Melodramatic, but true. I've been slipping noticeably for the past week. I spend a longer stretch each day feeling as though I have just woken up, and even the simplest actions are accomplished through a fog of weariness. I drift through the day like a ship searching for port. The captain rouses from his slumber to cry "Weigh anchor!", but by the time the deck hands have laid sluggishly to their tasks, the ship has gone adrift again and no harbor has been secured.
Death should never come skulking, in the piece-by-piece manner of crows picking carrion apart on the highway. Not when you're still young and healthy.
Healthy is what I am -- young, healthy, and dying. I can feel it in the way my body is no longer able to warm itself. I can feel it in the way it is easier to fall asleep each night and harder to wake up each morning. I can feel it in the naps I need in the middle of the afternoon just to last until nighttime. Slowly and inexorably, my body is running down, and when the process has finished, I will go to sleep and I will die.
Close curtain, exit stage right. No applause please, there will be no encore tonight. The show has ended and the remainder of its run has been canceled.
Dying. My spirit scoffs and my mind dismisses it, but my body knows a different truth. I can feel in my very bones what is happening, feel the final corruption of my flesh slowly encroaching, hear the steady grind of my mortality growing ever louder. This is the fate that awaits us all.
This is my death, and I'm grateful for the sacred grace that lets me see it coming before its time. Five short days from now, a doctor will give me a pill. This pill will destroy the last of my cancer cells, and once they are gone, I'll be given a second chance. I'll be able to take my thyroid hormone pills again, and as a renewed vitality surges through my body, my life expectancy will swell from mere weeks into decades. In a matter of days, I'll be myself again.
But not, I hope, my old self. I hope instead that I'll be wiser. For the last two weeks, I've had the rare gift of sitting on an island, watching as its edges crumble ever-faster into the sea, and knowing that there is nothing to fear, because all soon will be as it was. How many others can say the same?
Life is a fragile thing, made of sheerest gossamer. All that it took to bring me to this point was the removal of my thyroid, an organ I never thought of before last October, the size and appearance of a used wad of tissue. Small wonder that the ancients imagined death as nothing more than an old woman cutting a skein of yarn.
I hear from time to time of others who were reminded of their own mortality, and learned to live more in the moment. They stop and smell the flowers, they watch more sunrises and they catch more sunsets.
That hasn't been my experience at all. Instead of being taken with the fertile wonders of God's creation, I have been ashamed of the barrenness of my life. I am shamed by the cemetery on my hard drive, by row after row of shallow graves filled with the tiny bodies of stories I miscarried because I have lacked the discipline to create as God intended I should.
The writer within me hears the hour of his own deadline approaching, and he cringes. The story is not ready. Give me an extension, he cries, and the writing will change to a nobler theme. The second deadline will not be squandered.
I have also been shamed by my failings as a father. I snap and growl at my daughter in frustration, and I teach her to love Dora the Explorer more than her own parents, but before she goes to bed, my daughter rushes in where I am writing to give me a kiss goodnight.
She never used to do that.
The father within me cries for mercy beneath the weight of his own Father's chastisement. Forgive me, he cries, and she will better know by my example the wonders of your love.
Most of all, I have failed as a follower of Christ. I have sworn time and again to live as he would, but each year finds me burdened with a bigger collection of movies I don't watch, more books I don't read, and more things I don't need. Each year finds me more changed by the world than the world has been changed by me.
Meanwhile friends of mine are hit by stray bullets from somebody else's culture war, the American church takes the side of the mighty, and all I do is to sit on the sidelines and say, "It isn't right," over and over again.
No one should live like that.
When I was a child, my life stretched before me, a vast shore as unending as the world, and as ripe with possibility. Now I am thirty-five, and if I am fortunate, more years remain ahead of me than lie behind me. Because of my brush with cancer, I am aware for the first time of how badly eroded that shore has become.
There are great things I have wanted for years to accomplish for God -- stories I have longed to tell; truths I have wanted to teach through my actions; and people I have yearned to touch so they might experience the awesome reconciliation that Christ brings between us and God, and between us and one another. Some tasks I have begun, but most are woefully incomplete.
Time will not wait for me to complete that work at my leisure. Beyond the crumbling desolation that for now only temporarily encroaches upon my sullied flesh, I perceive the deeper rumble of true mortality as it also draws near. When the ticks of that watch run down, there will be no second chances to finish what I was meant to do.
I am dying, and so are you. Make haste, and work while there is still light.
Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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1 comment:
Nicely written and very insightful, but ultimately depressing. I prefer to think of death as a journey to a new world, not the closing of a door. Perhaps I missed your point.
Am really enjoying this blog now that I've discovered it.
Good job.
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