Every True Story Ends in Death

Today the Lenten Season begins. It's Ash Wednesday. This season has always been dear to me. It is a time when I really experience the magnitude of God's love for me. It's a time of purification, a time of cleansing. It's a time of setting the priorities of my life right. It's a time of focusing on the essentials rather than the accidentals.

At the beginning of the movie Brian's Song, a voice says: "Every true story ends in death. This is a true story." Yes, my life will end in death. I will cease to be. I will stop walking on this earth. I will no more play and laugh with my baby girl. I will never 'make love' with my wife. (I put it in inverted commas because I am not sure of the expression. Do we make love or do we share it?) My feeling towards death is very distant. I feel, most likely like everybody, that it is not going to happen to me. Or it is not going to happen to me in the foreseeable future. I kind of think that I have many more years to live. Is that true?

I would like to think that it is true. I would like to believe that I have many successful and fruitful years ahead of me. I would like to believe this with all my heart. It gives me the extra courage to carry on and hang on when I feel terribly down. It is amazing to note that this thought is so embedded in my head that it is natural. It is like a give (as we say when we do physics calculations.) Though I know death exists, it doesn't cross my mind. (Only sometimes when I think of putting an end to so much suffering.) I don't think it has ever descended from my head to my heart. For me, the existence of death is more theoretical than real.

As you can tell this is not a good way to go about it. I was watching one programme about death on Ethiopian TV. The journalist was interviewing two very old people. One was a woman, who is waiting for death to come at any moment. She even has her coffin ready. The other one was a man, who is always on the go trying to escape it. When told about the woman who has already bought a coffin, he said: I don't want you to talk to me about coffins. I don't like it. I have never been close to a coffin before. I am begging God for more days. He listens to me. He knows how I hate to die.

These two old people have death on their minds practically every moment of their days. In my opinion, what makes them wait for it or fight it is their age. What makes the idea of death so distant to my mind is my age and health. I am young and healthy, so I don't expect myself to die anytime soon. To be honest this scares me. It scares me because I am not living my dreams believing I will have time to do so in the future. It scares me because at odd times it dawns on me that I could die at any moment. To die without living is a thing to dread. I dread dying without living my dream more than I could possibly dread dying itself. It will be a tragedy.

"Every story ends in death. This is a true story." says that voice. My life is a true story. And it will end in death. (Logic 101.) I wish I have a voice that whispers in my heart "Your true story is going to end in death. Are you ALIVE?" Obviously, it is what lies between my birth and death that defines my life. What lies between the two, we call it LIFE. What is my life like? Am I living it or going through it, as I pass through some town on my way to another one? And that is what I am struggling with.