Where is thy sting?
"We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things." - Lemony Snicket
My dad once told me that the scariest thought to his childhood mind was that someday his mother would die. I can see him, a small boy, awake in the middle of the night, praying to God not to take his mother away. His anxious words must have chimed just right - she is living to this day.
As a child, death kept me awake at night. More often even than thoughts of burglars or the haunted hallway between my room and the bathroom - knowing that my mother, my father and my sisters would one day be dead terrified me.
I couldn't even think of death when my mother got sick. Though it was sudden and shocking, something in her brain popping one day ate pizza with friends in Pioneer Square. She couldn't eat, she couldn't talk, she couldn't drive for the pain in her skull. We took her to the doctor. Blood swelled up around her brain, or at least that's what I pictured from all the labels and explanations my dad and the other doctors gave us. She was lucky, they all said. Any other kind of bleeding would have killed her.
I didn't wonder if she would die or if she would live - I simply didn't think of it. My mind doesn't like to make allowances for the possibility of mortality. People go to the doctor, like they go to my dad, and the doctor fixes them. They come home. They always come home.
When I was even younger, my mother found our baby sister blue in her crib. I heard screaming from downstairs that morning. They took her to the hospital. We didn't know what would happen. The people from church said they were praying for us and brought us food. One night we ate a store-bought shrimp platter with sticky red sauce and several varieties of the classic Mormon noodle-fruit-and-mayo salad. Rachel, Sarah and I stayed home with Grandma while Mom and Dad were at the doctor with Hannah. For some reason it should have been a more grave situation - she might have died then. But I did not think of death. Instead we finished off our shrimp platter and watched all the Star Wars movies in a row. The next day Hannah came home.
But as I've grown, I've realized that not everyone comes home. This thought has always sickened and terrified me. Such small, spider-web strands seem to hold our lives in place. There are times when I am consumed with the anxiety of this fragility. A driver on a two-lane highway may turn his steering wheel a few centimeters and obliterate my entire family in one crash. A blood vessel or artery may burst and send death like a shot through someone's body. A lump may creep into a lung or breast or stomach and stretch its sinister tendrils or tissue masses and slowly cripple my loved ones. A boat may crash. A plane may crash. A car may crash. A scuba tank may be incorrectly pressurized and explode. The gas could be left on in the house and asphyxiate the entire household. The children may be abducted while playing in the middle of the cul-de-sac, the neighborhood bear may make an appearance and devour (or worse, half-devour) them all while they sleep outside on the trampoline. A stray ball may strike my mother in the temple as she watches a baseball game and kill her instantly. The dog may dart into the street and be struck down by cars, bikes, stray birds. He may drown, he may be eaten by other dogs, he may run away. He may try to wriggle through the posts on the deck or the banister and get stuck and hang himself.
Of course, these are not entirely rational fears. I quote Lemony Snicket now, looking back on the diverse ways in which I killed off my family (and dog) in my imagination:
"There are two kinds of fears: rational and irrational- or, in simpler terms, fears that make sense and fears that don't. For instance, the Baudelaire orphans have a fear of Count Olaf, which makes perfect sense, because he is an evil man who wants to destroy them. But if they were afraid of lemon meringue pie, this would be an irrational fear, because lemon meringue pie is delicious and would never hurt a soul. Being afraid of a monster under the bed is perfectly rational, because there may in fact be a monster under your bed at any time, ready to eat you all up, but a fear of realtors is an irrational fear. Realtors, as I'm sure you know, are people who assist in the buying and selling of houses. Besides occasionally wearing an ugly yellow coat, the worst a realtor can do to you is show you a house that you find ugly, so it is completely irrational to be terrified of them."
But death is no realtor. Death has seemed to me to be the ultimate sentence of loneliness. I hate being apart. Each time I leave the driveway after Christmas, or each time I hug my family goodbye and the airport, or each time I wave them down my own driveway, I am struck by an ill pang of emptiness. I know I'll see them again, but I detest knowing that it can't be now, that we can't always be as we just were. I hate knowing that in the meantime we'll all change, that we'll have jokes we want to tell, that we'll have ideas we want to express, that we'll have food and games and music and experiences that we want to share but can't.
So death has been, to me, an ache that is simply unactivated. It's always there, and sometimes if I worry hard enough about it, I feel the horrific loneliness of it. I think of not being able to be how I am now, just a phone call, a car trip, a plane ride away from those who are dearest to me.
Yet, I have had an experience which has lightened the burden of death for me. This is, in part, because I have seen the fresh swell of affection which may follow such a parting.
On Friday I had the chance to go to Katie's funeral. It was a very different experience from sitting together in the hospital room. Where there was raw and immediate emotion in the first experience, the second gave more planned space for these feelings. Though the suddenness had largely faded, the tenderness of this gathering was no less present.
