Plans for Life:
June 8th, 2008
“Plans for Life“
“You are mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” James 4:14b.
It was a Saturday morning my wife and I planned to go to the market. She had a bad night due to severe coughing and was up and about before 5 a.m. The sound of her nebulizer woke me up but I didn’t get out of bed until she asked me to take her to the hospital. I just had about the time to put on something decent, unlocked the gate and waited for her at the car. When she did not respond to my calls I went back up to see her face all white, lips blue and was beginning to sink into a chair. I and my son grabbed her and tried to hastily walk her to the car. She went no farther than three wobbly steps, then she was dead.
It’s amazing to see how fast the transition from life to death could be. And crushing and devastating to see all the things you worked for, planned for, and hoped for disintegrate before your eyes from the loss of one you chose to be a part of your life for better or worse, richer and poorer, in sickness and in health until death severs it all.
The irony is that I should be dead rather than my wife. I was once electrocuted to the point of having a near death experience, had a dozen automatic rifles pointed at my chest in the middle of the night in some small, war-torn island in Mindanao, fell through a ground floor hole into the basement only to have my hand grab a hanging chain I did not even know was there, had a huge plank of wood hurtling towards my head from 4 stories up only to be deflected by my hand driven by an instinct I know I do not have.
“Why her, not me?” I shouted to high heavens. The answer was just as loud and clear, “why not?”
Aside from the illogic of death, my wife’s demise taught me two things: first, that life will soon be gone, so live your life to the fullest and, second, plan for those that matters most to you and those you love.
Looking into these in their deeper context led me to:
- live in calculated recklessness
- have freedom within self contained, and self-limiting time and space.
They check each other out, making sure that I don’t go out of bounds but still enjoy the things I do within my own confines.
I have accepted the eventuality of death. Oftentimes, I am still gripped with longing and melancholy for my wife. At the same time, I have come to accept that I could never have stopped her from dying no matter what I did and that she is forever gone from us, except her memories.
My children and I have learned to lean on each other to cope with our loss and we have bonded like we never had before. But whatever happiness we may be having in the absence of their Mom, I can feel that, sub-consciously, they are preparing to see me be with my wife again.
