When I sit out on the back patio of my small townhouse unit, I can look over the fence and directly at several large trees. They are not Live Oaks but are deciduous trees that are shedding their leaves because it is late Fall.
A month ago, the trees were alive with green leaves and a haven for the birds and squirrels. Now they are like me: a few years ago, I was alive with energy and strength; now I am fading and I use a cane. I don’t want to fall, but I could and I may. No one stands on this earth forever.
Soon I will “die,” and my earthly body, like the leaves on my trees, will dry up, fall off, and become compost. My body, like dry leaves, will be burned.
Does that sound morbid? In one sense, of course, it is. Death is so “final” as we are told. But is it? Christians, and may other faiths, as well as legends and myths, do not say so. Just as new buds will appear on those trees in another season, so a new kind of body will appear on me in the season of heaven. The old leaves faded and then turned brown, the wind blew them away, and they were “gone.” But, of course, they were not, they changed into dirt and compost. In doing so, they left behind space for new leaves to appear, just as my earthly body changes and leaves space for a new spiritual one to appear.
This mystery occurs throughout the world of God’s creation and nature: worms turn into beautiful butterflies, the tadpole becomes a frog, seeds become fruit and vegetables. But for the new to appear, the old must go away, disappear, become “different.”
Most people do not like to talk about death, and few look forward to dying, unless of course they are very sick and find no purpose or beauty in living. It may bother you to think about death and dying, and if it does, it might be bettter if you stop reading now because that is the main theme of these essays.
I have watched people die, including my wife, who was the dearest friend I ever had. And, when she died, I experienced feelings that were desperate and forbidding, perhaps like a tree losing one of its leaves.
I believe that every human being, particularly Christians, should spend some time thinking about death and dying. Of course, humans have been doing that since we first appeared on earth, and we have found ways to make it “easier.” One way is to use metaphors.
Metaphors for death and dying come in all shapes and sizes: they can be brutal, funny, poetic, somber, ironic, and so on, and the ones I describe here are various permutations.
I had never heard the metaphor of someone “passing” until we lived in the south. I wondered, “Did I hear that correctly?” Where did they “pass” to? They must have been going somewhere. You can’t interpret a metaphor literally because they are meant to bypass speaking exactly or plainly. They can be invented to keep the real monster at bay.
They don’t of course: someone who “kicks the bucket” is just as dead as someone who “passes” and both refer to a person who is dead. But “kicking the bucket” is folksy and carries with it enough humor (perhaps) that we don’t focus on the literalness of death to the extent that we might otherwise. Metaphors do that for us.
C. S. Lewis said (in a letter of June 7th, 1959) that there are only three things we can do about death: “to desire it, to fear it, or to ignore it.”
I can’t ignore it, and while I don’t exactly desire it, I don’t want to fear it either.
Karl Franklin