One thing I noticed in Katie was how much like us she looked, something which has been harder to see with her failing health. She has Ford features - her nose and pursed lips looked so much like the others standing round the room. But while her lips were pursed in that final peace, ours were closed in quiet memory.
Watching the lines of people come to greet our grandparents, I realized how touching Katie's life had been. One of the visitors Katie knew from her activity with the special needs community brought her a diet coke. She couldn't drink it, the visitor knew, but Katie would like it. After the viewing, Katie's visitors filed in, some solemn, some sweetly irreverent. We remembered together, from talks given and words read, that Katie had chosen this life. I do not know the physical, emotional, and mental suffering Katie went through, but I am touched to know that she wanted her family to live richer lives for it.
Katie's influence is deep and far-reaching. I was not immediately close to Katie, but her sacrifice is a burning motivation to me. Sacrifices become easier when I see how little mine are. There are things that I have given up, things I do give up, and things still to give up, that will become blessings because of their loss. There are moments of dissatisfaction and disappointment, moments of grief and heavy sorrow that I might not immediately recognize as joy, but this has thrown a new perspective on suffering and sacrifice.
Jon recently wrote in his journal about making use of our sorrow to help others. I have connected with this thought: we ought to use our pangs as moments of clarity - clarity between ourselves and other sufferers. If we live in those moments as observers, "so this is how sorrow feels" instead of sufferers ourselves, our suffering becomes less acute. I am sure Katie felt this - I am sure she was comforted to know that this suffering was not only enlightening for her, but it gave her family the chance to make sacrifices and suffer. This may seem a morbid transformation - immense pain seen as a lucky chance. But anyone who has served the sufferer, or who has been the object of love and service, knows that this is how lives and bonds are built. Katie knew this, and that's why she chose the life she lived.
So when death comes, I know it will still jarr me. I will still feel moments of loneliness, aches for my own memories, and perhaps long gulps of pure unblemished sadness. But these moments will elevate. Though I don't look for sorrow, I know such moments will seal me to others in a way that a life free of sorrow never could. After death, after we all end up (crudely put) underneath sheets, when we are all together again, we will think grateful thoughts for those who suffered with us and for us. I can only imagine the unfettered reverence and gratitude we will feel for that saving sacrifice, the greatest sacrifice. In that, the gloom of death seems so thin. Coupled with the comfort that comes from knowing that our next reunion is simply postponed, I hope I will remember that sorrow sanctifies, and that empathy is the most beautiful elevation.
My dad once told me that the scariest thought to his childhood mind was that someday his mother would die. I can see him, a small boy, awake in the middle of the night, praying to God not to take his mother away. His anxious words must have chimed just right - she is living to this day.
As a child, death kept me awake at night. More often even than thoughts of burglars or the haunted hallway between my room and the bathroom - knowing that my mother, my father and my sisters would one day be dead terrified me.
I couldn't even think of death when my mother got sick. Though it was sudden and shocking, something in her brain popping one day ate pizza with friends in Pioneer Square. She couldn't eat, she couldn't talk, she couldn't drive for the pain in her skull. We took her to the doctor. Blood swelled up around her brain, or at least that's what I pictured from all the labels and explanations my dad and the other doctors gave us. She was lucky, they all said. Any other kind of bleeding would have killed her.
I didn't wonder if she would die or if she would live - I simply didn't think of it. My mind doesn't like to make allowances for the possibility of mortality. People go to the doctor, like they go to my dad, and the doctor fixes them. They come home. They always come home.
When I was even younger, my mother found our baby sister blue in her crib. I heard screaming from downstairs that morning. They took her to the hospital. We didn't know what would happen. The people from church said they were praying for us and brought us food. One night we ate a store-bought shrimp platter with sticky red sauce and several varieties of the classic Mormon noodle-fruit-and-mayo salad. Rachel, Sarah and I stayed home with Grandma while Mom and Dad were at the doctor with Hannah. For some reason it should have been a more grave situation - she might have died then. But I did not think of death. Instead we finished off our shrimp platter and watched all the Star Wars movies in a row. The next day Hannah came home.
But as I've grown, I've realized that not everyone comes home. This thought has always sickened and terrified me. Such small, spider-web strands seem to hold our lives in place. There are times when I am consumed with the anxiety of this fragility. A driver on a two-lane highway may turn his steering wheel a few centimeters and obliterate my entire family in one crash. A blood vessel or artery may burst and send death like a shot through someone's body. A lump may creep into a lung or breast or stomach and stretch its sinister tendrils or tissue masses and slowly cripple my loved ones. A boat may crash. A plane may crash. A car may crash. A scuba tank may be incorrectly pressurized and explode. The gas could be left on in the house and asphyxiate the entire household. The children may be abducted while playing in the middle of the cul-de-sac, the neighborhood bear may make an appearance and devour (or worse, half-devour) them all while they sleep outside on the trampoline. A stray ball may strike my mother in the temple as she watches a baseball game and kill her instantly. The dog may dart into the street and be struck down by cars, bikes, stray birds. He may drown, he may be eaten by other dogs, he may run away. He may try to wriggle through the posts on the deck or the banister and get stuck and hang himself.
