Our minister Father Rob gave us an
assignment for this Holy Week, to be like Jesus and face our own mortality. He
pointed out that often we do not confront our own death until we get closer to
it. I was very close to it for a year while my mother was on Hospice. Together
we faced her mortality and eventually her death. Unless you have a terminal illness
however, we don’t necessarily confront our own death. Some people confront
their own death as far as making out a Will and if they’re parents having the
odd discussion about whom you want to raise the children in the event you both
die. I’ve known some new parents that go to extremes when travelling and one
parent travels with one child and another parent travels with another child on
different flights just to avoid the possibility of the entire family dying.
The
truth however, is that more often than not, death doesn’t come with a warning.
It’s not like on Candy Crush where your lives are counted down in cute little
heart icons with numbers in them or like the commercials where they say “so and
so heart attack didn’t come with a warning.” Then it shows someone doing a
cross word puzzle and when the phrase “you will have a heart attack today”
magically appears on the newspaper neatly fitting into the crossword rows. We’re
not Jesus we can’t prophesize our own death, we can however, be like Jesus and
plan for it.
When
confronted with the Passion play, we often wonder why didn’t Jesus say anything
to defend himself? We become like the chief priests with the scribes and elders
who mocked him and said,
“He saved others; he cannot save himself.” My answer to this thought came to me
this Palm Sunday. “It would not have made a difference.” Jesus had planned for
his death, had foreseen his death and yet still at the last moments he cries
out “my God, my God why have you forsaken me?” He knew logically, spiritually,
mentally that his death was inevitable and that it was necessary in order to
save humankind. Emotionally however, you can never truly be ready for death
when it comes. There were times with my mother that we felt God had forsaken
us. Last year at Palm Sunday she was entering Holy Week in the Emergency Room
and had become paralyzed from the waist down. We cried, we mourned the death of
another bit of freedom taken away. We mourned the death of not being able to go
to Easter services together as we had every year for 41 years before. She made
me go anyway without her. She knew it was important to feel God’s presence with
me in church. Each time something else changed I’d ask her “Is this it?”Meaning,
was this the thing that was going to make her give up and die. Most of the time
the answer was “no” so in November 2014 when she had me call Hospice late at
night/early in the morning I asked again. Even then her answer was simply “I
don’t know. I think so.” We said our goodbyes; she thanked me for being her
daughter and for everything. I thanked her for being my mom. She slipped into unconsciousness
and died on November 7, 2014 on her birthday. As one of her friends said “That’s
so Laura.”
My mom had planned as much as she
could around her death. She told me where all the important documents were, I
had been paying bills and doing budget while she was still alive to answer
questions thanks to Father Rob who encouraged us to do that. She and Father Rob
had discussed her memorial service arrangements a few times. Even the date she
died, was after the first of the month when all of her pension checks had come
in so I had that income for the month. She even told me I would be getting
money from one of her IRAs and not to use it to pay bills that she wanted me to
take that money and go to Australia with our favorite band BROTHER on a trip
they were hosting Down Under. We’re not like Jesus we don’t know how or when we
will die, most of us don’t anyway. On a practical level we can be like my
mother and help the ones we love by making a will, telling someone you trust
where the important documents are, teaching another adult in the house how you
plan your expenses, set aside money in a life insurance policy. On a spiritual
side, we can be like Jesus and meditate and talk to God and not just during
Holy Week.
