I sat in the second pew, holding back tears as I watched that familiar face disappear behind the lid of the casket. I glanced over at a grieving wife, son and daughter. I turned to look back again at the casket as the funeral director placed a large cascading bouquet on top.
“This is life and there is death. Only ten feet from me,” I thought.
Charles was once a husband and a father. A teacher, principal, and mentor. He was an activist, a justice fighter, and most recently, a grandfather. Charles was a man who, only two weeks prior, was holding his new granddaughter in his arms, celebrating Thanksgiving with his family, smiling and loving.
Though he battled dementia for over six years, Charles had been very much alive throughout his illness. He was a man full of soul, in every sense of the word.
But now that soul is gone and in its place a body remains. A representation of what once was. The shell that held a man. A picture of something deeper. The face and body we recognized, but his soul was truly the man we knew.
Charles’ only son, a dear friend of mine, approached the podium. He glanced down at a paper full of memories and then back up again. The room was silent, apart from a chorus of sniffles. With a lump in his throat and tears welling in his eyes, he spoke.
He shared memories and lessons learned, high moments and low ones. His words made us in the audience laugh and cry. We walked through the journey with him and were able to feel a faint glimmer of the pain he was experiencing, as well as the hope that he knew existed. In his closing remarks, he read a verse from Scripture I’ve known my whole life but have never realized the brevity of until that moment.
“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:16-18)
The audience was silent for an instant. Then it broke into inspired applause.
It was in that moment I realized something I had known my whole life, but had never fully understood.
Outwardly we are wasting away.
I am dying. As I sit here, I am dying….
Every day I am closer to death than the one before. And I am sitting in a room full of a hundred more people who are dying.
Inwardly we are being renewed day by day.
Even though my body is dying, I’m more alive today than the day I was born.
What sounded so cliché to me my entire life now rocked my world. My body is an encasement of the woman I truly am. It’s a shell holding a soul that feels pain and feels happiness, a soul that loves, fights, smiles, laughs, cries. A soul that sings, writes, creates music and fights injustice.
And though my body will age and wrinkle, my soul will only grow younger as it nears eternity with my saviour.
And out of nowhere I smiled…
I smiled because the man I once knew, lying in the casket ten feet away from me, was more alive that day than he had ever been.
I smiled because for the first time, I didn’t fear death. For the first time, I realized that we are given one life, and in a flash it’s gone like a vapour. Whether I die tomorrow or am granted another 60 years, today I still have breath in my lungs. I have one chance to make my short vapour of a life on this globe count. One chance to love others well, to serve, to care, to see, to fight injustice, to not focus on what culture tells me to focus on, and to live like my physical body isn’t the point. Because it’s not.
C.S. Lewis says: “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
My new prayer is that I will never again be far too easily pleased.
Because I have only one chance to not live like I am dying, but to live like I am living.
Flickr photo (cc) by Jepster
