A number of years ago, a friend was dying. She had been cryptic about the cancer diagnosis. It’s hard to know what to do. I wasn’t mad; she wasn’t sharing. But I was devastated.
I ran into one of her children. A full-grown adult, though he wasn’t when I had first met him. I was barely an adult myself then. I fell apart in his presence. And he, who was losing his mother, told me with a tender, authoritative faith: We are not meant to be here forever.
That’s a death I’ve never gotten over. And since then, there have been more. I finally, late last year, surrendered to a kind of death fatigue. It was a surrender not in the trusting-God kind of way, but it was giving up.
The problem with giving up is: It doesn’t reverence the life we each have been given, and the gift of interacting with others in beautiful ways, all creations in the same position.
Life is to be celebrated. The mistakes and challenges and hardships — all of it — they make it all the richer. They mean that we have taken life seriously and struggled to make it beautiful for God, even when we monumentally screw up, because that’s how He made us — in beauty, for beauty.
Now whenever a death comes, I pray for the grace to be grateful.