I touch him before sleeping.
In the dark at day’s end, I draw close, lay head on his chest, press ear to the soft sounds of life swooshing through him. His heartbeat reverberates through me, and we breathe, one, rising and falling.
The thought always comes, always jars: someday this won’t be. Someday…. one day …. too-soon day, one of us will lie cold. One heart will stop. And the other pump on alone, wild with grief.
How can half a heart survive? My fingertips trace along his chest and our warmth bleeds together. Dare death divide one skin?
Then it comes too, us lying here close, him sleeping, me listening to the beat of now: memories of a day of dividing, skins separating.
She left my body in the dark of June, the alfalfa heavy and ready for cutting under spherical moon. And with each tightening and shortening of the uterine muscle, the largest muscle in the body of a woman, the delivering muscle, I had swayed myself through the contracting waves with murmured refrain, “Every one is one closer.”
So life births, skins separating. And life dies, skins separating. Every one is one closer. Like steady contractions releasing babe from womb confines, each day we’re one day closer to releasing from earth confines. Nine months of quiet, dark gestation, then a body pushing through the canal to life. Ninety years of living, less, then a body pushing through the dark to light.
There is time to be born and a time to die.
I lay the palm of my hand on the warmth of his chest. The thought hurts, but might not skin separating be the beautiful release?
I know it, in the cells and marrow and recesses. Don’t I weary, often, of this body of death? This skin that wraps me persistently sins, a pocking, oozing pain rash I can’t scratch away. I’m ill with failures and wrongs and self. I ache for healing of my humanity.
And death, because of His, is deliverance.
“View death not as the disease that permanently spoils life, but rather as the only cure to the disease of life,” writes Philip Yancey. “For sin has permanently stained all life, and only through death — Christ’s death and our own – can we realize a cured, sinless state.”
Life as the disease. Death, when He calls, as the cure. Christ rebirthing us into the real reality.
Could we not then separate?
Four hundred years ago, John Donne wrote truth that upends our death terror:
“That voice that I must die now, is not the voice of a judge that speaks by way of condemnation, but of a physician that presents health.”
I touch him before sleeping, before our healing comes.
It Is Not Death to Die
It is not death to die
To leave this weary road
And join the saints who dwell on high
Who’ve found their home with God
It is not death to close
The eyes long dimmed by tears
And wake in joy before Your throne
Delivered from our fears
O Jesus, conquering the grave
Your precious blood has power to save
Those who trust in You
Will in Your mercy find
That it is not death to die
It is not death to fling
Aside this earthly dust
And rise with strong and noble wing
To live among the just
It is not death to hear
The key unlock the door
That sets us free from mortal years
To praise You evermore
O Jesus, conquering the grave
Your precious blood has power to save
Those who trust in You
Will in Your mercy find
That it is not death to die
Original Words by Henri Malan (1787-1864).
Translated by George Bethune (1847).
Music, Chorus and Alternate Words by Bob Kauflin.© 2008 Sovereign Grace Praise (BMI).
Listen to Clip here
Part of a series this week on death and dying –Part One: Fear of Dying
(HT: kind Monica)
Photo: dried petals pressed close in death
