Even Dying is Hard

I spent the day with my friend Pat today. I spent all day sitting with her. And while I sat, a whole bunch of thoughts and questions were running through my mind.

Pat is one of the most beautiful people I have ever met. She is funny and sarcastic and loves with the biggest heart I’ve ever seen. When you love Pat you become protective of her and want life and the world to treat her right. Pat is picky and bossy and knows how to live life to the fullest. She has the most awesome car and can re-design the inside of your house like a boss. I have laughed with Pat and had to walk out of the room to cry because well…

My friend Pat is dying.

She had been for a while now. And she’s very nearly dead.

Her battle with cancer is almost over and it is ending with my losing a friend and the world losing a beautiful woman.

I watched her sleep today and thought all my thoughts. It occurred to me that  if I want my readers to think I’m really deep I would think something really spiritual… Like wow, it’s even hard to die. I watch her body decaying from cancer and I realize that “life is hard and then you die” doesn’t really work. Because dying is no easy thing to do. It’s painful and takes a long time. Different parts begin to shut down and in the end, you just leave.

That’s what it looks like when my flesh dies too. It is a messy, painful, sad process of my selfishness and fear dying. Making way for incredible new life… but it is death nonetheless.

Ok whew super-chrish stuff out of the way.

All I’ve been thinking for most of the day is ‘Jesus, if you love her more than I do (in my silly way) how can you see this? How can you stand to be in the room while she can barely function or recognize even her closest friends? How can you love every single human as much as I have loved this one, and painfully watch so many suffer?’

And I don’t, of course, know the answer to these questions. But in a weird way, I feel privileged. I feel like I have been given the gift of looking Jesus in the eye and sort of understanding what is in those beautiful globes of life. It’s like He has taken His alive, beating heart out of His chest and handed it over to me and said “please feel what I feel, and please see what I see”. So I’m feeling and I am seeing and it hurts like hell.

But really, I would rather have the pain. Because then I know that all this life and death stuff really means something.