on death and dying

After a long blogging break, I'm finally feeling the urge to write again. We'll see how long it lasts.

Pain tends to prompt me to put pen to paper. Or, more accurately, fingers to the keyboard. This time it's about losing friends to breast cancer -- two within two months. As I've observed these friends battle this disease, I've been struck by how difficult it has been. For my friend Leslie, it was a 4-year search to find God in the struggle. So many times she doubted God or couldn't make sense of it all. But in the end she grew more and more peaceful. I saw her a few days before her death and as the cancer made her mind grow foggy, she became childlike and she would point to things in the room the rest of us couldn't see. It was as if she was in the passageway between two worlds...moving toward something so much better. I found a strange comfort in that. It made me less afraid to die, because she was so peaceful after 4 years of fear, doubt, and pain.


My other friend, Sara, died this past Friday. She was married 10 months ago, and she borrowed my wedding shoes. When I dropped off the shoes we sat in her living room and talked . She had no hair -- whole brain radiation for the treatment of her brain tumors had killed off her remaining hair follicles. She would never grow hair on her head again. But she didn't care. She looked beautiful that day. For Sara, the cancer had helped her see God more clearly...about how joy and suffering go hand-in-hand, and her wedding was a huge celebration for the joy one can experience in the midst of pain. The last few months of her life there was a large tumor that moved from her liver toward her lungs. Her liver started failing and fluids made her legs and torso swell. Still, she told her husband that even now, she wanted to become more Christlike. Surely she was identifying with Christ in her suffering. Let this cup pass from me, I'm sure she thought in those last excruciating months. But I'm also confident she was saying "not my will, but yours."

Ever since my mother's death almost 6 years ago, I have been struck by the resurrection that happens after death. Death is conquered...not only for Leslie and Sara, but for us as well. "In the midst of ruin, there treasures will be found", says the poet Rumi. And author Nicholas Woltersdorff says ""I shall look at the world through tears. Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see." Our grief changes us. Gives us an urgency for life that we wouldn't have otherwise. Teaches us compassion. Give us life. I'm not sure I like the price, but I am looking for resurrection stories now, in the lives of my friends who were close to Sara and Leslie.