On Death

I always find myself deeply shaken when someone around my age dies. Seems like it has happened too much over the past year. I was just looking at pictures of Heath Ledger’s 28-year-old body being wheeled out of his apartment on a gurney. His body is not wrapped in expensive clothes anymore. It is naked – just as he entered the world - and covered with black cloth, covering a face that I admired many times. Today, his piles of money are waiting to be divvied up as is his closet full of clothes, and his fancy Manhattan apartment sits waiting for its next tenant to move in. But he doesn’t exist anymore. He’s nowhere on the earth…suddenly. His two-year old daughter had a dad yesterday. Today she is fatherless.

Death doesn’t feel real. Its mystery leaves me bewildered and numb. I don’t believe the body takes the soul down with it - I believe the soul continues to live. I believe that Jesus is the beginning and the end…and will continue to exist and know me and love me even when my body stops. But I tell you…it takes everything within me to muster the faith to believe it because it’s all so unknown and it doesn’t make sense. And sometimes I don’t believe it.

As I was sitting here looking at the black body bag on the gurney, a song played on my computer shouting “Hallelujah!” over and over again, and my eyes welled up. I’m so thankful that death, whether gruesome or peaceful or painful, is not the end. When the day comes – and it will come – that my lifeless body is zipped up in a bag and thrown into the ground, it will not be “tragic.” It will be just as it should be. Whether I die at age 28 or 108, it will not be “untimely” or “too early.” It will be right on time. I often think I’ve lost my mind– believing that the soul lives on and that Jesus will always be, but that is my hope.