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Final sermon: A pastor leaves his flock a message of love
'You accept what God gives you,' said Claudia Chernesky after her husband Perry's death from the H1N1 virus. 'Life is a privilege. It's not something you have a right to.'
Erin Anderssen
From Saturday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Sunday, Jul. 19, 2009 05:01PM EDT
When Pastor Perry Chernesky stepped into the pulpit at the Oakbank Baptist Church on Father's Day, he was not himself. He felt lousy, coughing with aching bones. Practising with the worship band before service, he was noticeably quiet, plucking at his bass guitar, not ripping off his usual self-deprecating one-liners.
He apologized wryly that morning to his congregation in the small bedroom community just east of Winnipeg: "I am not feeling very well, so I hope this make sense."
But people went home thinking it was one his most tender, thoughtful sermons. "In the top five," one parishioner declared.
He told them how his family had gotten in the habit of saying "I love you" every time they parted. He spoke especially to the fathers in the pews, offering a message that would later seem prophetic: "Tell the ones you love," he urged, "that you love them. Because you just never know."
Mr. Chernesky's wife, Claudia, and their two daughters, Abigail and Deborah, were at home, sleeping off coughs off their own. But ministers, by the nature of their work, pick up a lot of bugs; Mr. Chernesky couldn't skip worship over a rotten cold. It was bad enough that he had begged off the reception for a wedding he'd performed the day before, where he'd been expected to say grace.
Ms. Chernesky had already booked a doctor's appointment for him for the next day - the cough reminded her of his bout with pneumonia shortly after Abigail was born in 2002. For all the headlines it was making, swine flu didn't cross their minds.
Mr. Chernesky was counting the sermons to vacation: One more weekend, and they were taking a break from small-town life in Oakbank, to visit family in Edmonton. Today, though, he'd been promised a nap in the afternoon, and then Claudia was going to sit through the new Star Trek movie for the second time - the best kind of Father's Day present for a 42-year-old man of God who still had his old Starfleet Communicator at home and considered James T. Kirk a childhood hero. He just needed a rest first.
But he never made it to see Star Trek again. In fact, Pastor Perry Chernesky's Father's Day sermon, with its warning about life's uncertainty, would be the last one he preached. On Sunday morning two weeks later, his heart gave out in intensive care at a Winnipeg hospital. He was your average, seemingly healthy middle-aged dad, aside from some extra pounds on his 6'1" frame and knees getting too creaky to carry him though hockey games. Yet he died from a flu that blows through most people like a bad wind.
He was the 32nd Canadian to die with the H1N1 virus in his blood, but his was one of only a handful of cases where doctors could not easily point to another contributing factor such as congestive heart disease or diabetes or asthma.
Two weeks ago, a 25-year-old Calgary mother of four died with the virus after being initially sent home from the hospital with inhalers and told she had a bad cold; Vanessa Bluebell fell into a group that appears hardest hit by H1N1 - young, healthy and aboriginal. And while it may turn out in the long run that there was some hidden weakness that made each of these people unable to fight it off, for now these cases are one of the mysteries of the virus.
As of yesterday, the number of deaths in Canada connected to the H1N1 pandemic had risen to 45, still a tiny percentage of the people who get the flu. Most shake it off after a few days. Since hospitals have stopped testing everyone - the World Health Organization advised countries yesterday to stop spending limited resources tracking the illness - most people cannot even be certain they had it.
But, as doctors and hospital brace for H1N1 to return in force this fall, and drug companies race to churn out a vaccine, researchers concede this virus is different: Unlike the regular flu, it makes some otherwise-healthy people very sick. And sometimes, it doesn't let them go.
Finding his calling
Perry Chernesky didn't always want to be a pastor. He was raised in Edmonton by parents, Richard and Mary, who believed in God but didn't attend church. His father worked for the gas company by day and played the guitar in a country western band at night. His mom was a dental technician. Perry took after his dad in his passion for music, learning the guitar mostly on his own, and when he got his licence, he'd take his little sister, Terri-Jane, driving with the sunroof open and the Beatles blasting on the radio.
