The Day After

 It’s fascinating and a little frightening how fast life moves on.

I was at my buddy Joe’s funeral last night. Joe Smith. It was kind of intimidating. It just wasn’t right. He was too young to be resting in a casket. I kept wondering: if we had known twenty-five or thirty years ago that he would be gone at this time, what would have changed? Anything? If you knew that you weren’t going to make it into old age, that two years from now or five years from now or twenty that you would be gone from here, if you KNEW, then what would change about how you are living life right now?

Ignorance is bliss.

Apparently, Joe’s heart stopped working, which is amazingly ironic because he was all heart. It’s the last thing I thought would ever go bad in him. It was painful to look at him. Joe’s eighty-eight year old mother took me by the hand and we faced him together. He had a grin on his face, which is unusual, but his mom liked it. So did I. It was fitting.

There were some friends from High School at the funeral that I hadn’t seen in almost 30 years. 30 YEARS!!!  Pardon my French, but holy crap Batman! That’s like a lifetime all by itself. Even though it was a funeral, it was good to see them. It was like we hadn’t been apart at all. These people are wonderful. I could have talked all night with them without missing a beat. Only thing was, Joe wasn’t in on the conversations, and they would have been a lot funnier if he had been.

It’s a little sad that it took one of us dying to get us together, which is as much my fault as anyone’s because I’m so busy. I haven’t always been there for people like I wanted to because there’s just no time. My life is very full like everyone else’s seems to be. And even death didn’t draw all of us together. Some couldn’t make it to the funeral home, of course. Life gets in the way. High School was a long time ago. People have jobs and responsibilities, some people are too far away, and that’s that.

Every funeral I go to makes me think of this haunting line from a Jackson Browne song that I love called “Of Missing Persons.” A sentence from that song has been stuck in my head for decades and it won’t go away because it’s so true...

“Does it take a death to learn what a life is worth?”

Joe was an amazing person. They had pictures of him, like they usually do at funerals, and there he was, smiling with that big smile of his, through the windows of those photos. I had sat across from him, smiling at me, looking just like that, many times, back when Joe lived just a few blocks from another close friend who means the world to me. And these two were with me at a time in life when I was trying to figure out who and what I was. I don’t exactly know why we fell together in time the way we did, but I’m thankful for it, and I realize that they are both a part of the definition of who I am, along with other great friends who have no idea how important to me they are, even though I haven’t seen some of them for years. We simply ended up separated by the geography and expectations of life. I’m not bitter about it, that’s just how it goes, but it makes you wish there was a little more time here to keep things going. And it makes you want to reconnect with people that you have lost contact with. But that’s easier said than done.

When I was working on my undergraduate and then my master’s degrees I lost touch with practically everyone I had known prior to that. Not good, but there is nothing I could do about it. The demands were very heavy. And then we had kids and I launched into a whole different direction job wise with the church, and then suddenly 30 years is past and your hair is going grey and you find yourself wondering where the time went.

Honestly, right now, I feel like going away somewhere quiet where there are no expectations. I feel like I need time away to assess and figure things out. But that’s not going to happen. We don’t always get to do what we feel we need to do. So I will forge ahead and pray and try to figure out what God wants and what the people around me need so I can love them like I should.

What else can you do?



Peace to you.



© LW Publishing 2010

Mysteries of the Mind

No kidding. I’m standing on my front porch and I glance to the right and see another dead bird in the bush in front of our house. It apparently hit our front window and fell onto the bush where it lay, a big black bird with shiny feathers. I’m going to have to get out there and do something with it. I can at least bury this one.

What makes finding these birds stand out to me is that over the past few weeks I’ve become kind of obsessed with a weird question. This happens to me a lot. I come up with a weird question and I can’t figure out the answer and it gets into my mind and won’t go away, but it’s almost always something nutty.

For instance. An example that is not the question I am currently obsessed about. A long time ago I thought up a question that I still don’t have an answer to that I find satisfactory. The question is this:

Why do men have nipples?

I’m just saying. I know it’s a weird question. I know it reveals that I probably have some kind of psychological disorder. But, still, I wonder . . . why? They are pointless.

And, so, back to the birds. I have been mulling over another question the past few weeks that won’t leave me alone. And it goes something like this:

This world is FULL of animals, wildlife of all kinds, birds by the trillions, foxes, cats, mice and rats and squirrels. And on occasion you find a dead one. I found a dead squirrel in the tree in my backyard last year. And it really stood out to me because how often do you find a dead squirrel unless it has been hit by a car on the road, right? So, here are the basics of the question:

Where are all the animal bodies? Where are all the dead animals? They don’t have tremendously long life spans, and yet you just don’t see a lot of animal bodies laying all over the place. Are the animals having secret little squirrel funerals in the woods that we don’t know about? Elephants have graveyards, but what about rabbits? Where do all these animals go when they die? Is the process of decomposition so fast that they are gone within a day? Even so, why don’t we see more of them before they decompose. Is it a part of their instincts to get under a bush somewhere to die?

This world is full of things that can make us wonder, wonder, wonder. Don’t you think?







Peace to you.




© LW Publishing 2010

Bird

The family and moi were at a campground the past few days. Because I’m with them, we got a little cabin to stay in. I don’t tent. Call me a sissy if you want. I don’t care. I just laugh at you when the rain comes.

Next to our cabin one day we came across this bird on the ground, breathing his last. Literally. It’s chest was heaving, it’s head was pulled back, trying to breath, doing everything it could to stay alive, but there was no hope. I wondered what was taking the bird down. Did it run into the window on the side of the cabin? Did it just get old and have a heart attack and fall from the tree above? There’s no way to know.

It was compelling stuff. It was hard to watch, and yet we couldn’t walk away. Together, we saw how death takes over. How the fight is lost. And I think it was good for us to see. All of us.

This bird had been able to fly, which is something I can only dream of. It made it’s way out of the nest and into the world with very little help. Like all birds, it was amazing. An intricate work of art that decorated the skies.

I wasn’t sure what to do with the body. I wanted to honor it somehow, but I couldn’t think of anything. I didn’t have a shovel to bury it. I ended up putting it in a plastic cup and setting it in a garbage can.

Death is a part of things. We shouldn’t obsess over it. But it’s a reality we need to face. If you don’t, you won’t make good use of the time you have here. If you’re pretending you’re going to be here forever, then you’re likely to waste a lot of good time doing . . . stuff. You know. Stuff.






Matthew 10:29-31
Psalm 90:12
Peace to you.





© LW Publishing 2010