I have just written a rather lengthy essay on the subject aging and death.  So my blog this week will consist of an excerpt from that essay, “Way Beyond Time.”

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Death somehow always comes as a surprise, as an aberration, though it is the experience that we surely hold most in common with all living things.  We learn that we are “terminal,” as they say of the place where you get off, the last stop, and we feel misjudged, even betrayed.  Won’t I be the exception?

We know others die.  And we think, it’s too bad isn’t it.  But it’s always someone else.  A woman says to her husband, “Sweetheart, if one of us should die first, I think I’ll go and live in Paris.”

Years ago one of my minister friends told me a story about a pastoral visit he had with a man who was 89 years old.  The man had been told that he had cancer, and that the disease was advanced.  He was “terminal.”  When my minister friend approached the man’s hospital bed to bring him some comfort of whatever kind can come when there is nothing to be said, the old man looked at him, incredulous, and asked, “Why me?”

Five years later I am visiting that same minister friend.  His name is Dan.  Before he became a minister, he was a postman.  Now he has brain cancer, and he is dying.  The ministers of his acquaintance have pooled their money to buy him and his wife a new washing machine and dryer so they won’t have to go across town to the laundromat.  I was one of Dan’s closest friends when we were seminary students, and I love the man, so I have flown down to say good-bye.  His head is shaved from his surgeries, and he is thin.  A Buddhist who has meditated for years, Dan is calm and quiet.  On the other hand, I am frustrated and angry, and tears edge out in spite of myself.  I want to rant and rave.  Dan says, “It’s all right.  I’m all right.”  And I see that he is.  He died a few weeks later.  Every time I dance to “Three Dog Night” I remember how Dan used to leap into the air, dancing to their music: “Joy to the world, all the boys and girls, joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me.”