About that religious thing

I'm quite religious. Just sayin'. I first prayed when I was about two and a half years old, and God has been a prime relationship for me pretty much ever since.

Now you might think -- based on the mostly fine work done by Dr. Kubler-Ross -- that as part of my own anger, denial, bargaining thing I would at this point be too pissed off to be talking to God. But no. Either I've moved straight to denial (and most of the time that's probably true) or I'm already at acceptance. Not of death, not yet -- but of having cancer.

Cancer is a particularly scary thing for me because both my parents died of it before they were 70. My dad was gone a month before he turned 63. I'm 56. I did a little bit of care for my dad while he was dying, and quite a bit of caring for my mom. I know what dying from cancer looks like, and I have really been hoping for heart disease or stroke instead, which is why I haven't much bothered about being obese.

I also know a little bit about suffering. Namely, when you're suffering physically, you don't really have a lot of thoughts to spare for things like the state of your soul, being united to Christ, etc., etc. The model of slow and holy death one finds in novels from the 1800s is mostly based on the way people died with TB, a disease that tends to put one in exalted emotional states. Mostly, it's not like that. It's beastly hard work until your brain shuts down, and even then there's some core things that keep going. The last sound we ever heard from my mother, for example, was a laugh -- one of us kids had made a weak joke and everyone laughed, more out of tension than any sort of pleasure, and Mom laughed because she heard her children laughing.

I don't think I'm dying here, but I do think about dying quite a bit. I never expected to live to be old, never wanted to be old. Any time anything wonderful has happened in my life, my joy has been accompanied by a small voice saying, "Heaven's better! Heaven's better!" Which didn't diminish the joy one bit. It's as though the happier I am, the more I'm sure that this isn't home, that my real place is elsewhere.

So this intimation of mortality isn't the shock it might be for some people. I don't know how else to put it without waxing into religious language, so y'all just going to have to put up with that from time to time in here.

When darkness veils his lovely face,
I rest on his amazing grace.
When all around my soul doth fail,
My anchor holds within the veil.
On Christ, the solid Rock I stand!
All other ground is sinking sand.