Her cry shatters morning.
“I’m not going to die! I’m not!”
She’s wild. From the kitchen I can hear her, hear that wild strangling in her voice, her frantic struggle. I tighten inside, choke a bit too. She’s afraid of dying, and I brace myself for what I know will come, what’s come again and again.
The floor underneath shakes with her fear.
I look up from sink full of dishes. She’s racing now towards me, strands of hair caught on cheeks of wet pain, trying to escape terror that chases.
She grabs my legs, wraps herself around. I can feel her chest heaving. Her fingers dig, gripping, holding on.
“I’m not going to die! Tell him I’m not!”
I dry my hands on a dishtowel.
Malakai calls from his bedroom somewhere, “Yes, you are, Shalom! You are going to die! We’re all going to die.”
We’ve been here before; he’s said this before. A well-meaning six-year-old, Malakai’s a misguided big brother sharing a rather impoverished version of the gospel with his three-year-old sister: “Have you made Jesus your Savior, Shalom? Because some day you’re going to die.”
She only hears she’s going to die.
She clings tighter, sobs quietly into my leg. “Tell him I’m not doing to die, Mama.”
I was a gangly eight-year-old with a double cow-lick, just like all who had Chamber’s blood. The windowsill of the upstairs gable’s dormer leaned open and I leaned onto the windowsill and out into that Indian summer dusk in late September. The gnarly fingers of the apple tree reached up to touch me and high blue sky when that Chamber’s blood thickened cold: For the first time in my life, standing there touching sky, I realized I was someday going to die. Guaranteed.
One day no one would ever see through these eyes again. Be in this body of warm life. Think any of these thoughts in this place of skin and bone and blood again. Once I wasn’t yet here, and someday I just wouldn’t be here. The lid would close tight and they’d lower me too into earth.
“The fear of death haunts the human… like nothing else,” writes Ernest Becker in the Pulitzer prize-winning, Denial of Death. I understand that. “It is the mainspring of human activity.”
Mortality hunts and we live fleeing.
My Dad understands that.
I once sat with him in a pick-up truck late at night, parked out under hem of a Manitoba Maple’s spreading skirt, us back from somewhere and not wanting to leave the gleam of a billion stars and dance of night.
We sat still, looking up and not speaking, it so big out there and us so small.
“The thought of them no longer being… the thought makes me insane.” His rough voice quaked. I didn’t look over at him. A man needs privacy when he bears a piece of his wild soul.
What kind of God knows and names and remembers every one of the million shimmers up there in inky black? And were my grandparents the last outpost in Dad’s grapple with mortality? If they fell, falling stars…. I could almost hear his heart pounding. The dark dipped away endlessly.
What song does the world sing when your voice is forever silenced?
Does the wind still murmur through leaves of silver birch at pond’s edge though you never walk that way again?
Who plants the early peas in March?
Does sun kindle a grey sky into a dawn inferno though you no longer rise?
I sat awake in the dark, filling lungs, thinking of Grandpa’s every breath and the one that soon would never come, the Milky Way whirling around us both.
Four times in three weeks, I left a trio of small children in the barn with Farmer Husband, lingered in kiss with them all…. then took nursing babe, Bible and fervent prayers the three hour trip to Grandpa’s side. He didn’t have Jesus. He’d come through a war. He said he didn’t need any life-crutch. I had to go, in case he wanted any death-hope. It wasn’t too late.
He mumbled sounds and I prayed and once a string of moans found themselves words, I love you words, and more than once I strung together whispers, that Jesus loves you too. And my father never came because death can be a terrifying thing.
Dad rarely speaks of them, of my grandfather who died of Creutzfeld Jacob’s disease just as the apple trees were blooming late that spring, my grandmother who died of a broken heart six months later while the snow fell softly and the radio played, “I’ll be home for Christmas.”
“Well, I’m not going to die.” His jaw sets square, dark eyes punctuating the decision. If steely determination could upend the inescapable, Dad’s could.
I look into him, see all that terror masked in bravado. I can’t gather Dad up, rock that fear away, soundless cry that shatters peace. He’s scared to death of death. He’s not alone; there’s all of us, we “who through fear of death, were subject to lifelong slavery” (Hebrews 2:15 ESV).
A Sunday not so long ago, we sat in that country church, bowed our heads, and prayed pounding prayers for Bert Struyk with brain tumor tentacles crushing tight, for frail framed but hardy-spirited Jean Schneider, cancer lurking in bowels, for Donna Weber, her last wearying chemotherapy behind her, radiation waiting ahead. We bowed and I looked up.
Looked up at us all bowed there, hunched Laverne Bramhill and delicate Ruth Shore, both silver crowned. Freckled Charlie Hiemstra with his guitar for special music, and young Derek Van den Boogaard with bow and fiddle. Jean’s daughter’s wiping away the spilling grief.
It’s guaranteed. We pray for them, but it’s not just them, Bert or Jean or Donna. It’s all of us. We are each conclusively terminal. Denial’s always an option but I look into the faces of men, women, children lowered here and know. We’re praying for the ends that will be each of ours too.
Nine-thirty that Monday morning, Bert Struyk died.
“Will I die, Mama? Will I?”
Shalom’s red-face face turns up to mine. Blue eyes swim in tears.
“Your body is like a tent, Shalom.” I caress her arm. “See? What I’m touching, this is just your tent. The real you is deep inside, your soul, the part of your that feels and loves and makes your Shalom!”
She leans against me. I can’t imagine her cold, motionless, here so alive. I stroke her hair. “Your body tent will die. Everyone’s body tent dies.”
She finds my eyes again.
“But you, the soul-you on the inside, that will never, ever die, Shalom. God made our souls to live forever and ever.“
I smile, kiss the tip of her nose.
She’s studying me. I can almost see the neurons and synapses processing souls and tents and what dies and what doesn’t.
Then she shakes her head, rejecting the notion of no more.
“I’ll just stay close to Daddy. Then I’ll be safe.”
It’s what we’ve said near busy streets, large parking lots, crowded venues. Don’t wander off, you could get hurt; stay close to Daddy and you’ll be safe.
And here too, near the pit of mortality and what that means for fragile humanity, us who are but a vapor, withering grass, she remembers.
I pull this little frame of worry close, kiss a smile into her ragamuffin mop of curls.
Yes, Child, that’s right, always right. Close to Abba Daddy, we’re safe, all safe.
From death and its sting too.
Since the children have flesh and blood,
he too shared in their humanityso that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slaveryby their fear of death.
Abba Daddy, we’re safe, close to you, our Father. Because You sent Your son.
Because of Him we’re free — wildly free — from “cowering through life, scared to death of death.”
More: The Day my Mother-in-Law Died
A repost from the archives…
Photos: life dried out, beauty tucked in a wooden box
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