In 1986 he went off to the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology to study chemistry. At school, he met a pretty 18-year-old named Claudia Lodwig, but she refused to go out with him because he wasn't a practising Christian. He didn't know much about God, he confessed. "But would you date me if I came to church?" he asked. Claudia, who liked his goofy sense of humour, agreed.
They were married after graduation, on Canada Day, 1989 (Perry joked that he chose the date to make sure he never forgot their anniversary). Deborah was born in 1995; Abigail arrived seven years later.
For a while, Perry took a job selling medical equipment. Then, for two short months, he tried to sell cars, Claudia recalls, but he was just nice to force a sale.
"You had to be so competitive and cutthroat," she says, "and he's not like that. He had a big heart and he just couldn't do it."
But faith had become a major part of his life, and the people he met at church began to see a different line of work for him, a better match to his generous, outgoing personality and his desire to help people not badger them into buying cars. In 2002, after an undergraduate degree at Concordia University and a master of divinity at Edmonton Baptist Seminary, he took his first position as an associate pastor at a local church.
"He gathered the kids around him," says Claudia. "At first, they'd think, 'Oh, here's this great big geeky guy.' But then afterwards he was just Pastor Perry and all the kids loved him."
The move to the small town of Oakbank four years ago was his first call as head pastor. He became known for quoting Bugs Bunny in sermons, and playing Dire Straits on his guitar. He played defence on his men's-league hockey team, though this year he missed nights because his knees were bothering him. To his girls, he was their crazy father who would chase them around the house with a pair of fly swatters pretending to be the Star Wars villain Count Dooku, or would play long bouts of Mario Kart on their PlayStation.
Whenever he went away, and sometimes for no reason at all, he would buy the three of them extravagant gifts - a leather jacket for Claudia, a top-of-the line guitar for Deborah, the budding musician.
"I'd tell him, 'We can't afford this,' " says Claudia, who works for a pharmaceutical company in Oakbank. "But he couldn't help himself. How do you say no to gifts like that?"
On their own, the couple liked to hike or try out new restaurants.
Claudia remembers sitting in the pew at that last wedding he officiated. He was going to the doctor Monday no matter what, she'd decided. She knew he was struggling to get through the ceremony, reminding the groom - in that warm, twinkling way of his - to love his wife as if she were the centre of his world.
"He was that kind of man to me," she said this week. "He was my best friend, he truly was."
With their own 20th wedding anniversary just a few weeks away, they planned to have dinner with friends in Edmonton. But by Canada Day, Perry lay in a coma while his body fought back against the flu. At his bedside in intensive care, wearing a gown, mask and gloves, all Claudia could do was hold his hand and gently brush his hair.
His anniversary card, full of loving sentiment, was waiting in its envelope at home, for when he woke up.
Broken intimacy
After church on Father's Day, Perry had gone home for his nap, but Claudia found him sitting up in a chair, unable to sleep.
"Why aren't you in bed?" she asked him worriedly.
"I hurt too much," he told her. "I just ache all over."
This isn't good, she thought to herself, driving him to the emergency room at Winnipeg's Concordia Hospital. He was admitted almost immediately, and placed in isolation, standard practice for people who reporting respiratory symptoms. A sample of his blood was sent away to be tested for the H1N1 virus.
When she tried to sit with him on the bed, he shook his head: he couldn't wiggle over to make room for her. "Sorry, Claud, you can't," he said. 'I just hurt too much."
"Already then the illness was splitting us," Claudia recalls. "The intimacy was broken."
Even being on a ventilator didn't help, and by Tuesday his doctors had rushed through his lab work to confirm his diagnosis: He had H1N1, but they had no idea where he'd picked it up. Other than their coughs, Claudia and the girls didn't get sick, and no one they knew had the virus.
