Unsettled

Tonight I received an email I'd been dreading, from the husband of a long-lost friend of mine. A friend who, I found out late last year, was struggling with a particularly bad cancer situation. I got back in touch with her after I heard the news, and we exchanged a couple of emails. Then I didn't hear anything from her for quite a while. I finally dropped her a line asking how she was doing and got no response. Until this evening, when her husband wrote to tell me that she had passed away about two weeks ago.

She was 33 years old. Like me.

I try not to think about death very much, but sometimes, like tonight, the subject is hard to avoid. And although my faith tells me that death isn't the end, the truth is, it still scares me a lot. Death is the ultimate unknown, and I've never handled the unknown very well. I like to feel as though I'm in control of my life, and in control of the things that happen to me. But having cancer has been a major a blow to that illusion. Even though my prognosis has been good from the beginning of this whole surreal saga, I've found it difficult not to think about my mortality.

"O death, where is thy sting?" wrote the Apostle Paul in his letter to the early church in Rome. Well, I'll tell you where it is. It's in the word "goodbye" when we don't get the opportunity to say it. Or when we do, knowing it's the last time. And it's in the sobering realization that we ever have to say it at all.