At 76, my father died yesterday. Well, almost. His chest froze up and his heart slowed down, a lot, to one-third of its usual rate. In his grandparents’ day that would have been all she wrote. Game over. In his parents’ day, pacemakers were experimental, a new technology with some promise; a promise fulfilled as his mother lived a decade longer than she would have because of that new fandangled contraption. In his day, he’ll have the second most common surgery in America, heart bypass surgery, and except for throwing hay, he’ll be able to resume most of his daily activities within a relatively short time period.
He was a little teary on the phone, a few hours removed from the emergency room. Having slurped a few pages of “Chicken Soup for the Grandparent’s Soul” in his hospital room, he was reminded of time not spent with his kids and grandkids, and felt genuinely sad for that. That’s what almost dying does for you. It brings into focus life’s shortcomings, and makes you wishful for time lost.
Imagine waking up, and realizing that by all rights, you shouldn’t have woken up at all. That kind of tail chasing thought loop will make your head spin – and make you think long and hard about what’s most important; and where time should be spent. “If tomorrow never comes” is a good song, but few of us live with that frame of mind. We have to have our hearts slowed by two-thirds to actually believe it to be true, even if you are a preacher preaching that message every Sunday, like my dad does.
The good news is that he has time found. Time that he would never have had living 60 years earlier. He has a gift of life here. Not life forever – that gift of life isn’t for doctors to give – but still life on earth longer than it was meant to be. And sometimes that gift, or a reminder that life is a gift, is all we need to pick up and start living life even more like we should.
In Ecclesiastes 7:2, scripture says “It is better to go to a house of mourning (funeral) than to go to a house of feasting (party), because that (death) is the end of every man, and the living takes it to heart.”
I’ve tried to point this verse out to my kids, to remind them that they aren’t going to live forever. That death is the end of everyone – and after that you pay the piper. So choose, so live, wisely. It’s a lot easier to say to my kids than to think about it my own self. Taking it to heart, turns out, is a lot easier when you are waking up in the emergency room than when you are lying down at night expecting to get up the next morning.
Taking it to heart, turns out, is also a little easier when you get a call that by all rights should mean you’re headed towards your parent’s funeral. But that’s the point of Ecc.7:2. Want to really live? That’s after all who the “living” is in this verse; a play on words that means not just someone alive, but someone really living life to the fullest. Want to know the secret on how to really live life to the fullest? Take it to heart that death is your end, is my end. Get your mind around that. Bring into focus that life has an end, so it’ll bring into focus life, and what’s really important.
Sounds odd, doesn’t it, that going to a funeral is what helps us really live? That death, somehow, makes us alive. But isn’t that the mystery of the cross to start with? Death, somehow, makes us alive. If we’ll only take it to heart.
