“Are you sure you’ll be ok? It’s very cold out. I’m worried about you.”
On the one hand these are nice words to hear; it’s good to know that somebody cares enough about you to worry about you. Worry is a sign of love. I know. My mom worries about me a lot, and she loves me a lot. These are good things, though sometimes it goes a tad too far. Today she had to drop me off at a coffee shop on her way to work while I waited for my car to get winterized. The coffee shop was about ¾ mile from the body shop. It was cold, sort of, and so she worried.
Her worries cause me to worry that something really will happen to me. It's not that I worry about myself, rather I worry about what would happen to her if something did happen to me. I think I understand the risks of living. I think I understand the fear that lies behind the worry.
I could die. I could. Any number of things could befall me. I could have an accident while hiking or fishing; I could freeze on this walk (unlikely, I think); I could have a car accident (did you know that more people have died in car crashes than in all wars in the history of the world? Think about that!); I could have an undetectable medical condition. Who knows?
The reality is that any of us can be gone in an instant. I don’t want to sound morbid but you could be gone tomorrow (I surely hope you’ll be around a good long while)--hence the ubiquitous songs about living like you were dying. I quite enjoy life and I certainly don’t want to lose those closest to me, but if I were to suddenly cease to be please know that I understood the risks. I may not be the risk-taker that some people are, but I do enjoy going out on a limb, playing Frisbee in the rain, hiking in a thunderstorm, wandering in the woods. Something could happen someday… or I could die at the age of 85 after a long life of playing it safe.
The fullness of a life is only marginally dependent on its duration.
Death is real. To my mind, the best way to honor those whose lives are cut short is to embrace the newness of life. Death leads to life. Embrace new things. Love one another. Be open. Laugh. All of this honors life. So excuse me if I don’t drown myself in worry; excuse me if I don’t wallow in the pain of those who have gone before. I choose a different way to honor life: I choose to walk down strange paths, to take a chance, to say what I mean and mean what I say, to be real.
After all, death, like an hourglass, is turned on its head finally by the same God who has been the God of life all along.
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