Naturally

I have struggled against this. Struggled with this. Reasoned against reason and listened to the professionals who are paid to know more than I do. But the only one who knows my heart, besides my God, is me. Learning to trust my heart has been harder than learning to trust my God.

Death is not natural.

It’s not. It’s a thief. It’s a liar. It’s an illusion.

I’ve been reassured without reassurance for more than two years that death is a natural part of life. That it is, as songwriters insist, the “circle of life.” This is exactly why music is so powerful. And also, at times, dangerous. Caught up in the emotion of its swell and passion, who really listens to the words? Yet the words are the most important thing.

Death is the enemy. How can we believe it’s a natural part of life when it is the exact opposite of life? The day the palliative care doctor called and said Rob wanted to “die a natural death,” was the day my heart began to beat out of rhythm. Something wasn’t right. Those couldn’t have been his words. It didn’t sound like Rob. It didn’t sound like God either. What is supposed to be so natural about a life ending?

That’s the point. Life doesn’t end. Death is an unnatural separation of a soul from its body. Our bodies were designed by God to last forever. That’s the reason it’s so hard to die, because we weren’t meant to die at all. And by that, I mean that our bodies were not meant to die. Something has interfered with God’s design.

We stood at the foot of Rob’s hospital bed watching as he labored to breathe, listening as the cheerful hospice representative voiced the pattern we were encouraged to follow. “You can go now, Rob,” she insisted. “It’s all right. You can go.” Easy for her to say. He wasn’t the sun to her moon. He was mine.

The idea was that he was now hesitant, despite what we’d witnessed when we asked him ourselves if he wanted to “die a natural death.” Again, words spoken in the pattern of the professionals. The implication was that we were unwilling to let him go. That we had to release the reins of our hold on him so he could escape his body in peace.

But here is what I struggle with. If letting him go was the greatest act of love I could ever give him, why am I still in so much pain? I have been robbed of Rob. He was robbed of the future we dreamed about together. Of watching his grandchildren grow and investing in their hearts and lives. They grieve his loss still. Surely this is not natural.

It’s not. And I’m weary of being told that it is the final step in life, as if we are, as that melancholy shepherd journaled, flowers that bloom in the field only to disappear when a wind sweeps over it. (Psalm 103) Only that’s not exactly what he wrote. It’s an analogy, because David was an artist who painted with words. But words matter. When you read that in context, he prefaced it by saying, “As for man, his days are like grass.” Here today, gone tomorrow, our days are like grass, disappearing quickly, difficult to remember. But mankind, humans, are created in God’s image, the image of the Eternal One. The One Who does not die. And neither do we.

I think the problem lies here—the topic of death has been taken over by humanistic logic. Evolutionary explanation. A reduction in our value. If we are simply another in the animal kingdom, then we can be summed up by the words, “Start” and “Finish.” We become walking tombstones, lacking the details as represented by a three-inch hyphen separating “Birth date” and “Death date.” That’s it. That’s the total summation of a human being. You were born. The wind blew. You died.

Pathetic.

I will not accept that death wins. Nor that it is “normal” and “natural.” I don’t have to. Jesus didn’t, or he wouldn’t have stood in his full humanity at the grave of his friend, Lazarus, and ugly cried like He did. Of course those who are released from the confines of physical bodies are jubilant afterward. I’m not an idiot. I fully realize that Rob wouldn’t want to come back here even if he had the chance, no matter how much he loves all of us. And he loves all of us tremendously. I get that. If he needed my permission or my blessing to be set free from his suffering and an interminable future in a broken body, I loved him enough to put his needs before my own and I did.

I am through being mollified or patronized with the idea that having to make a decision like that at all is “natural” or even “God’s will.” I've lost my person and half of my heart. This is no place for judgment.  I won’t be convinced to put a new spin on Rob’s death by painting it up with flowers and flourishes labeled as “natural.”

If death was not natural to Jesus, then it is not natural to us either. He’s the one who called it the Final Enemy and promised it will eventually be put under his feet. I admit, it would soothe my heart in this terrible meantime between losing Rob and being with him again if I could view his death as a common transition. If I could stop fighting against the unfairness of it all. Stop pushing back against the idea that it is normal and ordinary, even expected, to see God’s damaged, perfect creation perish.

But I can’t. Because He doesn’t.

We are not grass. We are eternal. Created in the image of God.