holiday

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I am fond of encircling myself with the young: infants, children, bright faces- mostly ignorant of their existence- aware only of beauty, color, of laughter, of eating candy, of love. Perhaps one reason I do this, is my unconscious attempt to disguise my own terror of death and dying and of coping with it. I don't know. All I know is that- as a childhood quote comes echoing back to me, from the movie Pollyanna- "Death comes unexpectedly." The death of someone I know was felt last week. That reality was ushered in by the words of a friend who informed me, "___ died today." How can a whole life be extinguished in that one sentence- in that one single word- "died"? People pass away often. Yet when that death lands lands nearer home than the others that's when it is felt. And it hurts. "There is always the memento mori, the realization that death is contagious; it is contracted the moment we are conceived." (L'engle) This week, this Easter week, I am more conscious than ever that "all flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flowers of the field," that "man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow," but that "Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? ... But thanks be to God who gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

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