Of course, these are not entirely rational fears. I quote Lemony Snicket now, looking back on the diverse ways in which I killed off my family (and dog) in my imagination:
"There are two kinds of fears: rational and irrational- or, in simpler terms, fears that make sense and fears that don't. For instance, the Baudelaire orphans have a fear of Count Olaf, which makes perfect sense, because he is an evil man who wants to destroy them. But if they were afraid of lemon meringue pie, this would be an irrational fear, because lemon meringue pie is delicious and would never hurt a soul. Being afraid of a monster under the bed is perfectly rational, because there may in fact be a monster under your bed at any time, ready to eat you all up, but a fear of realtors is an irrational fear. Realtors, as I'm sure you know, are people who assist in the buying and selling of houses. Besides occasionally wearing an ugly yellow coat, the worst a realtor can do to you is show you a house that you find ugly, so it is completely irrational to be terrified of them."
But death is no realtor. Death has seemed to me to be the ultimate sentence of loneliness. I hate being apart. Each time I leave the driveway after Christmas, or each time I hug my family goodbye and the airport, or each time I wave them down my own driveway, I am struck by an ill pang of emptiness. I know I'll see them again, but I detest knowing that it can't be now, that we can't always be as we just were. I hate knowing that in the meantime we'll all change, that we'll have jokes we want to tell, that we'll have ideas we want to express, that we'll have food and games and music and experiences that we want to share but can't.
So death has been, to me, an ache that is simply unactivated. It's always there, and sometimes if I worry hard enough about it, I feel the horrific loneliness of it. I think of not being able to be how I am now, just a phone call, a car trip, a plane ride away from those who are dearest to me.
Yet, I have had an experience which has lightened the burden of death for me. This is, in part, because I have seen the fresh swell of affection which may follow such a parting.
On Friday I had the chance to go to Katie's funeral. It was a very different experience from sitting together in the hospital room. Where there was raw and immediate emotion in the first experience, the second gave more planned space for these feelings. Though the suddenness had largely faded, the tenderness of this gathering was no less present.
One thing I noticed in Katie was how much like us she looked, something which has been harder to see with her failing health. She has Ford features - her nose and pursed lips looked so much like the others standing round the room. But while her lips were pursed in that final peace, ours were closed in quiet memory.
Watching the lines of people come to greet our grandparents, I realized how touching Katie's life had been. One of the visitors Katie knew from her activity with the special needs community brought her a diet coke. She couldn't drink it, the visitor knew, but Katie would like it. After the viewing, Katie's visitors filed in, some solemn, some sweetly irreverent. We remembered together, from talks given and words read, that Katie had chosen this life. I do not know the physical, emotional, and mental suffering Katie went through, but I am touched to know that she wanted her family to live richer lives for it.
Katie's influence is deep and far-reaching. I was not immediately close to Katie, but her sacrifice is a burning motivation to me. Sacrifices become easier when I see how little mine are. There are things that I have given up, things I do give up, and things still to give up, that will become blessings because of their loss. There are moments of dissatisfaction and disappointment, moments of grief and heavy sorrow that I might not immediately recognize as joy, but this has thrown a new perspective on suffering and sacrifice.
Jon recently wrote in his journal about making use of our sorrow to help others. I have connected with this thought: we ought to use our pangs as moments of clarity - clarity between ourselves and other sufferers. If we live in those moments as observers, "so this is how sorrow feels" instead of sufferers ourselves, our suffering becomes less acute. I am sure Katie felt this - I am sure she was comforted to know that this suffering was not only enlightening for her, but it gave her family the chance to make sacrifices and suffer. This may seem a morbid transformation - immense pain seen as a lucky chance. But anyone who has served the sufferer, or who has been the object of love and service, knows that this is how lives and bonds are built. Katie knew this, and that's why she chose the life she lived.
So when death comes, I know it will still jarr me. I will still feel moments of loneliness, aches for my own memories, and perhaps long gulps of pure unblemished sadness. But these moments will elevate. Though I don't look for sorrow, I know such moments will seal me to others in a way that a life free of sorrow never could. After death, after we all end up (crudely put) underneath sheets, when we are all together again, we will think grateful thoughts for those who suffered with us and for us. I can only imagine the unfettered reverence and gratitude we will feel for that saving sacrifice, the greatest sacrifice. In that, the gloom of death seems so thin. Coupled with the comfort that comes from knowing that our next reunion is simply postponed, I hope I will remember that sorrow sanctifies, and that empathy is the most beautiful elevation.