In the meantime Jack’s sermons touched us: Jane was first to follow him; I followed Jane as we read Scripture and then saints and mystics. I found Meister Eckhart and Jane Julian of Norwich as well as Saint Teresa—do our hormones choose our metaphysicians?—as we joined a two thousand year history, full of murder and compassion and grace, under Jack Jensen’s leadership. We saw him sometimes for dinner or at a party, saw him drink too much and argue—with me to aid and abet. We learned how he lived, how hard he worked. At Colby-Sawyer he taught philosophy and the history of religions, five classes sometimes, and taught every day arousing the sometimes-lethargic young women of his small college. Also he counseled them, formally and informally, all the while he ministered to us. For years he worked on a long novel out of the classical world—he admired Yourcenar’s great Memoirs of Hadrian; he admired Mary Renault; most of all he loved the classical world, and visiting Greece was overwhelmed to walk in the Athenian agora where Paul and Plato walked—but he was not a novelist. He was a minister; on Saturday afternoons, for most of his life, he wrote his sermons. We heard him when he was spiritually alert and lively, and heard him when he was exiled and thirsty in the desert. When skepticism rode him as a jockey rides a horse, his sermons were historical and philosophical, dry but informative; but then the rains would come, especially during Advent when he waited again for the birth, or in contemplating personal saints like Dietrich Bonhoffer. The Christian year enthralled us, and rhymed with the countryside’s year: the birth in cold and snow, Maundy Thursday with its journey toward torture and death, Easter with its sunburst of resurrection. Jack permitted me to alternate skepticism with Christianity. When Jane and I visited China in 1986, reading our poems for USIS, on Easter we went to a Chinese church, two bignoses among five hundred enduring Chinese Protestants, and when I heard the choir belt out, in Chinese, “Up from the grave He arose,” I felt myself melted into two millennia of the round world.

Then Jack discovered a problem in his abdomen. Doctors could not agree whether it was cancer or not, an ambiguous cell structure, but they tried chemo just in case. He returned to health but later the symptoms returned; more chemo, which had to cease because it destroyed red blood cells. Jane and I were in Boston, baby-sitting a friend and his small daughter while her mother was hospitalized for a minor operation, when the phone rang: Jack had two days to live. So we sat by his bedside as he turned cold. The last night, Jane and another friend spent the darkness beside him as his breaths grew slower, repeating,

Lord, have mercy upon us.
Christ, have mercy upon us.
Lord, have mercy upon us.

At six-thirty the next morning, exhausted, with Jack unresponsive, Jane drove home to sleep. I held Jack’s cold hand in her stead. I was fetching a cup of coffee when Jack died early on the morning of March 17, two years ago today.