Death is out of place

In death there are no constants, nothing sure, except that it will come. No speed of light, pi, two-plus-two, no gravity.

If you're a smoker, like to drink a lot, or revel in skydiving, if you're just plain mean, you could outlast the health nut and survive the careful jogger or fat-skimping queen. In death you can't predict who'll last and live the longest.

Nothing's sure but death and taxes, but with death you're never sure of when or how you'll go --- by falls or heart attacks, by cancer, stroke, too many M&Ms. You don't know where you'll be at your last breath. On board a plane that crashes in a field? Will you be choking in a diner at your death? Or die from duct tape in your safe room, sealed?

If only death could be erased like cold when winter ends. In spring, no one would die, and for a season no one could grow old, no aches advance, no wrinkles, no goodbye. There's something wrong with death. It doesn't fit. It's like a clip-art graphic in the Louvre.

Survivors know there's something wrong with it. They push the dark away. It doesn't move. Death never comes to those you think it should, but comes instead to everyone you love. While relatives fall ill --- you lose the good --- the Castros thrive and claim more than enough of life.

The man who ripped you off survives into his 90s, and with wealth to spare. He cheats on taxes, goes through scores of wives. He bullies underlings and doesn't care.

And death appears to have no sense of timing, coming uninvited hours early for dinner, at your door, while you are climbing out of bed. It seems in such a hurry. That morning knock, each time, sends out a jolt of dread, confusion, fear and inner pain. You must refuse to answer! Lock the bolt and hook the latch, then quickly slide the chain.

We're never ready. Never. We might think we have sufficient warning, but we're wrong. We brace ourselves, prepare, try not to blink. Then death bangs not the doorbell but a gong. Death always comes as such a great surprise, zinging like an arrow to its mark. Or, slowly crushing, right before our eyes, the ones we love.

It simply cannot work that death's as natural as tears or breath. It shocks us, slaps us every single time! We can't adjust or just resign to death. It simply isn't part of earth's design.

The Word who authored life showed that our blood was meant to course forever through our veins. But real human choice demands that should we choose our ways to His, we feel the pain of separation that He knows from all who turn away from Him, and from His gift of life. One life span is a world too small. All nature screams of something more, some shift or lift into another span of life.

Not only nature, but the age-old Word that comes both as a book and as a knife that slices soul from marrow, joints and blood. That Word, both flesh and page, holds more than hope in this world. It proclaimed a land apart, above.

Approachable by those who grope for meaning and for truth through hands and heart. Though spat upon, and mocked a thousand ways, though crucified and buried in a rock, though now misquoted or revised away, though jumbled, trampled, mangled and forgotten, the Word that echoed out from tomb to ear for centuries is muffled, but not stilled.

Buried inside churches every year, by programs, papers, pews that must be filled, until the Word is just a whispered song, it still can sing that we are more than bone. No matter whether life is short or long, we're made for more, for we are not alone.

Donna Marmorstein, American News April 2003