Death
Death is really creepy to me.
I know that we are to aim for the “…to die is gain” viewpoint, but I’m really not there yet. And honestly, I’m afraid that God will take me as soon as I get there. Then, the other part of me thinks that I need to get there just to truly live…
Our sermon this week was on death. We asked the members of our Life Group to share experiences they’ve had with death, and Joe and I were pretty much the only ones who have had any experience. That really shocked me. One other couple had a miscarriage, which is certainly a death, and several had extended family who died, but no one had experienced the up close, painful, robbing kind of death that Joe and I have. Joe lost his sister, both of his grandfathers, and his great grandmother. I’ve lost Nick, my grandmother and grandfather, and several friends growing up. I didn’t think we were that weird.
Joe’s paternal grandmother is about to die. He’s about to deal with all of this stuff all over again. She is in kidney failure and refusing dialysis. It’ll only be a few days. She made the choice to die, and that’s a first for us to be around. We’re used to death stealing people, and here is his grandma, who is choosing death. She doesn’t want a life on dialysis. I totally understand. I’ve seen my uncle go through it and its terrible. Still, I can’t even wrap my mind around being in a place where death will be right in my face like that. I can’t imagine having to choose to die immediately or in a few years. I can’t imagine choosing death and just waiting for it to happen in just a few short hours.
It makes me want to hyperventilate. I don’t like it at all.
ETA: Ironically, I was afraid to play this song around Joe when we were first dating. I would skip this track and another similar one when we listened to this album because it talks about dying on train tracks, and that’s how his sister died just a few months before we started dating. He had no idea until a year or two later when I let the song play (I hadn’t realized it was on) and then he figured out that I had been skipping it.