Facing Mortality

On July 5, many years ago, my family found out there was something critically wrong with my father. He was in acute kidney failure. It was my birthday, and we sat in a restaurant (Mother's Pizza -- back in the day when it still existed) and pretended to celebrate, but really, acute kidney failure was at the front and centre of all our minds. How could it not be? A few days later we found out it was cancer: multiple myeloma, to be exact. He was given 6-18 months to live. There was no cure.

On July 5, this year, I turned the same age that my father was when he was diagnosed. Ironically, I have been reading a book called Rejoicing in Lament, by Todd Billings. (It is excellent; you should read it.) Billings was diagnosed with — you guessed it — multiple myeloma. The life expectancy is far longer, but it is still an incurable cancer. And so Billings and his loved ones are facing mortality, even as my family had to do, and I am reading about his journey on the anniversary of the same day we began my father's journey, at the same age that my father was.

It has been sobering — remembering those days so long ago, knowing that I am now the same age that he was, all whilst being in the middle of a pandemic.

Because, you see, the declaration of a pandemic is, in many ways, similar to a diagnosis of cancer, except that it is much wider-spread.

There is the same staggering sense of disbelief. It can't really be happening. Pandemics, and cancer, are things that happen to other people. In the movies. They are the sort of "oh-the-poor-soul-thank-God-it's-not-me" happenings of life until suddenly it IS me, and nothing makes sense anymore. I wake up and think that it must all be a bad dream only to realise again and again that it's not a dream and it is still bad.

There is the same sudden thrust into an unknown world of medical terminology. We are scrambling to make sense of the inscrutable. We are learning new vocabularies -- epidemiology, R0, antibodies, T-cells. We are memorising long lists of strange symptoms and examining ourselves for them daily (hourly?) Every twinge, every ache, every drop of sweat, every tickle in the throat becomes cause for alarm.  We have become acutely aware of all our internal workings.

There is the same waiting game. We watch the numbers -- are they going up? Are they going down? Is what we're doing working? When the numbers go in the right direction, hope soars. When they don't, hope plummets. And we watch. And we wait. And we hope and we pray and watch and wait and hope and pray some more. Our lives revolve around medical updates and numbers.

There is the same effort to grasp at normalcy, to find something, anything that isn't touched by the new reality, the "new normal" that is, in fact, so far from normal it's almost a joke to call it any kind of normal, even a new one.  But it doesn't work that way. Cancer and pandemics destroy normal. They affect how we feel and how we look (chemo head and pandemic hair might be opposite ends of the spectrum, but they have the same effect). They affect what we can do. They blast routine into smithereens. We slowly become aware that more and more of life is affected by this intruder, be it cancer or COVID -- both are thieves of "normal". And it is hard to not resent it. Everyone has a breaking point, a point at which he or she stops accepting what the thief is stealing and becomes angry and tries to fight back. Maybe it is the cancer patient shaving her hair before the chemo causes it to fall out. Maybe it is my father insisting that he is going to have a Blooming Onion at the Rockton Fair just three weeks before he died because, blast it all, he liked them. Maybe it is the person refusing to wear a mask in indoor public places, and becoming angry about it when challenged. It is useless, of course, fighting back, but oh, how we long for a return to normalcy, the way life was "before".

But mostly, there is the same confrontation with my own mortality. We could die. I could die. I remember, very shortly after my father was diagnosed, driving somewhere and becoming almost paralysed with a fear that I was going to crash my car and die in that moment. I tried to settle myself by telling myself something like this: Don't be so ridiculous! That's not going to happen! That kind of thing only happens to other people. No sooner had that thought crossed my mind when another one rose up: That's what you thought about cancer, too, and look how that turned out. It was the first time in my young life that I was confronted in a visceral way with my own mortality -- I could die. In fact, I was absolutely going to die, if not in the car that day, then some day.

We spend a great deal of our time pretending we are not going to die. Our culture tells us that talking about death is "morbid", that is, that it shows an unhealthy or abnormal interest in disturbing or unpleasant topics. So I acknowledge my mortality academically -- I don’t truly think that I or my loved ones are going to live forever -- but at an emotional level, I live as though we will. And then along comes cancer. Or COVID. And suddenly, the reality of our mortality slaps me across the face like a stunning blow. I could die. This could kill me. I obsess over "mortality rates", attempting to determine just how likely it is that I could die.  I rage against this thing that demonstrates to me just how mortal I really am. How very human and fragile we are. Our mortality is no longer an academic exercise but an emotional reality.  If cancer, or COVID, teaches me anything, it is that I and our loved ones could die -- at any moment.

