Death's Shadow

An aged woman possesses grey and tangled hairs of wisdom, finely etched creases and imperfectly mapped lines of experience, and eyes that see less of what is tangible and more of what is perceptible. 

I am not that woman, not yet, but she does breathe inside of me. 

The older I get, the more death’s shadow crosses my path. Others get sick. Others have diseases for which there is no cure. I don’t understand how it is that some get sick, and others are spared. It confounds me. When someone is diagnosed, I wonder, Why them? As others die, I attend celebrations for their life, and I look around, Who is next? Will it be one of us? 

I know, I am creeping you out with my morbid thoughts, but death has to serve a purpose for the living. 

A woman that Ward and I have known for a long time went into hospice this week after attempts to resect and subdue a fast growing tumour in her brain, were not successful.  

Another friend of mine, lost an uncle to lung cancer.  

Both, in their sixties.

In these moments, we have no choice but to pause and think about life—the precursor to death. We celebrate the aspects of their lives that made us joyful, and the moments that signified their success, uniqueness and worthiness. However, the loss mirrors our own mortality, and that of those who are closest to us. We pull our loved ones near, or berate ourselves for not being able to. 

Slogans remind us: 

“Carpe Diem (Seize the day)”,

“Live life to the fullest”

“Live—Laugh—Love” 

“You only live once”. 

While sitting in thoughtful memory of someone who has recently died, it seems not only possible but imperative that we change our wicked ways. However, the sun lazily melts the shadow of death, just as it lifts the fog from the coastal shoreline. With imperceptible amnesia, we return to our lives. 

But memories, with fleeting insistence, sink us in reality. Thoughts of those diagnosed, undergoing treatment, dying, or already gone, appear suddenly—like hiccups. With grievous sadness, we say goodbye to the person that we knew and loved, and remember the shape of them in our lives. And we learn, as the old woman knew in her bones, that we are changed people for the experience of knowing others. 

***

The Ship

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean.  She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch until at last she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other. 

Then someone at my side says, “There she goes!”

Gone where? 

Gone from my sight ... that is all. 

She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination.  Her diminished size is in me, not in her. 

And just at the moment when someone at my side says, “There she goes!” there are other eyes watching her coming, and their voices ready to take up the glad shouts “Here she comes!”

This is how I see and understand death.

Henry van Dyke (1852 - 1933)