People react in many different ways when it comes to death. Mourning will never be the same even for one person mourning on different occasions. I've experienced death in my life, in many different forms. It always hurts, but never in the same way.
A close friend of the family died working as a firefighter in the September 11th attacks. I was only eleven at the time. I hadn't known him as closely as my parents and other relatives did. When it came time to go to the wake, I stood outside the building with my siblings and younger cousins, since they didn't want us causing a fuss, or having to see the incredible sadness inside. While my cousins felt free to run about and play, I was solemn. The weight of the death, even though I hadn't known the man well, was hanging on my heart.
When I was twelve a boy in the grade above me was struck by a car and killed. I had never met him. It was frightening to know that someone my own age could die. It was a sobering reminder of my own mortality, in a sense.
At the very beginning of my freshman year of high school, just two years later, a boy in the grade above me committed suicide. This was, perhaps, my most terrifying encounter with death yet. The thought of someone taking their own life was completely foreign to me. It went against everything I had learned both at home, at school, and in church. Life was a gift we had been given. It wasn't our place to take away that gift. Didn't "thou shalt not murder" apply to one's own life, too?
My mother passed away after a long battle with cancer when I was a few months shy of turning sixteen. Losing someone I knew personally, and loved so deeply hurt more than any other kind of pain I had felt before. Even now, over five years later, I still feel sort of constant sorrow in my soul. The gap left behind was simply too big to have the wound closed up.
Today, I learned that someone in the grade above me committed suicide. Again, I never knew him, never met him. Yet I feel the weight of it filling my heart. Having experienced depression, and the many pressures and terrors of life that can lead one to feel suicidal, I know now why some people take their own lives. To know that we, as people, have failed in helping someone to see that there is still some good in this world, that there is something worth living for even though things seem terrible now, is frustrating. I feel guilty that I was unable to do anything, even having never met him. I feel guilty that I am still alive, having made it through my darker hours of depression, while he did not.
Often when I find myself faced with these situations, I turn and cling frantically to my faith. Some days, it really does feel like the only thing I can be assured of in this life. I try to find comfort in different verses, but today, it is doing little to lift my spirits. I think, until I allow myself to properly mourn his death and actually cry, I will have trouble finding comfort in these verses. There's simply too much sadness. It's almost as though I cannot be comforted until I have made my sorrow known to the world around me, rather than keeping it bottled up inside as I am wont to do.
What verses have given you comfort in times of trouble? How has your faith helped you through the dark times?
~*~
"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me."
Psalm 23:4
My friend, I'm sorry to hear this news. Your meditation on death and how you have learned about it in different ways over time is very profound and surely very healing. It is quite the universal experience to learn not only of human mortality but of the fact that it knows no demographic bounds, including age.
ReplyDeleteSomething of an extension to the idea of learning that one could take one's own life: One interesting aspect of death that I've discovered is how much choice we may actually have in the matter, even when the causes are external or not by choice. I think, in a sense, we release ourselves when the time comes.
When my grandfather passed in October 2009, he had been in the hospital for a week or so. In the last few days, he kept saying, "Why won't he take me?" He was never, to my knowledge, a religious man. But there were clearly a few matters that he needed to tend to before he could release himself.
When I visited, I sat at his side and silently read from the Psalms. I later forgot my Bible in the room. On Monday, after I returned to campus, my mother sat with her father-in-law and read aloud to him from the Psalms. The one you cited, Psalm 23, has always had special meaning for my mother, as for many. During a difficult time in her life, a minister had told her that it was not only about death but also about fear in life, about trusting God in all things. As my mother shared what she had learned, my grandfather passed.
In the weeks leading up to that day, he had said his goodbyes, had seen most of his numerous family members, had seemed to accept his imminent death to the point that he was essentially asking why God wouldn't get on with it already. So whatever it was that he heard in that message, I do believe it was what he needed to hear before he could allow himself to die peacefully.
I don't know what that means for everyone arriving their last moments, or if it is the same at all for others, but I know that after his death I experienced the most beautiful peace with death. Like you, I often thought back to the times that I'd learned a child could die or that anyone could die unexpectedly, thought back to the passing of various loved ones. But this one was different, and even as I mourned, I was reassured in faith in a way that I find difficult to describe.
Remember that it is all right to mourn and not to have absolute steadfastness or certainty at any given time. Feeling frightened or confused or sorrowful does not make you a bad Christian or a weak person; it simply places you in the perfect position to be fortified and comforted by your God, and perhaps to offer strength and hope to others as well.
This young man and his loved ones are in my prayers, as are you. I love you, dear one.
Peace and grace to you,
Kimmery
PS. This may interest you. It was actually published to another blog I occasionally read about 10 minutes before your post:
"Does our reaction to death make us human?" http://forbiddengospels.blogspot.com/2011/02/mellon-seminar-reflection-12-does-our.html