if you have everyone who loves you as you make the journey, you still have to face the solitary number you are. Somehow, John was able to make his peace with it. John said this to his brothers Andy and Greg shortly before he died:

"I have nothing to complain about, I have had a great life."

There's no disputing that. Our task, as we mourn this special man, is to do a little better, to understand that our complaints are transitory, to get beyond our complaints and to leave footprints, to make this world a better place. John could have complained about many things, but he found a way to leave this world and enter the next world with grace. It's a lesson worth remembering and a challenge for those of us who remain. Nothing in this world is promised to us, but promise remains. And the promise God has made to all of us is the one promise that matters in the end.