It's Always About Mortality

 Notes and Confessions Lent 2022

I had a little health moment today. I'm not going to go into it because it will sound scarier to other people than it was to me. Enough to say it's a recurring health thing and I know what to do about it, and it passes. I also have a call into my doctor to debrief. 

Over 20 years ago, now, I had a friend who was dying. They lived a few hours away from me at the time, and so when I went to go see him and his wife, it was an overnight visit.

One of the last visits, if not the last one, I got there while he was on the phone with someone. I was hanging with his wife in their kitchen when I overheard him say, "No, don't come visit anymore, I don't have the energy for it and you'll need that money to come for the funeral." 

I turned to his wife and asked, "Did I push my way into this visit?" She shook her head and said it was all right. When he got off the phone I asked him again, "Are you sure it's okay I'm here? 

He said no, it was fine I was there. The person he was talking to wasn't okay with him dying, would get anxious when he showed signs of dying (he had awful coughing fits, for one) and then he'd try to suppress all his signs of dying, which only made him miserable. "But you," he said to me, "let me be sick. I don't have to hold back around you. You're okay with me dying and so I enjoy your visit." 

That sounds like I'm bragging on myself, but in my corner, I'd been through seminary and already trained in the art of being a "non-anxious presence." Nonetheless, I took it as one of the highest compliments I've ever received. 

I think a lot about him and that visit whenever I have some health issue. With all sincere appreciation for all the help I received when I had a huge surgery in 2013, I really prefer to be sick alone. I feel, with my friend, a need to be "not sick" around others. I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable, I don't want to make anyone anxious, I don't want anyone feeling like they need to do anything. The vast majority of people (admit it, possibly you) are not okay with sick people. We want to help, we want to make better, we want to not experience illness, even when it's not our own. It is, understandably, too much a reminder of our collective fragility. Mortality. 

We're going to die. I don't like it.  I do not look forward to it. I will be the sort to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Probably. If confronted with the inevitable, I'm also likely to surrender to it. I can't see the future. 

I'm not particularly afraid of it, and so when I have something that I know is not imminently life threatening, I keep it to myself. I'll deal with, consult my physicians, and if it does turn into something "more" then I'll tell the people who need to know. And with some I'll have to act healthier than with others, but I"ll do my best to remind myself of the love involved. 

And in the event that this is too much of a Debbie Downer (hey, it is lent), I'll finish by saying this. At lunch, I wrote a monologue for the play I'm working on and the character told me something I didn't know about him before and that's so super exciting. That's been happening a lot lately with this play. I hope it doesn't get out of hand, but I keep thinking, "I'm really close to having a full draft of this thing" and then I go, "There's still so much to learn and reveal here!" 

To answer a question posed by Barbara Brown Taylor, this play is what is saving me today. Despite occasional "health moments" I have so much reason to live and everyday I find something that is saving me. I'm okay with dying and maybe there will eventually come a day when peace with death will save me. But not today. Thanks be to God, not today.