Day 21 – Death is crouching – a mortician’s view

On day 21 of my "30 days left to live," I received a text message at 1:30 a.m. morning from a new friend I recently met on my last trip to West Africa.

It was a plea for prayer on behalf of his friend, with whom he graduated from high school. His friend is in a fight for his life against leukemia. They are both 23ish.

Eric reminded me in the text message he “doesn’t do the God thing.”

Yet he is vicariously asking God to move.

We humans are such funny little creatures. If only our back-door acknowledgments to God were more plainly seen by us as a stark clue to how deep our need for Him is ingrained in our very being.

In the last four weeks in almost every circle of friends and family I have death has reminded me it is always on the move. This is partly my motivation for wanting to be more conscientious of how brief our time is here, and be more deliberate in how I make choices.

Three weeks ago, a 50-year-old farmer was electrocuted, who was among my parents’ closest friends. Tim left behind his bride of 28 years, Tina, and four beautiful children who had just started families of their own.

My friend Christy called me two days ago because her uncle suddenly passed away.

A business associate I have known and worked with for years died Wednesday from cancer. I didn’t even know he was sick. I read about it in the paper.

Two days before a friend’s wedding, she called me horrified, because her fiancé’s cousin had committed suicide in a drunken rage by slashing himself over his whole body and then hanging himself. He had a three-week-old baby and a new wife.

My own uncle has only weeks, possibly days, now that the cancer has spread to his brain.

A guy about my age who I know from church delivered the message this Sunday and talked about how his wife (couldn’t have been married more than a couple of years as he’s still in his 20s) was killed in a tragic car accident.

An excellent woman of deep character and faith that I have recently been privileged to spend time with has lost her mother, son and husband within a year.

Don’t tell me there aren’t times where it is legitimate to ask, “Has God deserted me?”

But what do we do with all the loss and tragedy? When the shortness of life socks us in the gut? Has God abandoned us?

I have a friend who is a mortician. She is young, full of joy and has this authentic faith that shines. She chose this path, because she sees all the pain, the questions and the despair of people who come through the doors of the funeral home.

It is her ministry to lovingly prepare arrangements, sit quietly with families, comfort in tears and give dignity to services, answer tough questions…

She thinks there is a culture of avoiding death in America. Ignoring its realities.

Often, we are shocked in the American church when death strikes home. Our society is so filled with images of beauty, vitality, youth and health, that death seems so far removed, unnatural and inappropriate unless you are old and have had a full life.

My mortician friend tells me about how the viewings used to be in the home for several days. It was a very public event where the home was the epicenter of all the remembrances, memorials, and grieving. Children were not protected from the dead or kept away while the casket was open.

And, of course, it used to be much more common to lose a child, or die young from disease, die in childbirth…

I don’t mean to be morbid in writing about this whole subject. But focusing on death and having a clear picture of the fact we are all going to die seems almost taboo to talk about.

Obviously when we experience death of someone significant in our life, it is natural to mourn, grieve and struggle deeply.

It's interesting that so many of my friends in West Africa maintain rock-like faith in Christ, when they see nothing but death and disease all-day long. But in the land of privilege and wealth, when we lose someone, often it cripples our faith.

Perhaps we’ve just lost our healthy acknowledgment of the reality of death – how quickly we come, how quickly others go and how brief we all are.

Whether we have 30 days left or 30 years. It’s all so brief. Understanding our own brevity and insignificance can bring clarity and passion to always live life like you only have 30-days left.

Day 28 - Teach me to number my days

I went to a different church from my own this morning, and …drum roll…in keeping with the theme of 30 days to live the message happened to be "Show me, O Lord, my life's end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life.” Psa 39:4

This, for me, may be getting a little spooky at this point.

During the service, clips from the movie, The Bucket List, were used to illustrate what matters most in life – relationships with God and relationships with people. (I always find it remarkable when Hollywood swims in deep waters without a political agenda, btw.)

There are two approaches in the movie of two dying men. One pursues pleasure and the other, a deeper reason for life and restoration of relationships.

The idea of cramming in as much wild and unimaginable pleasure possible if you knew you only had a short time to live, vs. pursuit of meaningful relationships, more fulfilling things, or restoration of all you have wrecked during your life is an interesting debate. Pursuit of self? Or pursuit of others and the meaning of life?

Everyone, of course, will say the latter of the two is the more noble pursuit. How many of us though, because we don’t regularly face the fact we are dying (whether it be in 50 years or 30 days) unconsciously live for self?

On Saturday, while trying to filter my daily activities through the question, “What would I do if I only had 30 days to live?” I found myself making judgments about little things, “This person I just tied in meeting at the intersection – should I dart out to be first, because, hey – I’ve only got 30 days to live! I have to get going!” Or do I, in a sense exhale and recognize it doesn’t really matter? Wave them forward and wait two minutes longer. Ponder this may be the last time I tie someone at an intersection…

Or on the way to Kansas City, my mom told me I was tailgating someone too close. Do I stick with my usual reaction of getting really annoyed? Or do I just look at her, tell her I love her and let it go?

I decided under the 30-day scenario, she matters more than my ego. I love her deeply and why in the world would I spend my few days with her being annoyed?

So on day 28, I want the answer to be others are first in my life. When I’m not first it opens the door for others to sit deep in my heart. It creates space in my soul for God to come in and take root.

This marks the first day of the last 30 days I have to live.

July 10, 2009.

