On Death

To begin with, I am obsessed with death. Ask anyone who knows me. Even as I type this, I am listening to my "Funeral Music" playlist in iTunes, which consists of several Requiems (in the old days, wealthy people would commission famous composers, like Brahms and Mozart, to write music for their funerals), as well as a couple of compilations, "In Memoriam", and "Music To Die For", both available in iTunes, I believe. When Betsy saw my "Funeral" playlist on my iPod, she declared it sick and wrong. I disagree. The Requiem is my favorite genre of music. Even though I don't understand a word of Latin (a shortcoming I hope to remedy someday), it still reminds me of the brevity of life, and transports me to glorious thoughts of eternity, that great expanse of time spent after the funeral.

But this week I did not need my funeral music to remind me of the brevity of life. Because a week ago this very hour, my brother-in-law, that is, my wife's brother, David, passed from this life at the age of 55, finally succumbing to a lung infection that he had been battling for nearly three months.

I don't know about you, but when I hear the word "infection", I don't get alarmed, because I think that nowadays, the doctors can just give him an antibiotic and the infection will go away, and he will be home soon. But even today there are infections for which there is no known antibiotic. So the first hard lesson I learn here (which I already knew, but which was driven home with crystal clarity), is that man is not the measure of all things. We don't "know it all" yet, we have not conquered nature yet, and never will, precisely because man is not the measure of all things.

But rather than run down that road of secular humanist philosophy (perhaps another time), I would like to get back to David. The way Marcia describes him, is that he was a man of simple pleasures. Aquiring money and things meant nothing to him, as long as he could spend time with the people he loved, doing the things he loved, mainly hunting and fishing, among other things.

But what I will remember most about David is how much he loved his neices - that would be my daughters Betsy and Kacie, and their cousin Courtney, who is two weeks Betsy's senior. I still remember the Christmas where he gave each of them their first little red wagon. But he was more than just an aloof gift-giving uncle. Whereas we would be content to send the kids down to the basement so we could talk, David would love to spend time with them, giving them "horsey back rides", or chasing them all over the house and jumping out from behind a door to make them scream. As Betsy said at the memorial service, "at family gatherings, we would always look for David's truck to pull up, because we knew it would be a really boring time otherwise." A sad but true commentary on the rest of us.

Another thing that ran through my mind this week, was that my dad was a year younger than David, or 54, when he died in 1984. But it does not fit logically in my mind that he was younger than David when he died. Maybe because he was my dad, and dads always seem older. I will resist the temptation to blog on my dad here, or I will be up all night. Definitely a topic for a future blog, but don't hold your breath. That will be a tough one.

But what it did bring home to me, again, is the brevity of life. David was 55. My dad was 54. My grandfather and his twin brother were 42 when they died of heart attacks within 5 minutes of each other in 1942 in Cambridge, after a Boy Scout meeting (they were leaders, not extremely slow scouts). And myself? I am 49, and I could be gone by the time you read this. But as much as I talk big about being the "next to go", I really don't expect to be gone by the time you read this.

This is not unique to me. It goes by the name of "the illusion of immortality", and it is at work in each and every one of us. It is neither good nor bad, IMHO, but just a fact of life. It is how the human mind works. By this I mean, we all know that we will die someday, but very few if any of us wake up in the morning thinking this will be the day. We all live our lives in practical terms as if we will be here tomorrow. And guess what, most of the time you will be right, but there will come a day for each of us when that assumption will prove false. Are you ready for that day? Indeed, are you looking forward to that day? Or is it more for you like the David Crowder song, "Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven, But Nobody Wants to Die"?

I have recently read two books on the topic of heaven. The first is simply titled "Heaven" by Randy Alcorn. This is the most exhaustive study on heaven, and what it will be like, that I have ever read. Highly recommended. And the second, along the same lines, but much shorter, is a book titled "The Slumber of Christianity: Awakening a Passion for Heaven on Earth" by Ted Dekker. Both books have the same aim, to awaken Christians to thinking past this life to what eternity in the New Heaven and the New Earth will be like, and living this life as if you really believe it will happen. And lest you think Randy Alcorn might be annoyed with Ted Dekker for stealing his material, it is quite the contrary. Randy Alcorn wrote the forward to Ted Dekker's book. They are on the same page.

So did these books change my life? Temporarily. Here I sit now, worrying about all the things that anyone would worry about who believes that this life is all there is. This very moment I am on call, fretting that the phone might ring. I am fretting about work next week, and getting through the Sarbanes-Oxley audit, just as if it were auditors that rule the world for all time and eternity (sorry, auditors). And as much stress as my job causes me on a weekly basis, I am fretting about losing said job within the year. Don't ask me to explain that logical contradiction.

In short, I think way too much about tomorrow, and very little about eternity. Am I alone in that? I am guessing not. But that doesn't make it right. I could go on, but I will leave you with a quote from C.S. Lewis, only because I could stay up all night and not come up with anything 1/100th as brilliant as this:

"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same."

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 120.