Turn Those Death Knells Off!
My mortality has a felt a bit too close to my liking these past few days. Yesterday morning, in the most outrageous of freak accidents, an older cousin of mine ended up shooting himself in the face while trying to defend his family from a suspicious noise he believed was a home intruder. He’s been in surgery for basically the last 24 hours and has lost his right eye and part of his tongue – that’ll make for one less beautiful, hazel eye in this world and an off-copy of that warm, canyon-deep voice I’ve heard call my name at every holiday meal I can remember. Thankfully, only by the absolute grace of God, was there absolutely no brain damage – not even a knick or a close encounter.
When my mom came into my room yesterday morning and blurted out, “Irvin accidentally shot himself in the face” (literally that’s all she said, the most ridiculous way to broach this sort of subject) my first thought was of his wife and their four children. Because I haven’t had too many examples of secure, faithful, deeply in love couples to model my own future marriage after, my mom always encouraged me to look to theirs for inspiration. She was right to do so – their relationship and their family provided me with the godliest example I could hope to find. And to think, that in the most spontaneous and accidental of instances, with that bullet taking a slightly different route, a family could have been utterly destroyed and the life of one of the greatest men I know could have been snatched away.
Whenever I get on a plane or make a long drive, I become nervous. Whenever anyone I love, like my mom or boyfriend, gets on a plane or makes a long drive without me, I become petrified. In the slightly romantic way that I view the world, I’d rather be with them and die with them, then have them die and I live without either of them (very morbid and Romeo and Juliette-esk, I understand). To ease my concern, one of my mom’s most unique turns of phrase has always been, “When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go and there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop that.” Her sentiment was that we each already have a death date determined by God and there’s no amount of painstaking concern or calculated measures taken to change that (also very morbid). She said it to take the weight off of my shoulders, but mostly it just made me feel so damn out of control – which of course I am when it comes to matters of life and death. Just like that, with a snap of God’s weighty fingers, Irvin’s life could have just disappeared with no warning, whereas I’d seen him healthy just that Monday on Christmas and his wife had been holding him in bed just minutes earlier. That’s the thing about accidental deaths, there’s no adjustment period, just life being lived in one second and life completely vanishing in the next.
So, as I drove on the main interstate in my area to meet some friends for dinner last night, I found my speedometer only reading 50 miles per hour in a 65 miles per hour zone. My eyes kept darting to and from each of my side mirrors. I was petrified of something freakish happening to me, too, or at least ultra aware of the fact that my life could be snatched at any second, just like Irvin’s almost was, and there was really nothing I could do to stop it. Dinner and laughter with friends loosened me up, but then only a few hours later I found myself crying at the thought of my boyfriend freezing to death in the snow at his Michigan cabin. He hadn’t responded to my text for only an hour and my mind was drawing outrageous and totally unfounded conclusions, when in fact he was doing the safe thing by not texting me while he drove on dangerous roads.
It’s been more than 24 hours since my cousin’s accident and I’ve calmed down considerably but I still feel my mortality and the mortality of those I love to be too close to my liking. I’m just not feeling as invincible as I’d normally like – which is terribly unfun for someone who imagines her death as some dramatic scene, beginning with me on my deathbed at age 103 lying next to my husband and surrounded by all of our progeny. Then together we say “we’re ready, You can take us” and we just painlessly slip away and wake up in heaven. Or I could die like that one man in the Old Testament who didn’t really die at all, he was just spirited away. If only. This feeling of being just a bit too mortal happens whenever someone I know, whether familiarly or vaguely, dies or is severely hurt unexpectedly. It always goes away eventually, but this time it has felt awfully too close like I could look out of my bedroom window and see a ghostly version of myself hanging out on the sidewalk below.
