Death

Tim and I read together 5-7 minutes a night. He reads on odd numbered nights and the 31st days of odd months. I read on even numbered nights and the 31st days of even months. I think we even have a system worked out for leap years... :)

Right now we're reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.

Last night, Tim read the telling of the death of a child from the perspective of her sister - who rarely speaks, but who is a philosopher and a poet and a lover of palindromes in her quiet. I share this with you because it is a haunting and vivid and true description of death, I think. And for some reason, it brought me to tears and tears and tears. Tim called it, my 'first good cry of 2008.'

I was not present at [her] birth but I have seen it now, because I saw each step of it played out in reverse at the end of her life. The closing parenthesis, at the end of the palindrome that was [she]. Her final gulp of air as hungry as a baby's first breath. That last howling scream, exactly like the first, and then at the end a fixed, steadfast moving backward out of this world. After the howl, wide-eyed silence without breath. Her bluish face creased with a pressure closing in, the near proximity of the other-than-life that crowds down around the edges of living. Her eyes closed up tightly, and her swollen lips clamped shut. Her spine curved, and her limbs drew in more and more tightly until she seemed impossibly small. While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. [She] shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born.

I guess this tale of death made me confront how passionately I do not want Samara to die. As loosely as I try to hold her, my love for her and my hope for her long life is fierce. Tim calmed my sobs last night with a litany of all of the things that Samara has yet to experience: "Samara will die after you," he said. "She is going to become a teenaged driver and she'll get married. You will be the mother of the bride. And then she'll have babies and you'll be a grandma. And then we'll die and Samara will have grandchildren of her own."

Of course, he cannot promise me these things - but this likely story was a salve for my fearful heart.

If I hope for anything specific in Samara's life -however long or short - I hope that Samara will love God.

But even if she never reaches the age of knowing - cognitively - the One who made her and loves her with more passion and ferocity than her mother - she is a child of the covenant - held by the God who watches her and keeps her. And I believe there is a 'knowing' that is deeper and more mysterious than the knowing that precedes commitment...

Shamar-YHWH