Dying Well

Hank DuBose died on a Tuesday.  It was a beautiful day in early March and he commented on it several times to his wife because it followed a string of cold, wet, miserable days.  He may have secretly, briefly thought of the things he'd be doing to his yard if he was in his own home instead of in this place for "Old Fogies" as he called them, but he didn't let on because that's the kind of man Hank was.  He thought you needed a little darkness to see the stars and he always looked forward to things to come.

His wife Alice made him take his jacket before they went to dinner.  He protested but she knew the deceptive nature of these March days.  It would be summer as long as the sun shined but as soon as the shadows of evening came out, it would be winter again.  He had taken the jacket from her, and hooked it over his arm, and talked of the pulled meat sandwiches they would eat in the cafeteria.

There was a lull in the conversation as they walked together on the sidewalk.  Then he collapsed.  She tried to break his fall but she was surprised at the heaviness of his body.  His arms stayed down at his sides and he scraped his elbow and his forehead on the sidewalk when he landed with a sickening thud.  She knew instinctively that he would never wake up.  Fear filled her as she always knew it would but there was a calm in her too.  She rolled him flat on his back, flicked the dirt off his sleeve, and held his hand until the medics arrived.

The next day, when Hank's daughter told her friends the news, they clucked and sighed and apologized and their eyes welled for her.  She held her hands up and said with a sad smile, "It's ok.  Really, it is.  He was a Christian for most of his life and this is the way he always wanted to go: in possession of all his faculties, next to the woman he loved, looking forward to things.  He always wanted it to be sudden."

It was a comforting thought to us, her friends, and the prayer flew into my mind before I could stop it: God, let me go like that too.  Still healthy at the end of a long life, not sick and bedridden, my body wearing out before my heart is ready to stop beating.  In the presence of my family who still loves me, thinking I'm going to dinner in 15 minutes.  Just walking along and BOOM.  Or maybe as I sleep, dreaming of the breakfast I'm going to eat when the sun comes up.  That's how I want to die.  Thank you for taking Hank that way.  Take me like that too.

That's what dying well looks like, I thought.

But even as I said the prayer I knew that God already sees the end of my days.  He knows how it will be, whether or not there will be suffering, and the answer to that plea for things to be comfortable at the end might be "Yes," but it also might be, "No."

And then I thought of the story of Abigail Smith, who suffered so greatly in her young life before cancer took her.

And I realized the pointlessness of such a plaintive request for God to make things easy for me.

It was His goodness that Hank should have had such a comfortable death but it was also His goodness that in Abigail's suffering, 30,000 people would hear through her story that He can take something evil and make it His business to redeem it for something good.

That's what God is about.

Not making life or death easy.

So my prayer is different now.

God, take me in Your time and in Your way.  All I ask is the courage to face it in a way that brings others to a closer understanding of Your goodness.  Amen.