“But When Life Tumbles In, What Then?”

I’m going to die.  So are you.  So is my neighbor next door and my friend who lives further away.  So is everyone.  On that uplifting note, let me share with you that my mother-in-law for the past  54 years is dying.  She has been my only mother-in-law and I could not have asked for a better one.  She has lived in California all these years of our marriage and our children growing up knew of only one kind of vacation—traveling from the East across country by land or air to visit Grandma Nita in the West.  Sometimes we were able to include stops at places like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon on the way.  For the most part, however, time being limited, I’d drive six or seven-hundred miles a day for five days to get to Grandma’s—visit for three or four days—and then drive another five days to get back home.  Sometimes “Grandma” would come visit us in the East.  She and my mother corresponded and talked often by telephone, and enjoyed one another’s company whenever they could be together. There are so many memories—all of them more precious now in this moment than ever before.

Barbara J. King, in her book, How Animals Grieve, tells us that throughout the animal kingdom, most animals display instinctive behavioral characteristics when faced with the impending death of their kind. Some birds, for example, expel a dying bird from the nest.  “Elephants sometimes stand silently at the bodies of dead companions and, later, stroke their sun-bleached bones as if embracing a memory.  Dolphin mothers refuse to part with the bodies of their babies who die, foregoing food and tirelessly keeping their child buoyant in the water day after day.”  Scientists say that some “big-brained” mammals may grieve when a family member dies.  The roots of human grieving go deeper.  Unlike the animals, we carry a heightened concept of death, the awareness that those we love most and even we ourselves will someday die.  Always we know that the day will come when life tumbles in.

John Arthur Gossip, the day after his wife had collapsed and died, stood in the pulpit and spoke on the subject “But When Life Tumbles In, What Then?”  I borrowed those words many years ago and have spoken them over and over again to myself and others to describe our human walk into the shadows—of which there are many, and one of these is the shadow of death.  “But When Life Tumbles In, What Then?”  Then my wife goes to California to be with her mother, to sit with her and to love her as the shadows deepen.  

“I don’t think you need to be afraid of life,” said Gossip.  “Our hearts are very frail, and there are places where the road is very steep and very lonely, but we have a wonderful God.  And, as Paul puts it, ‘What can separate us from his love?  Not death,’ he writes immediately.  No, not death, for standing in the roaring of the Jordan, cold with its dreadful chill and very conscious of its terror, of its rushing, I, too, like Hopeful in Pilgrim’s Progress, can call back to you who one day in your turn will have to cross it, ‘Be of good cheer, my brother (my sister), for I feel the bottom and it is sound.’”

Flower of the Day