So, here I am, same age, same date, reading about the same disease, and it all feels very, very familiar. 

Grief. Oh, it’s not always the gut-stabbing, breath-catching, heart-stopping grief that is so easy to diagnose as grief. It’s often the wistful longing for normal, the deep-sighing, teeth-gritting, just-keeping-on kind of grief that can disguise itself as weariness, disinterest, lack of motivation, or even anger. Everything feels harder. Everything feels covered with a layer of dust. It’s like looking out at a world of colour through dirty glasses, so that it’s all smudged and misty, even in the most dazzling sunshine. Grief because death hurts. Losing a loved one causes heart-stopping pain. Just the fear of losing a loved one brings its own exquisite ache. My heart flinches from it the way my hand flinches from a hot stove.

But the truth is that part of my grief arises because this season so sharply reminds me that I am not God. Cancer and COVID are quick to show me just how much “not God” I am when I am tempted to put myself on the throne as I build my kingdom of me with all MY hopes and MY dreams and MY plans. It is a death that needs to happen, just as cancer cells need to die. But the cure is hard. My sinful self-glorification must die, but The death of the sinful nature is still death. It still hurts. This season hurts. 

My mortality was never meant to prompt only academic acquiescence.  I am a finite, fragile, fallen human being, here today and gone tomorrow. Soap bubbles. I am not God. On this side of Christ's return, I am mortal. And I am called to live that way every single day, not just when I am handed diagnoses of cancer or COVID. Every breath I breathe is a gift from God. Every heartbeat happens because he says to my heart, "Do it again. And again. And again." My life, my every breath, my heartbeat is in his hands.  There is peace in knowing that. It allows me to grieve fully without despair.

So I am grieving.  It is sometimes hard to find the balance between living as though death won’t happen and living in fear of death. I am learning again to love as though I’m going to live forever, and to forgive as though I’m going to die today. I get there, day by day, as I open my eyes up to discover that I’m still living in a COVID world, that life still looks grey and dusty, but that a new day has dawned and God says to me, “Another day! Do it again!”

“So teach us to number our days

That we may get a heart of wisdom.”

— Psalm 90:12

Weeping over Alliums

I have discovered a love for gardening. Over the last number of years, I have been blessed to have the opportunity to play in the dirt, and I have been putting in raised beds, planting plants, pruning trees and bushes, and so on. Some things have been a success -- the raised beds I put in last year grew several meals of delicious fresh peas and beans, as well as loads of lettuce. Some things have gone fairly well -- the carrots and beets were small but delicious. Some things have been an unmitigated disaster. I did not harvest a single pepper off of nine plants -- they grew fruit but never ripened, and the squirrels stole almost all of the few heritage-variety tomatoes before I could get to them.

I really have no clue what I'm doing. I basically bung a plant in the ground and watch what happens. I've discovered that you really can kill forsythia by pruning it back too hard. Then again, maybe it was already dying; it hadn't flowered for years. Full sun apparently means more than four hours a day.  Clay is hard work. So is shade. And so is a yard prone to flooding after heavy rain.

And "deer and rabbit resistant" is a lie.

Or maybe it was squirrels.

Last fall, I planted 25 allium bulbs, and 25 camassia bulbs. "Attracts bees", they said. "Deer and rabbit resistant," they said. Heaven knows that's critical in our yard, where three or four rabbits can be seen frolicking about on any given evening, and everyone knows that where there are three or four, there are actually dozens.

They came up with a flourish this spring. All of them. Within days, the rabbits were eating at the new leaves of the camassias. They left the alliums alone -- of course they did. Alliums are of the onion family and taste and smell distinctly like their more bulbous cousins. But apparently the camassias were fine eating. So, I cut the bottoms out of flower pots and yogurt containers, and surrounded each emerging shoot with a protective cone. When the plants were a bit bigger, I figured they'd be ok on their own.

It worked. And so my camassias and alliums grew and thrived and send up a host of promising buds. I had visions of a sea of purple pompoms and blue spires. (Ok, probably a sea was overly optimistic. More like a shallow pond. But still. And the best part of alliums, at least, is that they readily self-seed, and so I knew that next year, I'd have a lake's worth of purple pompoms.)

