DEADLINE A brother pretty close to me received the news recently that his life, very suddenly, and unexpectedly, would be cut off. I do wonder if it is not better not to get news like this and just have it cut off without notice. But again, we all get notice, don’t we? Indefinitely. And because of that word, indefinite, we don’t take it too definitely. We don’t even take it for anything. We don’t, in fact, take it at all. It is not in our nature to do so. And when a doctor tells us this or that we still think no, it wasn’t, isn’t, me. Don’t we? (I’m trying to imagine.) But you have to think about these things when you get given a deadline, a definite time. And suddenly your life is brought forward, shortened to something you can see, because three months, or three years, isn’t that long a time. Even if day by day the seconds still tick away as usual and before you notice you see that you have spent 3 minutes already writing this. I’ve often wondered about that, how long a second may seem now, or how long it will seem then, or if time will exist at all when that time comes. And the deadline will not be pushed out again like it always is if you are a creative man hoping for the best. Yet knowing that it will not at the same time, knowing that you will never get the damn thing finished if there was no deadline. And knowing that your life would not come to an end without a deadline. And you do in fact want it to come to an end. Well, it was my mom who gave me that news, and you know, mom is getting on. She’s been looking at that door for some time now, and that’s another thing I would like to talk about. I had an idea this morning, a picture (it was to do with what she had told me) of a wall, a wall without measure in height or length, and no way through the door. You arrived there along your road and there you stopped. You never went past the wall. And lining the wall on this side were all the graves of those that were buried before you, and you now too were given a spade and said, get on with it. Now in the case of this brother of mine, the wall that was beyond the horizon for him had suddenly come into view, and like the earth that turns upon an axle, the landscape had changed, and the sky too. There was no sky, and what remained of the road was what he could see with the naked eye. That was the picture that came to me in the morning. But a mother now has her own idea, and her own picture, and for her it is a wall, yes, exactly as we have seen, but there is a door in the wall and the door can be opened. Only you could not see the door if you did not believe in it, if you saw only the wall. And knocking on the door it is opened and there you pass through to what lies beyond the door. Leaving that road you have traveled on forever. And beyond that door you don’t know exactly, neither do you care, anything is better than that spade they hand you and a place along the way where you can start digging. Are we not, even now, digging our own graves? With our unbelief? Of course we are. We just haven’t been given spades yet. But we’ve got our spot all prepared for us, waiting for us to start. Haven’t we? We’ve got our spot booked, our little place on earth set aside for us to return to it. But that’s all religious talk, you know. I’m not trying to preach here. Rather, I’m trying to think. And I’m trying to relate. I’m trying to put myself in that man’s shoes. And trying to feel what he feels right now. A man who believes in none of this stuff, nothing I’ve said so far. Who believes only in an end to things, and an end he doesn’t want to think about. Even if he can see it coming, and see there is no stopping it, no turning around and going back along that road, running away from that advancing wall. Then I thought again, not of the atheist, or the unbeliever, or the realist, or the scientist, but of the African who believes very much what the Christian believes, that death is a door only, a curtain, no wall exists, only a thin film separating him from another dimension. And who needs no door, no key, no spade, no fee, he passes through automatically as all things do, leaving only the dirt behind. And this picture is a comfort for me too, and a comfort I would have thought to anyone who can think like me, and see what I see. Thinking now of my brother, thinking of his father, his father’s father. All his fathers there on the other side. Those who have been here before him, walked the same road, reached the same place. And passed through the curtain. Isn’t it pretty? Thinking about that father, what he’s thinking right now, what he’s doing. What he’s saying about you. What he’s feeling for you. And wanting to talk to you, say something to you, put his arm around you maybe and tell you he loves you. Sure, I’m no orphan in this world. My mom is no orphan either. We got plenty of fathers, plenty of mothers, plenty of family looking out for us. And it is my wish, when my time comes, to see them there, and see they have not stopped looking out for me.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 11:26:45 +0000