It was decided to move him to the Health Services Centre, Winnipeg's largest hospital, and induce a coma to help his body fight the infection. Standard treatment, the doctors said, just for three or four days. Perry and Claudia never doubted them. They said goodbye to each other, believing it was just temporary, but making sure to say "I love you."
But in the coma his condition only worsened. His kidneys began to fail and he was put on dialysis, but even that didn't seem to be helping. Every time doctors would get him stabilized, something else went wrong.
For Claudia, sitting for hours beside her still, silent husband each day, time moved slowly. She was warned not jostle or make too much noise around him - the doctors said he needed all his strength to keep fighting. "Every step he went lower and deeper into trouble," she says, "the less we could touch him." Even when she did caress him with a gloved hand, he didn't respond. "He was as cold as a cucumber."
Still, his doctors were optimistic: "He's stable," they'd tell her, "go home." She needed to pace herself because he'd be in the hospital for weeks. She had the girls to consider, though Perry's parents had come to help out. The medical team looking after him, she thought, was top notch - so busy, but always with time for her. Later, even grieving, she would say, "When the chips are down, the system works."
At the church, the congregation held special prayer sessions and delivered meals, and they pondered the uncanny timing of that Father's Day sermon. "It was almost prophetic, we've used that word," says Howard Bredin, the music director. "Like he knew he wasn't going to be there here much longer. Something led him in that direction."
On Friday, July 3, doctors recommended that out-of-town family should come quickly. Perry's sister, Terri-Jane, flew in from Edmonton. Until then, she says, "We'd all been told baby steps, that nobody his age had died from this."
Claudia decided to let Deborah visit her dad, but chose to keep Abigail at home. "She's only 7," she says. "I thought it would be too much for her." They were still hoping, praying, for a different ending.
"On the very last day," Claudia says, "all I could do was hold his hand and squeeze it." She has to believe he knew she was there.
On Sunday at around 6 a.m, the phone rang: Perry was gone.
Later, word spread among the congregation that some residents in Oakbank had gone to their doctor the week before with minor flu symptoms. But of all the people Pastor Perry saw that weekend at the wedding and at church, Claudia hasn't heard of anyone even getting a cough they found worth mentioning.
United in love
This Monday, on what would have been Perry's 43rd birthday, Claudia and his family will place his ashes in a niche at an Edmonton ceremony - a quiet, private ceremony that follows a large funeral for him in Oakbank and another in Edmonton. The inscription will read "United in Love," with the date of their wedding and a cross.
"The Lord gave him 42 years and 11 months," Claudia says. "I just wish he could have been with us longer. But I had 20 good years of marriage. You don't complain about that."
Quiet Deborah is struggling the most with her dad's death. Next month, following in his musical footsteps, she heads to a prestigious band camp on a scholarship. Abigail still asks Claudia about heaven, and what her father might be doing up there, but seems to accept her mom's careful answers.
Claudia, leaning heavily on her family and her faith, is trying to figure out her next step. She expects, for now at least, to return to Oakbank.
"You accept what God gives you," she says. "Life is a privilege. It's not something you have a right to. You can't say, 'I deserve this, or this wasn't right.' Life is life. Everybody has bad things they go through."
She wants people to understand that her husband was the rare, random case: Most patients with H1N1 get better. She and the girls might have had it, and their most serious symptom was coughing. The last thing she wants is for the pastor's story to make people hide from life for fear of the flu.
"My brother didn't hide from anything," Terri-Jane agrees. "He lived his life the way he wanted to."
"I don't want people to panic about it," Claudia says. "And the health-care system is ... really looking out for people."
She sounds strong. Her voice cracks only once or twice while sharing her memories. "So far, today is okay," she says. "Tomorrow might not be."
In Oakbank, they won't soon forget their pastor's last words from the pulpit, reminding them of the same lesson.
Erin Anderssen is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.
