When the Potluck Gets Too Big for the Basement

As I sit on my porch most evenings, I find myself thinking about the ways things don't break the way you expected they would.

We spend a lot of time bracing for the big one. The call in the middle of the night. The diagnosis. The letter from the bank. We build our whole inner life around the idea that we'll know what hit us when it hits us. And then the thing that finally does you in isn't the big one at all. It's the slow accumulation of small ones. The drip, not the flood.

I was reminded of this by the potluck problem we had here in the late nineties.

The Lutheran church basement seated about 40 people comfortably. For 15 years, the monthly potluck brought in 30, maybe 35 on a good month. Then somebody's cousin from Mankato moved to town and brought her recipe for that lime Jell-O salad with the cottage cheese and the pineapple. Suddenly everybody wanted to come. Eighty-three people showed up in a basement built for 40. The windows fogged up, the folding chairs ran out, and Aunt Vi ended up eating her ham salad on the steps by the furnace.

Now, for those of you not from around here, a church basement isn't just a place to eat. It's where you catch up on the news, hear about the crop report, find out who's getting married and who's getting divorced. The women who ran that kitchen knew how to feed 30 people. They'd been doing it for 15 years. They had the whole thing down cold. But 83 people? That's not the same job. It looks the same from the outside, it's still a potluck, but it isn't. The rules change. The pace changes. And the thing that was a calling becomes a crisis of spirit.

I thought about that basement when I read about Father Dustin Feddon down in Florida.

For a dozen years, Father Feddon had been visiting men on death row. He knew the work. He'd walk alongside a man through years of appeals, through the slow grind of confinement, through the long waiting. He'd sit in the visiting room and talk about saints and prayers and the Camino de Santiago. He'd learned, more or less, how to accompany a man without losing himself in the man's desolation.

That was the job he signed up for. But then the governor started signing death warrants at a pace nobody had seen in 80 years. Three cells filled up instead of one. An assembly line. Each man moving one cell closer to the chamber after the one ahead of him dies. Nine executions in Florida this year, more than all other states combined.

And Father Feddon found himself waking up in the middle of the night with his heart pounding, standing at the bathroom sink in the dark, splashing cold water on his face until the feeling passed.

Here's how death watch works, as best I understand it from the reporting. When a man gets moved to death watch in Florida, he's placed in one of three cells that sit 30 feet from the execution chamber. The men listen for footsteps. They've got a mirror they slip between the bars to see who's coming. The warden shows up with a piece of paper and a cluster of guards, and the footsteps stop somewhere along the wing, and that man knows.

Father Feddon was in that chamber three times. Hand on a man's leg. Watching the chest heave. Watching the eyes roll back. Watching a healthy man go slack and still. He told a reporter he'd become hypervigilant of mortality, not of his own dying, but of other people dying right in front of him.

And here's the thing. The potluck ladies didn't fail because they didn't know how to feed people. The scale of the thing changed the nature of the thing. And Father Feddon didn't fail either. He didn't do anything wrong. He prepared for years. He entered the seminary in his 30s. He founded a reentry home. He drove four hours round trip to sit with men who were about to die. He did everything right.

But 19 executions in a year is a different job than one. The pace changed what the work was. No longer was he ministering to men living under sentences of death. He was preparing them to die. One after the other. That's a different kind of waiting room.

The governor told a reporter that justice delayed is justice denied. The communications director said the advice for avoiding the death penalty is to not murder people. Those are answers, I suppose. They just don't answer the question the priest is asking, which is: how do you keep doing this? And also: how could you abandon the men who asked you to walk beside them?

I don't have an answer. I'm not sure there is one. But the potluck ladies, they figured something out. They bought more folding chairs. They started a sign-up sheet. They learned to cook for 80 instead of 30.

The thing they never admitted out loud, the thing they'd only say in the kitchen when they thought nobody was listening, is that they missed the old potluck. The one where you knew everybody. The one where you had time to sit down. You can adjust to a new pace, learn to do the work of 80 instead of 30. But you can't make yourself un-see what you saw in that chamber. You can't un-hear the footsteps stopping at the wrong cell.

There's another man waiting. The DNA testing didn't yield clear answers, and the prosecutors want the stay lifted. The machinery paused briefly, but only briefly.

Somewhere in Florida, a priest is standing at his bathroom sink in the dark.

---