Living or Dying

For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.

-Romans 14:7-8

A Life Well Lived

The great question for the old and dying, I think, is not if they have loved and been loved enough, but if they have been grateful enough for love received and given, however much. No one who has gratitude is the onliest one. Let us pray to be grateful to the last.

-Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett, 120.

Little Deaths

I've died several times since then, and it's getting to be routine. In fact, as I'm writing this I see another death hovering on the horizon. A big one. And I'm starting to feel like my father, with one crucial difference.

Though he claimed to have lived countless lives, each in a different body and at a different place and time, I boast of having lived about five or six lives in the same body. Sometimes even in the same place and at roughly the same time.

I just don't seem to get this reincarnation thing right. I've even returned to a place I once lived, seventeen years later, as a very different person, in an older, more vulnerable body. It would have been so much nicer to have returned with a new body, and a tougher heart.

There are many ways to die. One one kind is final, of course. But before that one pulls you under, many others come along, like waves at the shore.

-Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana, 375.

Grieving

But we do not want you to uniformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope...

-1 Thessalonians 4:13

Not the Way It's Supposed to Be

In the film Grand Canyon, an immigration attorney breaks out of a traffic jam and attempts to bypass it. His route takes him along streets that seem progressively darker and more deserted. Then the predictible Bonfire of the Vanities nightmare: his expensive car stalls on one of those alarming streets whose teenage guardians favor expensive guns and sneakers. The attorney does manage to phone for a tow truck, but before it arrives, five young street toughs surround his disabled car and threaten him with considerable bodily harm. Then, just in time, the tow truck shows up and its driver—an earnest, genial man—begins to hook up to the disabled car. The toughs protest: the truck driver is interrupting their meal. So the driver takes the leader of the group aside and attempts a five-sentence introduction to metaphysics: “Man,” he says, “the world ain’t supposed to work like this. Maybe you don’t know that, but this ain’t the way it’s supposed to be. I’m supposed to be able to do my job without askin’ you if I can. And that dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you rippin’ him off. Everything’s supposed to be different than what it is here.”

-Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be, 7.