Heaviness

Death and dying.  These words have surrounded me literally and figuratively.  A good friend is getting married this weekend here in Seattle, yet her fiancee's brother suddenly died from cancer last week - how to celebrate a marriage when their family is certainly grieving a life?  I'm faced with a family member's imminent death - unobligingly recalling childhood memories that are certainly soon to be all I have left.  It's only a matter of time.  

And a dying to self.  What to make of the parts of me that must die in order for my surroundings to remain status quo?  The parts of me that are bursting to be let out, but that will upset the homeostasis?  Figurative death.  Its residue is thick and sticky, hot and suffocating.

And what makes death so taboo?  Why might it be upsetting for you to read this?  To consider my thoughts about death?  To consider your own thoughts about death?  Your own figurative deaths and the literal deaths that surround you daily?  Why am I so afraid of them?

Red in tooth and claw, we come at last to a fierce and painful city, to the bloody, unobliging reciprocity in which life lives by death, but still insists that death is robbery. (Robert Farrar Capon, p. 48).

Life must have death to be life.  I believe that the richness of life comes out of death - literally and figuratively.  When we figuratively die - when we go to the valleys and are able to climb out - that is when life is lived.  In spiritual terms, resurrection can't take place unless there is first a death.  Yet, death still feels like robbery.  Death still feels cruel.  How long do we wait for resurrection?