Confronting Death: One Year Later
Today is the one year anniversary (if you can even call it that) of my brothers death. I know how to mourn. I know how to grieve. Over the past few years that has been my life. Grief and suffering has been my daily bread. It was a sink or swim scenario. How do you live through the first anniversary of your only brothers death though?
Are supposed to cry? Expected to mourn? Should you write or pray? Should you distract yourself with games and hobbies or spend time grieving with loved ones? Do you take the day off or do you continue to work?
How do you find the answers for questions such as these on days such as today? After all, for much of the year the event, the conclusion of his life, his death, still doesn’t feel real. I feel he is like an old friend I need to catch up with. It feels like he just entered basic training again. Oh how many things I have to catch him up on!
I’m engaged! I have played so many new video games. So many new board games, and oh, what a year for sports.. but alas, he’s not there. He’s not some distant friend who’s been off the grid. He’s gone.
So I ask myself again, and I ask you, what are we to do on days like these? When life feels empty. When you have an anniversary you wish never occurred. When death feels ever so present, so heavy and weighty. What do you do?
The internet’s answers to these questions seems mostly hollow, empty, and full of platitudes. John Donne writes in his Sonnet X that Death Be Not Proud, but today I feel like death might be beating it’s chest…
C.S. Lewis after the first few weeks of his wife’s passing wrote about grief and said this “I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontier post across it. So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs.”
He understands my feelings well. Many things we once enjoyed together now often feel so empty. Many things I once deemed important now feel irrelevant. What once was roads of joy have now become roundabouts that only have one exit, perpetually spitting you back out the way you came.
In my time since my brothers passing, I have found there to be two answers to death. Two answers to the grief that plagues us all at some point in our lives if we allow ourselves to feel it. We can sit idly by and let grief and death have it’s way with us like a small boy trapped in a whirlpool or a strong ocean current. Moved to our knees by every memory and thought of our loved one.
Unable to pick up our broken pieces and live. Unable to build up our faith. Our spiritual faith, but also our faith in ourselves, maybe our faith that we could ever love again. Not because we are unable to love, no, because we are afraid to ever be hurt again.
The other answer is to move. Not to move away and forget. Not to move and be distracted. No, your grief can be just as real, and just as strong, but you choose to continue living. Death is hell. It is destructive and it is Satan’s strongest instrument. But it does not have to be the end of your life too. You can choose to live, to find joy again, to laugh and love.
Yes, you will never be the same, but you can still live. Sometimes the path you choose will fluctuate and move, but you alone must make the choice of if this grief will keep you from living, or if it will simply be a reminder that life is short, so it is best to live it to the fullest while you can.
But the final answer to help us all understand death if you can swallow it is this, that death is nothing but one of the final phases of every relationship. Every dance must end. Every road must come to a stop. Everything that ever was, must cease to be. So to every relationship must have its last goodbye.
C.S. Lewis says this about how relationship with his recently passed wife. “But it could also mean ‘This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course it would not be prolonged.’ As if God said, ‘Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next.’ When you have learned to do quadratics and enjoy doing them you will not be set them much longer. The teacher moves you on”
Lewis wonders if death, that grieving, that painful despair that comes with losing someone you loved, is apart of the program. Apart of the “dance”, and the ritual of love. What if that final goodbye is the final step of the relationship?
Finally he writes “And then one or other dies. And we think of this as love cut short; like a dance stopped in mid-career or a flower with its head unluckily snapped off — something truncated and therefore, lacking its due shape. I wonder. If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer. It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure.”
How does it change our view of our lost loved one to understand this is the natural process as long as we are of this world? What does it change to understand death and bereavement as one last dance with our dearly beloved?
But I reckon death is not the final act. No, much like the last supper was not truly the last supper, our last goodbye is not really our last goodbye. It is our last goodbye here, on this earth yes. But Jesus has promised he is preparing a place for us. A place where say hello, and never again say goodbye. A place where our loved ones of the past, present, and future will all reside. A place of perfect harmony and of glorious celebration.
Yes, death is immensely difficult. But what if we chose to not treat it as the end, but a reminder of the beginning of eternity. As Jesus said, “ I tell you, I will not drink from this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”
And as we say every time we take communion, “do this in remembrance of me.” So as truly as the sun rises day by day and sets night by night, my brother is passed and I see him no longer, but every day I wake I live in remembrance of him. Truly as believers we must sing “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”
Let us remember in these difficult times some of the words of Bonhoeffer on death. No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence.
Whether we are young or old makes no difference. What are twenty or thirty or fifty years in the sight of God? And which of us knows how near he or she may already be to the goal? That life only really begins when it ends here on earth, that all that is here is only the prologue before the curtain goes up — that is for young and old alike to think about. Why are we so afraid when we think about death? ….Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God’s Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. Death is mild, death is sweet and gentle; it beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that it is the gateway to our homeland, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace.
How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether, in our human fear and anguish we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly, blessed event in the world?
Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.”
Finally, as we traverse this current life of death and suffering together, let us all exclaim with Bonhoeffer when he writes “The night is not yet over, but already the dawn is breaking.
