This is water

Recently I came across a speech by the late writer, David Foster Wallace, that he gave in 2005 as a commencement address. He starts with a parable:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

He goes on to talk about how "the important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about". When I read that I thought immediately about the pervasiveness of grief. In the immediate aftermath of Jen's death, her absence dominated our life. Even sunny days seemed empty. It was like losing a limb. I thought of Auden's poem 'Stop all the clocks', and the rhetorical vastness of desolation:

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Yet outside of our family, the lives of most people who knew Jen seemed to go on as normal - saddened by her death, but much the same.

For myself, I felt suddenly connected to the grief of others, both friends and strangers, and even to the grief in literature, real and imagined. It was as though, in the style of 'The Matrix', I'd penetrated the facade of the usual world and found another darker parallel world where death and loss was close at hand. Now I know that the latter world is the real one that we will inevitably begin to see as we grow older. It's only long life expectancy, good health, youthful optimism and perhaps luck that enables us to believe we are in the first world.

I started writing this entry on Valentine's Day (a coincidence -- the day meant nothing to either Jen or myself), but it seemed too sombre for the occasion. The sad reality is that we will eventually lose each and every person that we love, whether by estrangement or death (theirs or ours). It was a clear-sighted person who put 'till death do us part' in the Anglican marriage service. There's almost certainly a lot of bereavement and death ahead in my life and probably in yours too. We never know how close it might be, as though we are skating over the surface of the void.

What I've written is dead obvious: we're all going to die, sometimes sooner than we think, and we'll all experience terrible grief. This is water. I haven't kept at this blog because Jen's death is uniquely special (although it is to me), but for the opposite reason that it is part of a universal experience. I hope in some small way my reflections might intersect your world in those grim times, just to say that we are not completely alone in our grief.

Of course the complicating factor is the uncertainty of timing. You or I might die tomorrow - a car accident, a heart attack - or next year (an unexpectedly fast advancing cancer, like Jen) -- or forty years from now. How do we live with the simultaneous awareness of the certainty of death and the uncertainty of the day? In the first few months after Jen's death I was assailed by fluctuating impulses -- on the one hand, seize the day and make it happen now (before it's too late), and on the other hand the thought that I should just enjoy the moment, the place, the person or the conversation now, without always living for some future moment. If life is to be long we should plan carefully for the consequences of our actions, and make good preparations. If life is to be short we should focus more on the people we love.

In mulling over this issue, and preparing for our church's Lenten series on Matthew, I was reminded of some words of Jesus out of the Sermon on the Mount (NIV translation): "Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. ...... Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?". Again at the end of this section, he says "But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has trouble enough of its own.".

When I go beyond superficial misinterpretation (Why plan or prepare for anything?), there is still a radical shift in focus: God's purposes are primary, and material luxuries or even necessities are at best a means and at worst a distraction. I find here some clues as to how I might deal with the uncertainty of death. One is a shift of priorities from material to spiritual, from achievements to relationships. Another is to appreciate the quality of today more than worry about tomorrow.

This sounds fine in theory, but in practice reflection in my life is largely overwhelmed by the pressure of what 'has' to be done, the inevitable demands of working full-time and bringing up two boys. A valuable thought came to me from a Facebook discussion on parenting: we can't appreciate our children all the time, but we can find and make moments in each day when we do. So I think I need to retain times of awareness in each day of the fragility of life, and the nearness of death. That cultivation of insight is one of the many aspects of prayer: making time to remember the ultimate realities, and so to live more in the real world.