Musings on Death.

I have one of those grasshopper minds that bounce around all over the place so consistency is not the name of the game. It doesn't help that living where we do I get long stretches where the mind is allowed to roam free ~ & believe me it does! It goes some very strange places.

It has been worse in the past few years. We have had a lot of deaths in the family. They began with Matt, who was only 18 & took the opportunity of his parents first holiday ever to walk along the family's favourite walking track, in sight of his grandparents house, & blow his brains out. No~one has ever understood it. My grandfather was 96 so was more understandable & my father in his eighties but Mark was only 44.

I was there when my father died & it still surprises me. Between a breath & a breath everything that made my father himself was gone & there was only an empty shell left. It is impossible to think of Mark, who was always so very alive, like that, & of course, in one sense he's not.

In certain moods I want to rage with Dylan 'against the dying of the light'. In others I rather fancy Peter Pan's, 'I think death must be an awfully big adventure.' And at the back of my mind there lingers the promises of God, 'no eye has seen or mind concieved... I go to prepare a place for you'. In a sense all of these are true. We instinctively rage against what we percieve to be a wrongness in the universe. Death is a big adventure, the biggest, & we do have the promises of God to hold onto & give us courage as we traverse that last valley between here & there.

I also like what MacDonald, a Scottish shephard turned preacher has to say about the 23rd psalm & walking through the valley of the shadow of death: You only get shadows where there is light. As believers we walk steadily towards that light all our lives & at the end death is only a coming home. I have always liked coming home. It is the nicest part of the day. I know my saviour is waiting on me turning that last cornor & bolting for home. It is only what might come before that occassionally frets my soul. It shouldn't. Grace is always extended when grace is needed & as one preacher I know puts it: Life is a terminal illness. So it is.