Saying Goodbye

I finished filling a notebook this week, and as I leafed through it, I came across a piece of prose I wrote last September after the death of a dear friend.

I watched you
as time and illness weakened your body
and death sought you -
creeping up slowly -
taking a piece of you at a time.

You became so frail in body
but your spirit shone like a star;
I felt your love and companionship
oh how I hope you felt mine
as I helplessly stood by

both dreading the day you would leave me
and anticipating your freedom from your plight.

Then the last day came
and all I wanted to do was turn back the clock
so I could have you with me like it was when you were well.

All I could do was make you as comfortable as possible
and stroke your head gently
while I sang softly to you
and told you how much I love you.
I don't know if you understood my words then,
but I know you understood my heart;
You reached out to me
until the final moments when death took you
and you couldn't do anything but go with it.

The finality of the moment of death is like a boulder
falling on top - crushing its victims;
You want to run away but there is no where to go.

It seems so cruel that as death consumes someone we love
that the world goes on about its business without a care.

It is the same for everyone.

For those who experience the loss
it is an empty hole - a pit in the heart
where grief and sorrow blaze for a time -
till the sweetness of memory
is not so painful as it is sweet
even though the loss is never gone.

Those of us who wait upon the Lord
know there will be a day when those who believe will rise again
and there is hope!

But when someone dies without this hope
the pain and loss are incomprehensible.
The loss of death is final.

It makes one examine life
and what is important in the time left as an inhabitant of earth
before our Heavenly Father calls us Home;
Contemplating if someone's life will be made better
because I was a part of it;
Will I show someone the way to eternal life
or waste it on my own worldly agendas?

Guilt for not having done more increases sorrow.
Guilt for avoiding watching death take away the ones we love,
and then when theyre gone,
wishing we'd have spent more time with them;
Wishing for just one more day, or hour
to hold them and tell them we love them.

But those moments are gone.
And we must go on without them in our lives.

Sometimes it feels like it is not enough for the memory of you
to live in my heart or my dreams at night.
I wake up to the realization that you are gone.
(I had hoped many times to wake up and find that your illness was but a bad dream).

I hope that when my life on earth is over,
that I will have impacted someone as profoundly
as your life and unconditional love have impacted me.
************(end prose)

Just a year before I wrote this, I walked through the valley of the shadow of death.
But God delivered me and I am becoming as if I had never been ill
but I am ever aware of how precious life is, how suddenly it can be taken away,  and I have really thought about what is important. Though this prose seems quite maudlin, it is real and part of life. I've read some teenage prose lately trying to romanticize death, but there is nothing romantic about it. It is ugly and cruel, and final. What I want to say, is that if you do not know God's redeeming love, death will seal your final destination when the judgement of man comes. Everyone will spend eternity somewhere: for those who know God, though our bodies perish, our souls will be in His presence! It awaits anyone who is willing to receive it. I'd be glad to share with you how to do that. Just ask.