Life and Death -- iv

continued from yesterday

I had a window seat, I remember, and probably because I’d been reading some Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, I remember thinking about what she says somewhere in On Death and Dying, how children have trouble distinguishing between a wish and a deed and how, therefore, they can feel guilt about someone close to them dying, if along the road somewhere they’d secretly wished that person to be no longer part of their lives.

What if, aboard that commuter jet, the wish would become deed, I asked myself. What if, as Emerson says somewhere, all our wishes are really prayers? What happens if this little plane goes down somewhere south, the Vermont mountains disappearing as we slipped up and away from the runway? What if, for Deborah’s sake, the commuter jet crashes?

Not in my life before or since have I done such an assessment of my own life, my own living as I did just then. I remember thinking that, should I die, my own two children—just five and three—would probably do just fine, not really knowing all that much about their father. My wife would grieve—losing her husband would be a painful loss; but our community of believers would take care of her, and she’d be young enough to find some other man to care for my children and for her. Life would go on.

And what of me? Think of me sitting there aboard that plane, as if the human skull in my hands was a gift just given. 

If I were gone, if I were no longer aboard mother earth, I wouldn't see my kids’ growing up. I wouldn't witness their being teenage years; I’d miss their marriages, and the entire calendar of life’s ritual joys and sorrows. I'd miss caring for them and watching my wife give them so much love. I found that very sad.

And more? 

Okay, I would have loved someday to write a novel. I would have loved to write more, to teach more, to do those things that brought me joy. I would certainly have missed love of all kinds. I would have missed life’s joys, although I knew little, back then, of its woes. 

And what of God? There I sat aboard a plane on its way down. What about facing my Creator? 

Somehow, I found myself unafraid. I’ve never been afraid, I guess; I'd never been into "the wailing and gnashing of teeth." But I’d never thought about actually dying in the intense way I did on a plane marked eerily for a crash. I’d never stood as close as I could to the darkness, as well as to some splendid, imaginary, divine throne. I'd never repeated to myself with as deep a conviction that, yes, I believed that I am not my own; I believed God loved me. 

Perhaps the assurance, the conviction I felt in my soul that day, high above New England, is a gift from my father, who never doubted his faith either. Perhaps, like Thoreau, I really was never aware of having quarreled with God. We’d always simply got along.

All of that is forty years behind me now, but nothing that has happened since that time has been as immense a life and death challenge as a regretful poet's death wish confessed on a stairway into a small plane ready to leave Burlington, Vermont, and the profound assessment that perverse wish of hers created in my soul.

I've never felt so much like Hamlet with Yorick's dusty skull, never measured my life in the way that I did that morning over Vermont's Green Mountains.

Todd Billings' The End of the Christian Life put me back on that plane once more, helped me remember a moment of life I'd honestly never forgotten.