The Death of Edith Bunker

My morning devotions and meditations took me through Numbers 20 the other day. It starts off with the words “The Israelites, the whole congregation, came into the wilderness of Zin in the first month, and the people stayed in Kadesh. Miriam died there and was buried there.”

Miriam died there and was buried there.

That’s it. No mention of mourning. No sorrow from her brothers Moses and Aaron. No family gathering to remember her. No national day of prayer. Nothing.

Miriam, in case you don’t remember, was the older sister of Moses. It was she who watched over the infant Moses in the basket hidden in the bullrushes in the Nile. It was she who convinced the daughter of Pharoah to take Moses’ mother to be a nurse to the “orphaned” baby, thus assuring his survival and his ongoing connectedness to the Jewish people. It was Miriam who danced and sang after the Jewish refugees were safely across the Red Sea, and her song is still sung at Passover celebrations around the world. Her song was a model for Mary’s song, which she sang when told that she would bear Christ.

And while there was one incident recorded where Miriam, along with Aaron, turned against Moses, for the most part when the heroes of the Exodus are mentioned in the Bible, it is always “Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.”

But when she died, there is hardly a mention of it.

When Sarah, the wife of Abraham, died, Abraham mourned and wept for her. He spent lots of time, money, and influence in securing a resting place for her remains. There’s a whole chapter about it in Genesis.

But for most of the women in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, there is little said about them when they die. Admittedly, there is not any reference to any of the women saints of the New Testament dying. And other than a few martyrs, there’s not much about the men. But it seems to me that these women need to be reclaimed- their life as well as their death.

I was thinking about all of this when I remembered the death of Edith Bunker. Edith, you recall, was the wife of Archie Bunker on the cutting-edge sitcom, All In The Family. She was also in one season of the spinoff, Archie Bunker’s Place. Edith, played wonderfully by Jean Stapleton, was the one who loved Archie, her daughter Gloria and son-in-law Michael. She cared for them, tried to keep them at peace with one another, took all of Archie’s verbal abuse and seemed to turn it around by her gentle spirit. She basically held the family together. When the character died at the beginning of the second season of Archie Bunker’s Place, there were a few references to her. Archie refused to accept the death benefit from her life insurance policy, and finally broke down and cried upon finding one of her shoes. But other than that, she was gone. Out of the show, out of the picture.

I’ve been thinking about the women who have made such an impact on us. Perhaps it is because this is the month of my mother’s birthday. Maybe the deaths of some dear female friends over the past year have sunk in. Whatever it is, I know this- we need to pay attention. None of them…none of us…last forever.