Through a Veil, Darkly...

3AM. First time I've had a chance to write in a while. It's been a hell of a month--I mean that literally.

Rich Mullins, a singer/songwriter who died too soon, has a song where he mentions that even though we all want to go to Heaven, to stand there and stare death in the face "takes some grace". For the past month, that's what I've been doing.

I've mentioned in past posts a family member who was very sick. It was my mother-in-law, and the sickness was breast cancer that had metastasized to her lung. Since Christmas, we noticed her deterioration was more pronounced, though she continued to work full-time and there was little change in her crisp, cool, intimidating self. Then a month ago we went to run some errands for her and picked up some prescriptions. The prescriptions were for drugs so strong we knew she was far, far sicker than she had been letting on. Over the next week or so, we began taking care of her.

The past month our care increased daily as her condition worsened daily, and in the last week hourly. Cancer is one of those diseases that is so evil because it takes someone away in increments, in inches, in ounces until suddenly they collapse in on themselves, and the devastation is complete. It robs one of dignity and sound mind and strength, it takes all of the things we consider good about out humanity. It is a thief of the worst kind. I have seen those inspirational "What Cancer Cannot Take" posters and I think if someone tried to hand me something like that today I would break it over their head. The words are so empty when you are staring into the yawning, black maw of the disease.

Anyway, there is too much that is ugly and raw and bloody and private about that right now for me to write about in any clear manner. It is why I haven't written here in so long--any words that came to me were too painful to be written.

So let me say this: Mary passed away on Friday, April 13th. Hours before she passed, Moon and I woke to the lonely mourning of an owl outside our window, an owl I have never heard before or since in our wildlife-deprived, overly-developed neighborhood. The past few days have been filled with people coming in and out of our house, the funeral home, and later today Mary's church, telling us their version of Mary; giving us bits of stories we might have never heard. Reminding us her life mattered--which it did, and does, and will.

Standing in the presence of death does take grace, a grace I do not have within myself. Caregiving, the sort of hardcore caregiving Mary required toward the end of her life, required a grace I did not have. It required God, belief in God. It sounds crazy, but each time I have stood there before death--too often in the past year and a half--it reaffirmed my belief in God, my hope in God. For one thing, death seems to thin the veil between this life and the next. There is a verse in the New Testament sying something to the effect of "but now we see darkly, as through a veil..." and I remembered that as I stood by Mary's hospice bed. She would say things, see things, that seemed as if she were peeking around the edges of that veil, seeing the enormity of the things we could not see with our earthbound, lifebound eyes. When death stops for you, and you are riding in that carriage squeezed between death and immortality...I don't know. It's as if I hear a whisper in my ear, lower than low, like a thrumming in my blood that there is more, that there is more to this life, that this is but a temporary stopping point.

I do not feel the aching loss, the sense of drowning in grief I felt when death first started visiting me a few years ago. The more it visits, the less afraid I am of its return. I can't say I welcome it, and I certainly want it far, far away from my doors for a long time to come: Temporary or no, I love this life. I love my family, my children and my husband. I love the feel of life throbbing in my veins. But it no longer seems the bringer of evil it once was. (Cancer, on the other hand, is a demon straight from Hell. Don't let anyone tell you differently.) Death simply is a part of life. It is part of this life process. And God is there, even in death--maybe especially in death.

Anyway, it's way too late for me to be up writing, and I'm running on too much caffeine and not enough food, so I'm not writing the words I really want to say. It's the curse of the writer, to think in random passing the deep, profound truths that escape you immediately upon finding any way to record such thoughts.

Here is what I know: in this life, the questions matter. Mystery matters. And the day when I saw my baby son propped up against Mary in her hospital bed, watched Sam wriggle and kick against her wasted body, watched her smile down on him and saw him look at her in that new glaze of wonder and awe with which he looks at everything, I knew I was seeing the best of life and the worst of death in that moment. And I knew, I know, that life wins. Life wins.

To you, Mary, and the legacy you left behind. I am forever grateful for it, and everything you life and death taught me. See you beyond the veil.