Life and Death: Meaningful and Sweet

    Today while listening and contemplating during the hours I spent at my local church, or the chapel edifice where quite a few hundred of us congregated at our special six month or semi-annual meeting, which we peculiar people call Stake Conference, I was thinking about death on a few different levels, or in a few different angles or lights.

    They will be the following four references, for the purposes of this discussion: 

    1. The death of Jesus

    2. The deaths portrayed in film and art

    3. The deaths of those that we know personally

    4. The death of someone close to us, in person, in the time they expire

    Do we find beauty, grace, sublimity, value, meaning, goodness, or negative factors, in any of above? I do. I will explain. Life and death are partners, and as such, the dance between them is one eternal round of opening, dancing, and closing.

    First, the Death of Our Savior Jesus Christ. We Christians continually and consistently commemorate and memorialize, laud and recount His death, which is symbolic of what is to come, the greater goods of physical resurrection and the triumph of purity and cleanliness over sin and wretched filth. Death in Jesus is life eternal, the ultimate pay off for this life as we know it, according to Christian theology or doctrine. Death is requisite for Life Everlasting. The biggest dance that we know: God and existence, all of it. The totality of all creation.

    Second, the deaths that we see portrayed in film, or in art like paintings or nursery rhymes and books and stories. There are heroic and tragic deaths: some are gory or very traumatic. Some deaths are understated, or glossed over. There are the anonymous deaths, the ones that transpire without much acclaim or fuss. Sometimes soldiers or fighters are wiped out in fell swoops, while other victims are innocents that disappear from the realm of living without any identity or attribution. Anonymous, forgotten as living or dead, on screen or pictured or not. Some deaths are drawn out and poignant. The main characters, or side characters, may suffer from a terrible wound, or a long-standing illness, and he or she themself, or the others suffer and live till their last moment, which leaves us the viewer or the reader verklempt, caught up, engaged, living and processing as they die.

    Death be not proud. Whatever that means. I am not sure.

    Art in all its forms can bespeak and message the meanings, the beauties, the pathos and the drama of death in all its ways. From the Greeks to Shakespeare to George Lucas or Quentin Tarantino, Ernest Hemingway to Salmon Rushdie to Toni Morrison to a million other raconteurs, we look at, peruse, feel and process the passing of life in ourselves and others. Through art, a vicarious yet often emotional or cathartic exercise, for us the viewers and participants who go along with the creators vision of life and death.

    More of the eternal dance, personified in animals, like Charlotte's Web, or heroes, or their opponents the villains, who may  and all the dying ones in between. The aged, the infirmed, the young or snake-bit, at times literally. So many deaths in film and art! It helps us deal with the real thing, right?

    Then there is the real thing, the deaths happen in our personal lives. Grandparents, other family, friends or colleagues, and even closer relations die and go away. We can be thousands of miles away from where it occurred, but we feel the pain and the loss, sometimes forever. We may never get over it, as they say, the loss and death of a person near and dear to us. Some celebrities' passings can also affect us. Some of those artists or famous ones we become attached to emotionally, intellectually, artistically, so their loss can be very personal without a reciprocal association or kinship to us.

    If a baby dies, or a person dies suddenly from a car accident, or from so many unexpected means that delivers the final breathe to a person, to include wars or violent crimes, most of us do not see and feel those events up close. But some of us are closer to those that pass than others, which brings to my mind and soul a more meaningful and sweet experience with the death process, the transition of the soul to the next place.

    Real time spirit gone away, the life force has moved on.

    I was close to my mom when her spirit finally left her body. She was holding on the last few days, after a year and half of fighting the terminal liver disease. I have written about losing her before, about memories of her and her meaning.

    I was overseas, working on a base with military around 2021, some seven years after the passing of my mother. I was recounting my experience of my mother's physical death with another man, slightly older than me, me in the young fifties, he a slight be tougher, crustier guy. But friendly, for sure.

    We had both seen our mothers pass. My story touched him, as we ate a lunch together. I could tell. As I explained the details, which for me, a son, were sweet, perhaps it reached the sublime in the feelings it evoked. I told him this story in a busy lunch hall we call a DFAC, short for Dining Facility. We sat across from each other nearer the end, where members of our faith tended to congregate when we did eat together. It was likely a sunny and pleasant day (actually!) in Kuwait. Maybe November, or January. Perhaps a mild 80 or degrees outside. I cannot recall my exact words, so here I pose it retrospectively.

    It was the first week of March. Snowy in Indiana that year. The Sunday that she went to hospice was dark and grey with snowflakes. Tuesday came with some sun, but it was cold. I went to the Indianapolis Airport to pick up her dearest life-long friend and sister, and her only brother Bill, with his wife Anne. I took them the hour back to meet mom at her death bed. They all bade her solemn and kind farewells. It worked out well.

    Tuesday afternoon, getting dark, I took them back to my mom's house where they would stay. I was inside my mom's house, the one she had lived in married since I was in high school, minus the church missions in southeast Asia. Since 1986, now 28 years later a familiar abode. I received the call on my cell phone. It had to be Terry, my step-father, but perhaps it was my sister who was there, too.

    She had passed. We all got in my car again and returned to the hospice, to her room. Her body lay there lifeless, but I went and kissed her face. I cried hard. I think I uttered audibly "I love you, Mom!" Then I did something less usual. I felt the warmth in her body; I uncovered her feet and cried over them, sobbing and holding her feet. Still warm with her life now gone.

    The tough guy soldier listened to this and I could see some tears welling up in his eyes. Yes, this is the love of a son for his mother, I say.

    Weird, strange, odd? Maybe, to an outsider. That was my last farewell, my final touch of her mortal remains. She had given me many foot massages over the years, probably more as an adult. She believed in and learned and practiced reflexology, which posits that the foot has corresponding parts of our body that can be accessed to heal us and make us whole. She had done that to me when in my teens maybe, certainly in my twenties. Had she done it for me in my thirties or forties? I cannot remember. But all the times were sweet, comforting, loving. My mother made me feel loved and whole.

    Christ washed his disciples feet, with his hands in a ritualistic act of love. Women washed the Savior's feet, with their tears? Behold, thy mother! Yes, I held her 73 year-old feet, worn, tired, old. But fresh and clean. Now to be buried with the rest of her. Till the day she would stand again at the Resurrection. 

    And me with her! We should all be with our mothers and Jesus. Yes.

    I did not say all of these things, nor think them, at the cafeteria table, but I say and think them now.

    And thus I declare: Life and Death is Meaningful and Sweet.

    Yes, the whole thing. 

    From one to four, wherever we fit. May we all see it, approach it, embrace it. 

    Life. And that what comes.