And then it happened. I woke up one Sunday morning and took the dog out and discovered that of my 25 beautiful alliums, 18 of them had been beheaded and the foliage trampled. The buds lay scattered about my garden, snapped off and discarded.

By 9:00 that evening, every other allium had met the same fate.

I stood in my back garden and bawled my eyes out.

I literally cried myself to sleep that night.

Over alliums.

But it wasn't really over alliums. It was the disappointment. The failed expectations. The hard work that didn't pay off. The promise that wasn't fulfilled. It was this whole year.

It was a year that started off bright and full of promise, and it has twisted into this blighted awful thing that just goes on and on and is one loss followed by another. We couldn't get together for Easter. Mother's Day was a write-off. Victoria Day weekend was a washout on so many levels. Graduations are cancelled. Shootings in Nova Scotia. One day, the Snowbirds flew directly over our yard while I was out working, and it was awesome to see them, and a few days later, one of them crashed. Sorrow upon sorrow, disappointment upon disappointment, and my alliums were just one more thing, and I cried like I haven't cried in months. Over all of it. Over this whole messed-up year, and our whole messed-up world, including my beautiful alliums that weren't eaten, just wantonly destroyed. An ocean of purple turned into a river of tears.

And that's the way of grief so often. It builds. Sometimes I don't even know that I'm grieving, and then I find myself overreacting to something innocuous (although having every allium beheaded isn't exactly innocous, except in the grand scheme of things). I could have told myself to buck up, to not be silly. I could have scolded myself for my tears. I could have reminded myself that they are just alliums, and they'll grow back next year, and rabbits (or squirrels) will be rabbits (or squirrels). But I didn't. I let myself cry. I knew it wasn't just the alliums. And I cried with God. I told him this year sucked. I told him I was ready for it to be over. I told him I hated rabbits and squirrels with a holy hatred that verged on unholy hatred. (I even texted my brother to see if he had an air rifle I could use to send the varmints to their eternal home. You will be glad to know he did not, and no wildlife has been injured in the creating of this garden. Cages are, however, prolific.)

I told him I was sad and that I missed my old life, the life where I felt safe and in control. I told him how hard it was to trust him to be in control when I felt so out of control and vulnerable. I cried and I prayed, and I prayed and I cried until I fell asleep.

I still feel sad often. And that's ok. I feel happy, too. My camassias, also in bud, were protected forthwith, with cages. It wasn't quite the look I was going for, but it did the trick. The camassias survived and have begun flowering. They are quite beautiful, unfolding above their cages.





















It's the way of today, it seems. We bloom. Within cages, perhaps, but we bloom.

The rabbits (or squirrels, but my bet is on rabbits) didn't behead quite all the alliums. They left one. It was the one most accessible. And it seems fitting that they left it.

It's fasciated. Twisted and blighted. Just like this year.

And yet ... somehow ... still trying to carry on, to do what it was created to do, beautiful in its own odd way.

That's somehow comforting. If my one remaining allium can carry on, then perhaps I can, too.

A Time to Trust

It has been the year of 1000 days, and we are on day 2789.

I have spent the last ten weeks at home. Ten weeks. It feels like forever. It has been forever. Basically, the only place I've been for the last ten weeks is to the barn to take care of my horse. We've had groceries delivered. We've had pet food delivered. We've had plants delivered. I'm even getting a pair of new jeans delivered. And, you know, in a lot of ways, it's been ok. I've had loads to do. I had to finish up my courses at the college I teach at, and then I had to do work on a course toward my doctorate. I've been busy in the garden. Every day has been filled with purpose, and I'm grateful for that.

But in the last few weeks, especially as things have started to open back up again a little, I've discovered things about myself that I don't like. I was getting more and more afraid. I found myself looking at people with suspicion and fear. Getting gas felt like walking through a minefield. I was trying to walk through the world without touching anything or anyone. "Out there" felt dangerous. "At home" felt safe. The rigamarole of trying to remember to disinfect my hands, not touch my face, not touch germy surfaces, stay two metres away from everyone, remember not to touch my steering wheel until I'd disinfected my hands, and on and on and on in a desperate effort to not get sick is exhausting. It didn't feel worth it. Leaving the house didn't feel worth it. It was easier to just stay home and avoid everyone altogether. Plaguey bags of pestilence -- that's how I was looking at people. Every time I got back home, I breathed a sigh of relief.

I am naturally an introvert and a homebody, and I think I could quite easily become agoraphobic.

