It is Christmas Eve–my second without Jane. Tomorrow will be Christmas Day–my second without Jane.
A year ago there was only numbness. Today? It is too early to say how I am going to feel. Too early, too, to even guess what Christmas Day will bring. Both will be different than two years ago. Jane was on the mend after fighting off the H1N1 flu that, in her, was nearly all anyone feared it would be. We were happy and thankful.
We worked together to prepare Christmas Eve dinner for her father and sister. We adjourned to separate rooms to finish wrapping the presents we would open in bed in the morning. We listened to Christmas songs and snuggled with hot chocolate on the couch.
It was a quiet night filled with the beauty of expectation. We did not know it would be our last together.
Savor the time you have with your friends and your families tonight. Hold them close to you. We simply never know when these bodies will stop working. We rarely get to know when the last anything is taking place.
But we cannot spend our lives worrying about death–either our own or someone else’s. Death is out there, certainly. Worrying about it can do but little for us. Yes, we need to take steps to preserve our health–and the the health of those we care about. We need to go to the doctor, take our pills, exercise regularly, and keep an eye open for signs of illness and injury. But we cannot allow ourselves to become so concerned with death that we forget to live. When we forget to live we are mere animated corpses waiting to be buried.
When death strikes near us many of us let that death kill us as well. We cease living and begin waiting for death. And in our initial grief that is ok. A year ago life simply did not matter to me very much. Had Death come for me then I might have gone without a second thought. All the flavor in everything had drained away–and a good part of me didn’t care.
“Leave the dead to bury the dead,” Christ says in one of his apparently less compassionate moments. It seems a cruel statement to a man who has lost a family member he cares deeply about. Jane and I shared our lives in every conceivable way–we even shared her death, albeit our experience of it was from two very different points of view. When she died a part of me died with her. But for as long as I live a part of her will live with me. It were a profanation of our love for me to live among the dead while she still lives within me.
So let the dead part of me bury her body–and let that dead part of me be buried there with the part of her that has died. And let our living body carry the parts of us which yet live back into life.
That will be miracle enough for this Christmas Eve.
