There is a small patch of woods near my house, maybe ten minutes away on foot. The trails that run through it are short, no more than a mile or two, but if I walk them slowly and mindfully, I can lose myself in calm thoughts.
During a recent walk in these woods, I was thinking about the death of a good friend’s daughter. Last year, aggressive cancer killed her within the span of one month, and I drove to the great lakes region to attend the funeral.
I met my friend almost ten years ago when my wife, our young children and I lived in a small town on the shores of lake Michigan. During that time, I hiked widely through the area, pushing along sections of the Ice Age Trail and working the coastlines of lake Michigan and lake Superior: the one smooth and easy, the other cold, rocky, and hard as granite.
When I arrived the day before the funeral, the temperature was cold, but the weather was fine, and there was a green bloom creeping around the landscape and a pale blue sky in which you could see Spring. As I looked out my hotel window at the nearby hills and forests, I remembered the many trails I had hiked. There was no time for hiking, though, and even if there had been, I wasn’t in the mood; the whole reason for being there was too heavy.
My friend, whose daughter had died, lives deep in the country and often takes long walks through the scrub wilds surrounding his home. I have never had a chance to hike with him, and that is a pity. Now in his sixties, he nonetheless stands straight and tall, with a solid trunk and legs that resemble an old but not aged oak. He has a gait that would be an inspiration on trail.
I spoke with him a few days before the funeral he told me that he was “not doing well,” feeling gutted by guilt for all the time he had not spent with his daughter, for earning (in his estimation) too little or losing his temper too often. Her death broke some part of him, and over a year later, he aches, he told me, from backtracking through the last twenty-five years of his life, searching for how he might have better spent time with his daughter.
His size and strength were no match for his grief, and on the day of the funeral, he bent and shook as he cried.
I hid my face in my hands as I cried too.
I cried for my friend. It hurt me badly to see him in such pain, and I felt useless knowing that there was little I could do for him.
I cried for myself. I cried for the many missteps that I’ve made with my life, my children, my wife and for my foolishness and the time that I wasted over the years.
But I did not cry for his daughter. Though she was young and beautiful when she died, death found her right where she wanted to be. In her lifetime she had considered a religious vocation and declined it, loved deeply but refused marriage, and found that teaching was her given vocation. Death took her in full stride of doing what she loved or, perhaps, dare I say, doing what she was meant to do. Would that any of us might be so lucky that when death finds us we are where we want to be.
About once a year I hike the trails of my little woods in the dead of night, when it is as dark as possible, best with heavy cloud cover and no moon. And as I hike, with my headlamp’s beam slashing left and right in the darkness, I think about death.
Death is waiting for us somewhere down the trail at some unknown yet preordained point. And Death will do what it does: Stop us in our tracks regardless of what we are doing or how much further we want to travel.
Death does not care if we are lost in life. It does not care how deeply we want happiness, how long we have been waiting for something (someone) or wondering how the hell we got so far off track. Travel smoothly along the path that we are called to, or struggle, bloody and exhausted through the thorns and thistles of our missteps, it makes no difference; Death will capture us, appearing suddenly out of the dark forest that we don’t see for the trees. Death is ready for us – ready or not.
Death is the journey’s end for all of us; that’s just how it goes. We should reflect daily on this cold, sharp fact, breathing it in as deeply as we would the fine spring air and then, as the saying goes, memento mori. Since our steps are numbered, we should move bravely and purposefully through life with a strong stride and our backs straight, taking care to discern our vocational path and, with deep humility, walk worthy.
JG