The Wall, The Dungeon, The Dragon

I wrote this some time back. I didn’t publish it at the time. I’ve gone back to it a few times and tweaked it, here and there, but wasn’t sure whether it should be published or not. But, given that it’s some honest thoughts that “aggregated” over the two weeks after my mother’s passing, and express some of the challenges of dealing with a close death, I thought perhaps it might … do something for someone else. And maybe it’s just good for me to put something down that will remind me later on. So here it is.

My mother passed away two weeks ago.

We use these wonderful terms for death, don’t we? She “passed away.” She “graduated to glory.” She “received her reward.” She is “with Jesus now.” She is “at rest.”

They’re true. They’re wonderful.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe them.

But at the same time, there is the paradox of how all of this feels. We have other words, too. More clinical: She died. She kicked the bucket. Her body gave out. She expired.

Words that capture not so much the heavenly reality, but the reality of the earthly emotions that we all feel when we are the ones left behind.

Her passing – that’s the phrase I’ve been using, mostly – shocked me. Shocked all of us, I think. Her health had deteriorated (which not everyone who knew her, knew, because she was an intensely private person). We in her immediate family knew the situation was grave, but it was being treated by her doctor. She had recently been feeling better, sleeping more, eating a little more. So, we thought she had turned the corner. Turns out, not so much.

It’s not like there was a ton of things unsaid. We were relationally fine. We knew her health was poor, and we had just been over last Wednesday night. Before I left that night I hugged her. I didn’t know then I was hugging her goodbye for a very long time.

That first day–and in many days since–there have been moments of grief, which was to be expected.

But there have also been moments of real, severe anger. Because it was as if the event of her passing – of her death – had slammed me through a wall. As if an 18-wheeler had crashed into my vehicle and shoved it through a pile of bricks.

And now that I was through the wall, there was no going back to the other side of it. There was no stacking the bricks back up, rebuilding the wall, and enjoying the pre-crash state.

And there was nothing I could do about it. No matter how much I fought against it, it didn’t matter. Like the boxer who gets knocked out the moment the fight starts – or maybe even before the fight starts, by a cheating opponent – the fight is over.

And I was angry, because I felt we were robbed. Everything was okay in the past, but we were robbed of the future. When death comes, we feel like it steals away all of the might-have-beens.

This is where I find myself in a real dungeon, and I can smell a dragon nearby.

Intellectually, I understand the idea of heaven, of eternity, of life after death, of the promise and hope that we have.

But I still feel like the future has been stolen. And that conflicts with my thoughts, my philosophy, my deepest-held beliefs about eternity.

In the darkest of moments, I wonder – what if we’re all wrong? What if it’s not true?

CS Lewis said that Jesus was either “Lord, liar or lunatic.” I don’t think he would have done what he did had he been a liar – but what if he was a lunatic, after all? What if, in the final moments, when you see that last “tunnel of light” – it’s really the last LCD pixel on the screen of your mind, burning out? What if it all just fades to black–

As I say, very depressing.

It’s a dungeon–not of doubt, but of fear. Fear that I am wrong.

When deep in the dungeon with a dragon nearby, there is only one weapon that does anything for you – hope.

You feed it facts, you feed it feelings, you feed it what others have written, you feed it Bible scriptures, you feed it what you think you’re hearing when you pray, you feed it worship music, you feed it the warm embrace of your wife, you feed it the reassuring words she and others speak, you feed it all sorts of things, like fertilizer.

But really, hope just comes from the Spirit. It’s either there, or it’s not. You can’t birth it – you can only plough the ground and hope it grows. Because if it grows, its the best evidence of God I find.

And the hope is there. It might be as small as a mustard seed, but it’s there.

Hope that death is not the end, but the gate to an eternity whose light we can only barely glimpse on this side.

Hope that when you’re down to the last pixel on the LCD screen of your soul, that light will suddenly burn brightly, and reveal itself as Heaven’s glory washing every last bit of darkness away.

Hope that when we are in what comes next, we will know even as we are known – that what has been will not be lost in what will be.

Hope that the dragon will indeed be defeated by the prince, and that Happily Ever After will come.

We do not grieve as do those without hope – because whatever else the Gospel may be, it is Good News of Hope that defeats fear and uncertainty with the Truth that is coming.

Hope has come, and is coming, and will come for me.