I attended a cell member's wake some weeks ago. He had been battling cancer for the past 1 year. Left behind to mourn the loss was his wife, 2 children, family members, a host of friends, classmates, business associates, and church-mates. I watched the video footage of his life, flashed up with photos taken from his childhood through to the last few months, when his head was shaved bald because of the medical treatment he was receiving. I listened as eulogies were delivered of what a fighter he was, a caring, kind, fine man. Loving husband, responsible father. Too young to die at 50 surely.I knew exactly what the wife had gone through and was going through. 13 years ago, I had gone through the same torturous process of watching a beloved spouse die, helpless to alleviate his pain or suffering. My husband was 41 when he succumbed to the same disease. My kids were much younger than hers then. But I am sure her grief is no less than mine, or for that matter any other human being's experience of losing his/her 'other half', no matter how or when it happened.
I remember shaking hands with many people, a blur of faces murmuring condolences as they filed past the casket containing the dead body who was once my husband. I hated the way they had 'made up' his face. It was downright ugly. But I guess corpses don't take well to make-up . I remember holding onto the urn containing his ashes, travelling back all the way to Penang, and the boat-ride out with his childhood beach-boy buddy, because he wanted to be buried at sea. I have to admit I don't really know how my 3 children coped at that time because I was too wrapped up in my own grief. The oldest was about 15, I think, my youngest 8, Besides what's there to say when someone you love dies? We all know life has to go on for those still alive this side of earth.
Fast forward the years... my no. 1 princess just celebrated her 29th birthday, She wrote an article (here) posing a rather poignant question - what is adulthood? As I told her, I think I grew up to be an adult when I finally knew my life has an eternal meaning - something that goes beyond just doing this or that, being here today and gone tomorrow. Only in facing death did I come to terms with the truth that life isn't a puzzle to be figured out and pieced perfectly together. There are many questions I can (and did) ask for which I will never get any satisfactory answers. Like why did God let my husband (or anyone) die if He can heal all diseases? Where is God when it hurts most? Does He even exist? Some people never quite 'forgive' God for not answering our questions or behaving as we think He should; in the process we bail out, deciding we don't need/want a God who doesn't live up to our expectations.
Yet, insisting on answers to hard questions only shows a rigid mind closed to possibilities that go beyond human boundaries, which no one can prove or disprove in any event. We are so much the poorer for not wanting/daring to take the leap into the unknown or unprovable. If I assume God doesn't exist just because I can't see Him or (seemingly) get no answers to my prayers, or that He isn't good because there is so much evil and suffering in this world, it surely doesn't say much about my faith or my trust in Him.
At every Christian wake, pastors inevitably talk about the 'blessed assurance' that those who die, believing in Christ, live again as they enter into God's presence in heaven, and believers who carry on surviving have the 'blessed hope' that we will yet meet them again when it's our time to go. It sounds very much like a child's fairy-tale; the cynics and the atheists mock it, the proud and independent see no need for it. But for me, the hope of being reunited with precious people I have known and loved who have believed God and passed on from this life is such a comfort to my soul. I don't know how but if Jesus resurrected back from the dead and physically ascended to heaven as witnessed by so many people living in His days, I'd rather believe than not believe that the same will happen to me, trusting that God cannot lie. After all, just because it sounds ridiculous incredulous and downright impossible, who am I to say it didn't or can't happen? I wasn't there.
Every funeral I attend reminds me of the truth that life and death is a journey, and every journey must have a destination. If our ultimate destination is only to be buried in a cold grave, or be burnt to ashes and dumped into an urn or into the sea, our life on earth stands for nothing really. Even an avowed atheist Richard Dawkins acknowledged quite frankly, "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." What a tragic conclusion. It's really very sad if we don't know where we are going in life and in death, because without a destination, there is nothing to look forward to. Evil, good, justice, retribution has no meaning if there are no eternal consequences. Love itself is reduced to nothingness if I 'just die'. Life should, must mean, more than that.
My children have grown up without a father; I cannot do anything about that, except be their mom, and rest in God's promise that He is Father to the fatherless. As for me, I have learnt to live all over again without a husband. And I live well, in anticipation of the glorious day when God takes me out of death into a new life and a grand reunion. Meanwhile life on earth becomes that much more meaningful and worthwhile when I know all my living is measured in terms of eternity and my final destination is not death.
Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die;and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?” - John 11:25-26