I am missing my loved ones, missing my friends and colleagues, missing my church, missing hugs, but I was becoming more afraid of the risks. I am afraid of the people I love most, and they are afraid of me. I am afraid of doing things I have always enjoyed doing. It strikes me as especially cruel that if my loved ones are suffering, I am to keep my distance. So my friends are crying and I stand at a distance and let them cry alone because I am too afraid that I might get sick if I break that precious two-metre rule. Oh, I am staying healthy, physically, but I'm not living. I'm being told I need to fear everyone and they need to fear me. But I miss them. And I'm pretty sure that if this is how I need to live for the next two years in order to avoid getting sick, until maybe a vaccine is available, or maybe a vaccine will never be available, then by the time a vaccine comes available, if it ever does, my heart of flesh will once again be a heart of stone. I will start believing what I am now feeling — people, even my loved ones, are to be feared and avoided. I will be content to stay inside and stay safe because I will have stopped feeling and stopped caring.

While I was becoming aware of all of this, I was writing a paper for my doctorate. A paper on the sovereignty of God.

And I began to think: what does it really mean, practically, for me to say that I believe God is in control? I'll tell you what I think I mean by it. I think that when I say, "God is in control,"  I'm saying something like, God has the power to make this all go away with a wave of his wand, and I'm pretty sure that he's going to do it right quick. (I know that's supposed to be an adverb. Poetic license.) He's going to inspire some brilliant scientist who is going to create a vaccine in, like, six months, and we'll all go back to normal living just like that, and we can look back on this year with a fond shudder and pat ourselves on the back for having survived the pandemic of 2020. He's going to somehow make this all go away even without the scientist, because, well, this is inconvenient. And it's horrible. And I hate it. And God is good, so he's going to just make it all disappear. Because, after all, he's in control. Maybe what some people mean is that they can act like idiots and go around licking doorknobs in public places because God will prevent them from getting sick. They can just ignore all government regulations (or suggestions) (or suggestions that become regulations -- it's hard to keep up with it all) because God is going to prevent the coronavirus from affecting their bodies the way it affects everyone else.

But what if that's not what it means? What does God’s being in control mean when the coronavirus doesn’t go away and there is no vaccine and I need to learn to live in this new reality? I have been focused on staying alive and keeping my loved ones alive. But what happens when the cost of staying alive comes at the price of living? What does God being in control mean when staying alive costs me love and I get fear instead?

When this whole thing started, I saw often this quote by Martin Luther: “Very well, by God’s decree the enemy has sent us poison and deadly offal. Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence." Don't panic. Ask God to protect us. Wash your hands often. Avoid contaminated surfaces. And for goodness' sake, stay home. Socially distance. Flatten the curve. Etc. Basically, everyone stay alive.

But that quote is a four-line section out of an eight-page essay on how Christians in 1527 should respond during the bubonic plague. When I read the whole document, one thing became clear: there is no one right way to respond. Luther says, If you are needed, you should be available. If there is no one else available, you are obliged to help. If you are not needed, but are not afraid, you should stay. But if you are not needed, and you are afraid, you may flee the plague. However, he adds this caveat for those fleeing: "I am nevertheless in (God’s) hands in this danger as in any other which might overtake me. (His) will be done. My flight alone will not succeed of itself because calamity and harm are everywhere." I can try to protect myself from the coronavirus and I might catch it anyway. I could avoid COVID-19 and die from some other cause. There are no guarantees -- not in pandemics and not outside of them.

And earlier in the same document, Luther writes this: "What do all kinds of pestilence or devils mean over against God, who binds and obliges himself to be our attendant and physician? Shame and more shame on you, you out-and-out unbeliever, for despising such great comfort and letting yourself become more frightened by some small boil or some uncertain danger than emboldened by such sure and faithful promises of God!" Luther isn't saying, "Don't not fear the danger." He isn't saying, "There is no danger. Just go out there and live your life." He isn't arguing that it's all a mass-conspiracy to inhibit democratic freedom or anything of the like. In fact, he speaks harshly against those who have that attitude. He calls them murderers. Neither is he suggesting that we should go out and deliberately get sick just to get it over with. He calls that suicide. (Apparently the way people react to pandemics hasn’t changed very much in 500 years.)

