Several years ago Tom, my best friend from high school, died in a car accident. It was unexpected as deaths go, the most personal encounter with it that I have had. I had never experienced a friend dying before. It hit me in its own way and to be honest I am still dealing with it, carrying the memory of my good friend and the knowledge that he no longer exists.
I didn't cry at his funeral. I couldn't cry. I even tried to make myself cry, thinking that it was appropriate and necessary, and in the attempt I ran through my mind every sad thought possible. No tears came though.
I mention all of this because the only time I see Tom now is in my dreams. He'll pop up in them every now and then and he has been making appearances more frequently now than ever. I think it is because my wife and I are getting closer and closer to the birth of our first child and there is that knowledge in the back of my mind that he will never share in that experience.
Tom was the most self-assured person I have ever known. To a lot of people that trait came off as a cockiness yet it was an endearing cockiness. While he had his own inner demons, as we all do, he possessed a strength that rubbed off onto others.
I miss him greatly.
We hadn't seen each other in a few years before he died. That's a hard thing...to never have that final goodbye, to wonder if the dead can ever know the impact that they had upon us, if they ever knew the love we felt for them. There are so many wishes left behind, never able to be fulfilled. And it is strange...our lives had parted since our last get together as I am sure is so common a thing. Not a parting out of hate or argument, but just the separation that comes with time, with people going about their different paths, having so many different experiences that they grow away from each other. It is the lack of shared experiences and it causes persons to move away from each other like flotsam being carried apart on tiny ripples and waves in a vast sea.
I dreamed about Tom again last night. I dreamt that I could go back in time and see him again, to try and prevent his death or to at least say goodbye. The dream hit me hard, harder than other have lately. Afterwards, I thought of how silly our lives are. How the important things and the scary things are really not that important or scary at all. I thought of how we are as children and about how my own child will soon enough experience going to school for the first time, make her own friends and enemies, and how those things will become so ultimate in importance for her.
John 11:1-6, 17-23,28b-37
Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, "Lord, he whom you love is ill." But when Jesus heard it, he said, "This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God's glory, so that the son of God may be glorified through it." Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. When Jesus arrived (in Bethany), he found that Lazarus was dead and had already been in the tomb four days. When Martha
heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give to you whatever you ask of him." Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again." Martha went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, "The Teacher is here and is calling for you." And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. The people who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and went to him. They followed her because they thought that she was going to Lazarus' tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." When Jesus saw her weeping, and the people who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus began to weep. So the people said, "See how he loved him!" But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?"
I don't like Jesus very much in this story from St. John's gospel. Lazarus dies because Jesus doesn't come soon enough to heal him. True, a few verses later he raises Lazarus from the dead, but I can't help but focus more on the emotional impact that his death had upon his sisters and other followers of Jesus. What sticks out most is the recorded interaction between Mary and Jesus. One can sense the anger she feels towards Jesus for not coming sooner. I think about that and I hope that the cries of Mary cut Jesus hard. I hope he felt guilty. The words of Martha and Jesus in this chapter remind me of a very traditional Christian response to illness, calamity, and death. This tragic thing has happened according to the greater will and glory of God. This thing has occurred for a reason and purpose known only to God. We cannot understand why it has happened but we must trust in God that there is some justifiable reason and purpose behind it all. I hate this response. I hate the blind trust of the sheep led to the slaughter.
I slip off to Tom's grave every now and then. I go because I am drawn to it by feelings I don't quite understand. When I arrive and stand in front of his tombstone I don't know exactly what to say or think and I fumble around trying to find something that feels appropriate. I'm not sure there is anything appropriate. The stones of the dead, mute and cold, are only there for us the living.
This is the puzzle of life and death.
By the rivers of Babylon-
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung our harps.
Psalm 137:1-2
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