Everything Ends

Today, 8/8/08, it is exactly one year since I began married life. My baby son came into this world exactly 139 days ago.

When we celebrate anniversaries and calculate ages, we count all the hours and minutes since the beginnings of things. We celebrate the passage of time from a beginning point. On some level we know that the conditions to allow marriage, and babies, and our own lives, to come into being were brewing for a long while before their official beginnings, but we have to pin something down, and declare how things endure and unfurl through time.

What we don't know is our reverse age. We don't know many years we have left, how many months remain until the end of a life, how many weeks or days until death (or divorce) do finally part a married couple. Time remaining has been heavy on my heart lately.

A relative has been in and out of the hospital. How much time does she have? We don't know. Perhaps twenty years, perhaps twenty months. I pray they're happy ones. I imagine I will have the honor of outliving her and remembering her one day. But it really is imagined, an assumption. Who's to say she will go before I do?

Last night, the phone rang. I eavesdropped. "Does her husband know?....No, let's leave him alone for now. We can call him in the morning." What could it be? An affair? You don't expect people to die.

But it was a death. A good friend had fallen--too far--while climbing a Cascades peak. Two weeks ago, at dinner with group of friends, B had no idea he would never see her again. It was not a particularly tough climb; she was an extremely experienced climber. Of course we want to know just how it happened; did gear fail? was she overconfident? But it doesn't really matter. Without warning, this person's life ended unexpectedly. Unimaginably. But expectations and imagination count for nothing in the end.

There was nothing to do but get ready for bed, check our sleeping baby very carefully, and hold each other in the darkness.

I know we are still processing this terrible gift of death. We are forced to face the profoundly precious, incredibly mundane matter of our ongoing existence. We go along imagining we possess a certain mastery over things, but really the life we are immersed in is barely understood. Its end is even more completely unknown. Having no other recourse, we pretend trivial things are important to keep ourselves occupied in the interim.

I used to think that all distraction from the Ultimate Matter was evil. But there needs to be joy in life. More than ever, I am looking forward to seeing who the baby is when he wakes up from his nap; to watching the Olympic ceremonies tonight on a borrowed TV; to getting a facial sometime soon. To savoring the mundane mystery while I can.