Death is nothing at all
I have only slipped away into
the next room
I am I, and you are you,
Whatever we were to each other,
that we are still.
Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way
which you always used
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity
or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed
At the little jokes that we
enjoyed together
Play, smile, think of me,
pray for me.
Let my name be ever the
household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort,
Without the ghost of a
shadow upon it.
Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and
unbroken continuity.
What is this death but a
negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you,
for an interval,
Somewhere very near,
Just around the corner.
All is well.
- Henry Scott Holland
I dug through my house a few days ago and dug up the poetry I had written throughout middle school, high school, and the first year of college. In my middle school poetry journal, this poem (actually an excerpt from a sermon) is pasted onto the first page. I think I was much more fascinated by death when I was younger. At the very least, I glamorized the idea of dying, as it is still glamorized in movies, stories, cheap novels, and so on.
Either way, I've discovered that suddenly, I'm older now, and somewhere along those 10 years that went missing between middle school and now, my attitude towards death changed. Maybe I could think of death so easily then because it was so far from me, similar to the ways we can gossip about celebrities or people we don't know personally. But things change. You meet people and they might tell you how they've had to deal with life and the alternative to life.
Ever since my last college year, I feel like I've been scared. Scared to leave friends, home, and especially family now. I feel like I'm fearful all the time now, anxious about passing my tests and staying in school, finding a job in the future, finding friends to be with or someone to love, losing friends and family and loved ones, and (if this weren't bad enough) fearful of coming to the end of my life and realizing that I've wasted so much of it while being scared of everything.
I'm reading a book by Os Guinness, and the first few chapters talk about the human condition, and sort of the strange situation we find ourselves in. It mentioned life, death, the hard questions, and yet so did many books that I read during college. I find it kind of odd that before this, I had a grandparent and a freshman from Wiess both die, yet I never thought about it too hard then (maybe I couldn't back then). But now...it's as if everything hits harder, is more personal, is a little more painful to think about.
I used to think about my own death rather calmly, what people might say at my funeral, what I might say to them right before I die. Nowadays, I'm scared to think of the idea at all, for fear that I might have to consider that some day, I might have to say a eulogy for those I love - friends, grandparents, even my mother and father. The idea absolutely terrifies me, makes my heart ache so much I wish I could just turn off my conscious thought sometimes.
I don't know what exactly changed. Perhaps it's because I had things taken away from me during that last year of college - relationships, family, purpose, comfort, familiarity. Maybe I started to worry about losing things that I didn't think I could bear to lose. I think that after things started being easy, after Rice stopped providing me with everything I needed, after I got sent out on my own, I started being scared. During Rice, I felt the death of a relative and a freshman at Wiess, but recovered fairly well. However, after Rice, I've started to feel and fear deaths that haven't even come close to happening yet. I'm paralyzed by a fear things that may happen in a future that I won't change because I feel paralyzed, and so life goes by, I get nothing done, and time ticks ever on. Great.
I've heard pastors claim that the Bible's most often given commandment is "do not fear", and to paraphrase what Paul once said, the law is there to show me what sin and imperfection is. If this phase I'm going through is one that everyone hits eventually, I can understand why God would give this commandment so often.
I'm working on it.
