Death

I have recently grown to despise death.  Since you all know me well, you know that I have oscillated between being very emotionally expressive in my youth to increasingly emotionally stilted only to return to a much healthier place lately.  The catalyst for the recent change was my grandfather, Leslie Durant, passing December 14, 2004.  I simply cannot get over it.  I miss him all the time.  There appears to be no honor great enough to offer him, so I continue my Sisyphus-esque task, heaping small tribute upon small tribute, trying to create something worthy of him.

In the process, I have become profoundly sensitive to others' pain concerning death.  I cried for nearly half an hour listening to Dan Savage tell the story of his mother's passing on This American Life.  Only this morning, a NPR correspondent's tribute to her late father had me in tears getting out of the car.  The pain of losing someone to death is incomparable and universal.

And it's not so much the loss of immediate, corporeal access to loved-ones that is so gut-wrenchingly agonizing about death.  It is how pathetically most of us die.   Most of us don't go out in a blaze of glory.  We slowly slip away.  Actually, our faculties slowly abandon us.  We return to dust while we are yet living.  We have to sit patiently and watch it happen to ourselves.  The commentator this morning spoke of congratulating her father during his final years for attempting the herculean tasks of getting out of bed each morning, after he had slowly lost first the ability to speak, then hear, then walk over the previous several years.

God have mercy.  Lord have mercy.  Selah.


My heart is pricked, I hope permanently, at the thought of death.  The cruelty of its slow, universal approach.  The lasting pain of its wake.  God give us peace.  Selah.

Several hours after I wrote this, one of my favorite authors, Jose Saramago, died today.  The Gospel according to Jesus Christ is a fantastic book.  Blindness is his most popular and award-winning masterpiece.