Thinking About the End

A couple of Sundays ago, I was wandering the church with my 3-year old daughter who believes she is too good for the nursery. The other toddlers and babies and preschoolers happily play in the nursery while their parents sit in church, but not Miss Hoity-Toity. Oh no. This is payback for the many judgmental thoughts I had as a teenage nursery attendant. I would roll my eyes at mothers who wouldn't let their little ones cry a little or a lot when they were abandoned in the nursery.

Well, now I'm that mother. I've left her a time or two in the nursery, but when I've returned, she was gasping for breath and extra-clingy for the next day or two. She has a genuinely slow-to-warm-up personality and I can't see any reason to leave her in the nursery. So, I do my spiritual worship while I trail behind her and try to convince her to be still, just for a while, just until the congregational singing ends at least.

So, there we were, hanging out in the fellowship hall looking at a large display of pictures and memorabilia that had been set up for a funeral the day before. I studied the pictures and artifacts of this man's life, calculated how old he was when he died, figured out how old he was when he was married. Then, my eyes fell upon a plain brown plastic box labeled with the man's name. The box held his cremated remains.

How odd it is to have your life summed up on a long table full of pictures and items. How strange to be condensed small enough to fit into an unremarkable box. Eighty-two years and now he's gone.

Tonight, my husband has gone to Seattle to visit a dying woman. The last time I saw her, she looked fantastic. A couple of years ago, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but she'd responded very well to treatment. But the end is near now. She will slip from being a member of our world to being a memory.

Sometimes, I can hardly stand the thought that our time here is short. The world looms large and I have only seen a tiny speck of it. I've sunk my feet into the sand at Cannon Beach only a dozen times a most. I watched the sun set in Tahiti only ten nights. I breathed the brilliant air at Mt. Rainier a mere half a dozen times. I've never seen the Northern Lights or the Alaskan coastline. I haven't eaten lobster in Maine, nor have I gazed at the Grand Canyon.

So many books wait to be read and that doesn't count the brilliant prose yet to be written. My shelves alone could keep me busy for months, if not years. I haven't read Dickens or Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." I never developed an appreciation for poetry.

I haven't seen a live production of "The Nutcracker" at Christmas. I've never been to Hawaii. I've never even seen Niagara Falls.

My children's journeys have scarcely begun. I want to see the directions they take. I want to be waiting at the dock when their ships come in. I want to cheer at the the finish line. I want to hold grandbabies and prove that mothers-in-law can also be friends.

I think of the really beautifully written books I've read. When I read a great book, I am eager to know what happens and simultaneous dread the book's end. That's a shadow of how I feel when I ponder the story of my life stretching ahead. I look forward to the unfolding tale, but I shirk from the end. The thought of closing the book feels like a boulder on my chest and I can't breathe. So mostly, I don't think about it. Until I see a brown plastic box holding what used to be over six feet of man.

Occasionally, I think I should just go ahead and save my husband the trouble by writing my obituary now. But then I realize how incomplete it would be . . . at least I hope that it would be incomplete. I have more life to live, more stories to tell, more boxes to check. I need more material before my obituary will be worth the money the newspaper will charge to run it.

Plus, I need a better picture.