Everyday it seems like a fog of life decisions and situations and chores can be all we wake up to. And sometimes I’m so full of fear, bad habits or procrastination that I wince at choices that will open me up to pain or loss – choices that may cost me something.

So often I wait. I sit and stew in a situation when I should act.

I wait for Genie Jesus to come along and magically engineer my circumstances to where my feet are transported to that spacious and sure footing the Psalms talks about.

This week would be an excellent week for me to get my act together, clear my head and focus on things that matter, because I am picking up my daughter and her sister in Kansas City. They are spending a week with my family and I for the first time.

Almost nine years ago, I placed my three-day-old newborn for adoption with a wonderful family I chose from out of state.

(I was young, in a bad relationship, had no education and no way to support a child.)

I was totally unprepared for how gut retching that choice would be. For three years I stayed mostly in a fog of grief over a motherhood no one really credited (including myself) as legitimate.

(Well, there were a few. But for the most part if you want to create a socially awkward moment in a crowded room, throw out the fact you’re a birth mother and watch all the little people scatter.)

Overtime, the adoption grew into a fully open one. I love each member of my daughter’s adoptive family and cherish the closeness that I have with them.

So anyway I’m in the bathroom getting ready this morning (this is often where my most profound thoughts of the day take place), and I’m thinking about the haunting voicemail I had at 5:30 a.m. from my beloved kid brother, Matt, sobbing because his girlfriend of two years just dumped him OUT OF THE BLUE after spending some week at some pansy-ass self discovery thing in California where she met a guy that she thinks she needs to pursue. I want to kick her ass. Very Jesus like, right?

Then my mind starts rolling through the possibilities of how this situation can be used to create opportunity to win Matt back to the truth that God is real. He is LOVE. He is NOT Joel Olsteen. He is not religion. He is not some rigid non-educated world view or Ned Flanderish lifestyle that prefers bumper stickers warning of unmanned vehicles in case of rapture instead of profound logic and reason that makes sense of the universe.

Then I started to dwell on the fact my best friend is in West Africa for two weeks at an orphanage and I MISS HER and need her counsel right now so much. My lovely, God-given crutch of friendship that I’m such a weenie without…

Then I started to think of my other beautiful friend who is going through a messy custody battle with an ex-husband who’s also on my list of “peoples behinds I would kick if I wasn’t a Jesus follower.”

Then I started to think about this relationship I had swung back and forth into over the last 10 months that looked great on paper (go to church, gainfully employed) and should have added up, but it didn't. At all. And we both knew it.

So much energy expended…round holes…square pegs…my life’s pastime…

Then I started to think about my daughter’s family and her parents and how they are separated and may very well end up divorced.

What does that mean? What does it mean God, when you sacrifice your sanity? Your motherhood? When you sacrifice your right to see your own child so she can have a family and it all falls apart anyway?

That’s when the thought came to me of what would I do if I had to filter everything through the reality I only had 30 days to live?

While I was getting to ready this morning, I remembered a sermon Craig Groschel socked to my gut a couple of years ago titled “30 days to live.”

He interviewed people who were dying, and asked them what their regrets were? How are they spending their time? What would they do differently with their family?

I began to challenge myself in my head. “How would you treat this relationship if you only had 30 days to live? How much more time would you waste on that situation or this situation?

Would I finally divorce fear, my lifelong companion, and more deeply embrace God’s truth and faithfulness that He came to give us life abundant?

But my thoughts were interrupted by a call from my mom, “Did you get a call from Uncle Steve’s mom?” she asked.

“No.”

“Well, I guess they forgot their cell phones on their way to the VA. They were getting another CAT scan. It must be bad for Lenore to leave a message and say she can’t get a hold of me so she’s going to call you.”

“What do you think it is?” I asked.

“Well you know he’s been really sick. He can barely eat anymore and they’ve stopped the chemo. I don’t think he’s honestly going to live much longer.”

At this point I just stood there shocked by what I was hearing. Shocked for my uncle, and shocked because I had just been completely marinating in my own mortality, and my mom calls me with this news.

I have to be honest, my Uncle and I are not that close. I don’t want to be one of those people who put themselves on display during a tragedy for the notoriety that comes from being near to it.

My Uncle is a hard man to know and an even harder man to love. At 50-something he was never married, no children, and he hasn’t had a job in more than five years.

The vitality of his life, the meaning of it, is something that has long been lost for him.

When he would join us for a holiday, he would spend the entire day watching TV never talking to anyone.

The only thing that would engage him was to throw out something provocative like, “Yea, I do NOT think Democrats are the spawn of Satan…” And he would swivel the chair around, and go rapid fire on the great evils and stupidity of liberals, Democrats, credit card companies, preachers, foreigners, Muslims, college kids, Californians, the news media and the weasely French…till all in the room would suddenly remember something urgent in the other room and scatter.

But we really do love him. And he does have his sweet moments. They’ve grown with frequency the more sick that he has gotten. So have his desire to “do this” or “go there when I get better.”

Today his doctor recommended to his 80-something year old mother that she get hospice.

So I don’t know why anyone would want to read about this.

But I’ve made the decision today to try and sincerely live my life the next 30 days like there all I’ve got.

Now this doesn’t mean that I’m going to quit work, let my car get repossessed and do nothing but eat chocolate and spend time with my family.

But I am going to make a conscious decision that with every circumstance I encounter, be it a person in need, a weighty decision, a string that needs cutting, a leap of faith that needs taking…I’m going to try and filter that decision/circumstance through, “What would I do if I only had 30 days to live?”

We shall see what comes of it…