I Will be with You

Since I was young, I have gone through periods of time where I am seized at night by thoughts of death and imaginings of death leading to nothingness - manifested in my mind as sightless, soundless, feelingless. It's frightening and overwhelming and constricting. Everything screams, "I don't want to be nothing!"

With my dad's passing and discovery that he had Huntington's Disease, I have recently lain in bed and thought about what it would feel like to have Huntington's and to progress through the illness, losing physical and mental capabilities to the point that my body one day can't function and wondering if I would mentally understand what was happening (when my dad was quite sick, he told my sister, Lesley, that he was part bat to explain all his movements. Did he know he was sick and ailing?), if my dad knew he was dying at the moment. I imagine death like a relief but also as fear, an end into nothingness. I worry about my children losing me too soon.

I wonder at times if I lived in another country or earlier time where or when death is a bigger part of life, a daily part (and not in a sensational news - fear this - way), if I would be less fearful of death. I haven't been to a single funeral, which feels like a blessing.

In February of last year, I was still breastfeeding Harper. I was at a women's Bible study at my friend Megan's apartment, sitting on the carpet and listening to a discussion about heaven and different visions of what heaven will be like. In the midst of the discussion, I imagined death as another part of living, a next step, and I felt this physically as the sensation of milk being let down, a fullness and and then release. This seems to match with what elderly people sometimes say, being "ready" for death, welcoming death. I am still forming a vision of heaven and struggle with doubt of it's existence, but the sensation of death being part of the fullness of and release in life felt real and comforting.

This Father's Day, we attended All Soul's Church of Boulder, and the pastor - love when this happens - spoke about death, describing the deaths he remembered on this Father's Day, his first marriage and a baby named, Sarah, who he and his wife adopted and who died in infancy of trisomy thirteen. He was a father for a very short time. I cried during the sermon, and my friend, Shari, asked if I was thinking about my dad. I wasn't at that moment, but it was probably part of the emotion of the day and the vision of losing a child young, of having "lost" my marriage, of the fear of my children losing me.

During the sermon, the pastor quoted C.S. Lewis (from Transposition and Other Addresses), "We remain conscious of a desire, which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it?... A man's physical hunger does not prove that that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely that man's hunger does prove that he comes from a race that repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. I do not believe that my desire for [heaven] proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called 'falling in love' occurred in a sexless world." I hunger for something beyond death, a next step after this life, a rich something that is far beyond the fearful nothingness, regardless of how my life ends. I find comfort in the idea that this longing is an indication of heaven's existance.

I believe in God's love for me (even as I wonder how to interpret it in this life) and felt it deeply once during a therapy session, felt it as pressure in my upper arms. How I wanted to hold on to the strong, loving sensation and walk every day of my life in that love. I came to realize one night, talking to Ardis and Shari, that if God loves us like that and even more (how much can we feel it even at the best of times), no doubt He has amazing plans for our death. No doubt He will be there, and as in all things (a hymn that can make me cry at church - I have done a lot of that), "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, And the waves will not Overcome you. Do not fear, For I have redeemed you, I have called you by name. You are Mine. . . . When you walk through the fire You’ll not be burned, And the flames will not Consume you. Do not fear, For I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, You are Mine." (Isaiah 43)