Instead, Luther argues against allowing fear to override doing the right thing. He says, "The devil is such a bitter, knavish devil that he not only unceasingly tries to slay and kill, but also takes delight in making us deathly afraid, worried, and apprehensive so that we should regard dying as horrible and have no rest or peace all through our life. And so the devil would excrete us out of this life as he tries to make us despair of God, become unwilling and unprepared to die, and, under the stormy and dark sky of fear and anxiety, make us forget and lose Christ, our light and life, and desert our neighbor in his troubles." And that, I fear, is what I have been doing. I have seen people in pain and suffering, and rather than going to them, I have stood back for fear of getting sick. I have allowed the fear of getting sick, or the fear of loved ones getting sick, to shape my attitude toward people Jesus died for. It is hard to love someone I see as a plaguey bag of pestilence. It is hard to think kindly of those I see as threatening my physical wellbeing because they get too close to me in the grocery store. It is hard to live when I am focused solely on staying alive, as though staying alive is the most important thing and dying is so horrible it should be avoided at all costs. It is even hard to put aside my own comfort by putting on a mask for the sake of another's wellbeing.

In some ways, it would be easy to lock myself into my sterilised home and peer suspiciously through the drapes at the world out there, and tell myself that God is in control as I hope that I might wake up tomorrow to a world magically freed of the coronavirus. I would stay alive. But doing so is killing me. It is killing my soul. It is allowing fear to rule over trust in God. It is allowing my own attempts to control my wellbeing to rule over my trust that God is in control of my wellbeing. If I truly trust that God is in control, then I need to learn to live, not just survive, in a world with COVID-19. I don't quite know what that means yet. I know that part of it means that when I saw my mom this past week, I gave her a hug. We wore masks, and then after that, we Took our masks off, kept our distance, and visited outside, but not giving her a hug when I knew she needed one would have been wrong. Part of it means going to the barn and being truly happy to hang out with my friends there, physically distanced, to be sure, but not spending every second fretting about what I've touched or not touched or what they've touched or not touched. So, on Saturday, we were there together, and we celebrated a birthday and we had cake and lemonade and we sang Happy Birthday (dryly, not moistly) and we forewent the candles. We did our best to stay physically distanced, and we did well but not perfectly, and it was ok. It was wonderful. It felt almost ... normal. It might mean offering my neighbour a hug when he stands there crying because his dog died, instead of telling him (as I did) that I can’t hug him. (I’m ashamed of that now.)

Luther has one more word to say. "Everyone should prepare in time and get ready for death.... He should become reconciled with his neighbour and make his will so that if the Lord knocks and he departs... he has provided for his soul, has left nothing undone, and has committed himself to God." I've had the conversation. I've told my loved ones that I do not want to be put on a ventilator, should there ever come a time when I get COVID-19 and need one. I am ready to die. I know my Lord and Saviour. To depart from the body is to be present with Christ. The thought of being put into a drug-induced coma and to be hooked up to a machine that breathes for me for weeks on end, lying there totally alone, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits fill me with far more horror than the thought of dying to be with Christ. I am not looking to die, but saying that God is sovereign and that he is in control means that I do not need to fear dying. My life is in his hands. My loved ones' lives are in his hands. Should they die of COVID-19, I will grieve. I will cry my eyes out. It will hurt. But I will still adore my Jesus. I will know that they are in his hands, even as I am. And I will look with more longing than ever for the day when I am with them again.

There are no guarantees. There never have been. My father died over 20 years ago, long before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19. I have lost many loved ones -- people whose losses have broken my heart and left me sobbing till I thought I might throw up. None of them died of the coronavirus. I am not going to allow this pandemic to harden my heart and fill me with fear and turn my belief that God is in control into lipservice and not heart service.

So what do I really mean when I say that God is in control? It means I believe that the revelation of God's glory will make every bit of this suffering today worth it. The day will come when I will stand before him and see his glory and recognise that every one of his decrees was good and right and glorious. It means I will step in where I am needed, however I am needed, even if it puts my life in danger. It means I will strive to keep my heart soft and not allow it to become calloused by fear and suspicion. It means I will obey stipulations and suggestions for the sake of others, even when they inconvenience me, but I will not trust that those stipulations or suggestions are what is keeping me healthy.

It means I will be willing to risk staying alive for the sake of really living, knowing that my life is in God's hands. I will truly live today, because today God has given me breath in my lungs. If tomorrow he takes the breath from my lungs, then "with my final heartbeat, I will kiss the world goodbye, then go in peace, and laugh on Glory's side, and fly to Jesus, fly to Jesus, fly to Jesus and live!"