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The Labor of Death



My grandmother was dying, and I wasn't quite sure I was up to the task of enduring it. The hospice nurse came in and spoke to her, the one struggling for the breaths, "Good job, JoAnne, you're working at it." Then the aside to us, the daughter, and the three daughters of the daughter, "We labor to enter this world, and we must labor to leave it as well."

And suddenly I saw it all differently. I sat with the baby in my lap (does one bring an infant to a deathbed?! - but bringing one twin meant the kids at home could manage the other, and so it was that one not half a year into life was there in the presence of death). The baby helped me see it. As I had labored to bring her and her partner-in-utero from the darkness of the womb in to the sunshine of that September day, so Grandma was laboring to leave this dark world and enter in to the light of her Savior's presence.



And then I knew what we could do. We could take the lead of the hospice nurse (who brought us a Melody in her name and her words), and encourage the feeble and fragile shell of her who used up her life loving us, in this last great work of her life. As others coached me to let the pain bring forth the new life within me, we coaxed her to give in to the the struggle to give up her life. To encourage her in the breathing that doesn't give life, but takes it away and gives life beyond breathing.

And as the babe at my breast cried out for life-giving food, Grandma cried out for rest-giving death, and we that held her hands responded with our own heart cries (and chest sobs) of pain and love and remembrance. And then, almost eighty-five years after her first gasp for the air of this world's atmosphere, she gasped to give it back and to be born again into the fullness of life, as unlike this existence as this is unlike the life of womb-darkness.

And as we gazed on her presence departed, the small babe cried again, returning us from the eternal to the temporal - reminding us of the life-giving duties we have yet to do here, and to do with the God-loving, beauty-revealing, art-appreciating fullness that she taught us.






"Let us then be up and doing with a heart for any fate. Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor, and to wait..." ~Longfellow (A Psalm of Life)



"What you sow does not come to life unless it dies, and what you sow is not the body that it is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body... So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable... When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written, ...'O Death, where is your victory?' ... But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." 1Corinthians 15 ~ selected verses





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