I don't know what happened.
I went to bed feeling tired, but fine. I woke up stiff, headachey, unable to breathe and even less able to walk a straight line. I leaned on the wall while getting ready, because the floor kept tilting and weaving.
I went to work for a while, then gave it up and came home. Feeling sick like this brings me face to face with things like..... well.... mortality. Combined with last night's news, and I'm thinking about one thing..... death.
Two people died last night. Friends of a friend. It's not supposed to affect me because I don't know them, but I can't help it. Two girls died last night in Saskatchewan, but thousands of other people died, all over the world, no less important, no less beautiful, no more expendable. All of a sudden I'm aware of death all around me.
It stalks me at every step. It feels unnatural. Humanity wasn't created to die. I used to think I'd like to die, I thought that I'd welcome the day I could leave this tired earth..... at a young age I prayed for death on a regular basis, but as I get older I know this..... Death is not my friend.
It's my belief that life as we know it is in fact death, working it's slow poison in our lives. If it can't get us through some tragic means, it will wear us down until we succumb to it in old age. But life, life abundant waits beyond, and in fact we are not born to die, but rather we die to live. I yearn for the day I pass into life .... but Death is not my friend.
It strikes with cruelty and malice, and there is no tale of death that doesn't seem to me to be tragic and terrible, despite the life that comes afterward. It fills the world with pain and rot, and as much as I long to see heaven, I will fight death till my last breath.
I remember walking home as a child, up a hill on a gravel road. I must have been about 7. There on the shoulder of the road lay a gopher. Dead. Mouth open, stomach bloated. Legs splayed stiffly in the afternoon sun. I began to cry. I picked up the gopher and took him home, buried him in the pet cemetery beside Runty the Rabbit. I mean, why can't it live? It's not missing any parts. If I fixed it, would it get up and run away? What is missing from this animal, that it can't be repaired and recharged and sent on it's way? The absence of God given life smells like rotting flesh, and I have always hated that smell. It's an obscene thing, an intruder on this planet which was meant to be paradise, and I have no grid, we have no grid with which to process that which we were never meant to experience.
Which is perhaps why we never really know what to say, what to do, how to respond.
I can't help but think of what I've read about refugees in other countries, children who are orphaned and alone, people who hid amongst the corpses of their loved ones until death went on it's way. You see them on TV, their faces are sad stones, their eyes are well acquainted with death. Do they accept it? Do they attribute it to the will of God? Do they know that death is an unwelcome vagabond we will soon be rid of?
One thing they do know.... that the worst cruelty of death is not that it takes the ones we love, but rather that it leaves us behind.
I went to bed feeling tired, but fine. I woke up stiff, headachey, unable to breathe and even less able to walk a straight line. I leaned on the wall while getting ready, because the floor kept tilting and weaving.
I went to work for a while, then gave it up and came home. Feeling sick like this brings me face to face with things like..... well.... mortality. Combined with last night's news, and I'm thinking about one thing..... death.
Two people died last night. Friends of a friend. It's not supposed to affect me because I don't know them, but I can't help it. Two girls died last night in Saskatchewan, but thousands of other people died, all over the world, no less important, no less beautiful, no more expendable. All of a sudden I'm aware of death all around me.
It stalks me at every step. It feels unnatural. Humanity wasn't created to die. I used to think I'd like to die, I thought that I'd welcome the day I could leave this tired earth..... at a young age I prayed for death on a regular basis, but as I get older I know this..... Death is not my friend.
It's my belief that life as we know it is in fact death, working it's slow poison in our lives. If it can't get us through some tragic means, it will wear us down until we succumb to it in old age. But life, life abundant waits beyond, and in fact we are not born to die, but rather we die to live. I yearn for the day I pass into life .... but Death is not my friend.
It strikes with cruelty and malice, and there is no tale of death that doesn't seem to me to be tragic and terrible, despite the life that comes afterward. It fills the world with pain and rot, and as much as I long to see heaven, I will fight death till my last breath.
I remember walking home as a child, up a hill on a gravel road. I must have been about 7. There on the shoulder of the road lay a gopher. Dead. Mouth open, stomach bloated. Legs splayed stiffly in the afternoon sun. I began to cry. I picked up the gopher and took him home, buried him in the pet cemetery beside Runty the Rabbit. I mean, why can't it live? It's not missing any parts. If I fixed it, would it get up and run away? What is missing from this animal, that it can't be repaired and recharged and sent on it's way? The absence of God given life smells like rotting flesh, and I have always hated that smell. It's an obscene thing, an intruder on this planet which was meant to be paradise, and I have no grid, we have no grid with which to process that which we were never meant to experience.
Which is perhaps why we never really know what to say, what to do, how to respond.
I can't help but think of what I've read about refugees in other countries, children who are orphaned and alone, people who hid amongst the corpses of their loved ones until death went on it's way. You see them on TV, their faces are sad stones, their eyes are well acquainted with death. Do they accept it? Do they attribute it to the will of God? Do they know that death is an unwelcome vagabond we will soon be rid of?
One thing they do know.... that the worst cruelty of death is not that it takes the ones we love, but rather that it leaves us behind.
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