Monday
Beloved in Thomas the Apostle:
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How do we live our lives understanding that every moment of life is gift? Most of us live as if life were “without end.” It’s not. Death, we Christians believe, is part of every life. We also believe that life “is changed, not ended” when someone we love dies...and when our turn to die comes. Every moment of life is gift. To live fully, to be fully alive glorifies our Maker and is the reason our Maker created us. Why does the death of someone shock? Death is part of life. All of us will experience it ourselves. The Bishop who ordained me to the diaconate said once, “Stephen, we know that everyone with whom we worship Sunday after Sunday is going to die.” “Your people don’t know.” With all due respect to him, the people with whom I worship Sunday after Sunday do know that death, “is just outside the door,” as our Alicia Ritch, a dear former member and Treasurer, told me one day sitting in my office battling her enormous health problems…but living as fully as she could in spite of them.
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Death does not shock. Unexpected death does. When we learn of the death of someone whom we know to be vital and fully alive, we are shocked. How can it be that someone we have just seen or just heard or just spoken with has died? But, “She was so full of life and joy,” people have been telling me about Dani Copeland since the news of her death circulated. How can someone so full of life, so joyful, so alive, not be? Shock does describe how many of us may feel about her death. Dani lived life knowing every moment was a gift…a gift to enjoy as fully as one can. When the Bishop told me that “your people don’t know that they are going to die,” he had not had the experience of a parish community in which all of us have watched many, many young people die from the ravages of HIV/AIDS. During the late 80’s and for several years of the 90’s people in this parish lived with “death just outside the door,” bursting through the door to claim member after member after member. Those who lived through those years here learned of the proximity of death and of the random, ruthless manner in which it took our friends and lovers from us. For most of those we lost then, death came as a mercy given the long, lingering descent into death of those members. Grief and sadness combined with relief when their agony had ended.
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Whether sudden and unexpected or drawn out and anticipated death gives the survivors, every survivor every time, the work of grief. Grief heals our broken hearts by providing us with a way to acknowledge the enormous loss, a way to begin letting go the dead and “give them back to the God who made them,” a way to give expression to our sorrow and a way to begin again living our own life fully. Grief takes time…traditionally it should take a full calendar year, marking the shared important dates one would have experienced with the deceased were they alive: birthdays, anniversaries, Thanksgiving, Christmas, personal important dates and finally the anniversary of the death of the person being grieved. Use every moment you need to grieve someone you love. 
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