Month: October 2017

Afraid to live Afraid to die

Posted on by je_suis_julie

Fear: noun; a distressed emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, or pain.

I suppose fear is a result of death, and that of sin. As expected, these days I am depleted by the fear of death more than ever before. I use to think about death in a good way. It was my ultimate outcome, a sign of a job well done, the end of the race.

Now it scares me.

I fear losing another close friend. I fear dying when my time comes. How will it feel to leave my body, this vessel I call home, and to experience a state of bodilessness.

My fear extends beyond death. I’m now afraid to live. Afraid of making memories without him. Afraid of doing things we used to do together. Afraid of growing older than him, for he was always a year ahead of me. Afraid of stepping into new chapters of life and not being able to tell him about them. And most of all, afraid of forgetting things we did together.

When someone dies, memories are all that remain. Photographs hardly do them justice. But what of when I forget the sound of his voice, the way he walked, the expressions he made?

I was at first comforted by the thought of seeing him again; heaven seemed all the more near. But as one morning without Johnny in this world becomes a few dozen, I search in vain for that comfort?

I remember a famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” 

Last week I didn’t want to be. But with each new morning in this sad chapter of life I realize that Someone wants me to be. And as long as I am here, ’till the day I get to see Johnny again, I will carry out the tasks my Father has asked of me.

As I start a new week I pray these words from the Psalms, “Restore to me the joy of your salvation.”

The Death of a Friend & the Birth of a Nephew

Posted on by je_suis_julie

Hospitals. Nobody likes them. I hadn’t stepped foot in a hospital for eight months. And then I made two trips within a week. One for the death of a friend and another for the birth of a nephew.

Because the two incidents happened so close together, Johnny’s death and Gabe’s birth, my emotions tend to overlap. I see my sister with her baby, that baby who grew inside her for nine months, that human soul who I just thought of as a swollen stomach for weeks on end. And it scares me. My mind tries to comprehend how this works.

How is a human soul born?

How does a human soul die?

But wait, it doesn’t die. For it was John’s body that died, not his soul. That’s what they tell me.

At his funeral . . . that wretched day when I sobbed on the porch, mortified at the thought of seeing his body.

At his funeral . . . that awful day when we drove for an hour to find the place to rest his body.

At his funeral . . . his friend spoke. I didn’t know the man. It was a friend from his years when I was in college. The man was preaching a sort of funeral sermon, explaining the eternal life John’s soul was granted in Heaven. John’s soul, not his body, his soul. Like the soul in little Gabe that began when he was born.

The man at the podium loudly proclaimed into the microphone, “JOHN IS NOT DEAD.” Silence followed. Someone in the audience murmured an almost laugh. It was lunacy to say such a thing at a funeral, with the body of our friend resting in a closed wooden box just a few feet away.  I mean, really? Can you imagine what those words did to everyone? 

The words haunt me like a strange shadow, breathing into my ear, those words I so very much wanted to hear the night it happened. But no, I heard in fact the opposite.

John is dead. Despite the words that echoed hollowly through the sanctuary, despite the fact his soul lives on, despite the life God’s given him in heaven, John is dead. John died.

Three weeks from the day his life was taken, I still tremble at the thought. I still wish it was all a dream and I’d wake up wondering how someone so close to me could actually die. How could I go on when that person — who was a part of me and I of them — was removed from my life?

But no.

Three weeks have come and gone and I haven’t woken from this bewildering nightmare. Dreams don’t make sense in the moment but still we try to figure out how to keep going, or we come to a point when nothing about the dream is fathomable and we simply wake up.

There is no waking up after a death. There is simply the shock, and then the grief, and then something they call coping. Trying. Attempting. Figuring out what to do.

“I don’t know what to do.” I breathed these words into the dark air outside the hospital. We hugged, his best friend and I, in the eerie realization that it was just the two of us, and that Johnny, though inside the hospital, was no longer there.

________________

I hold my nephew in my hands. This doesn’t feel real. How can my sister have a baby? I know it’s so simple. My mom had ten of these. But my brain for some reason cannot admit the change life brings. First she was pregnant, then he was born. First Johnny was here — we were texting hours before it happened — then he was gone.

Death is not a dream. Death is reality.