When the Finish Line Is Looming

What does it mean to "succeed" when you're dying "too soon"?

Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.

Gandalf: …Bilbo was meant to find the ring. In which case, you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.

Not long after college, two of my close friends married one another. One of them had been a housemate of mine. He and his college sweetheart married and shortly wound up in a small town in Tennessee. Within a couple of years they had a baby. Life was idyllic for them. But when their baby was just nine months old, she died in her crib one night from what, they later learned, was an undetected heart defect.

The death of their baby was a crushing blow for them. It was a shock to all of their friends and family. On the morning of the funeral, I flew to Nashville, rented a car, and drove to the small town where they lived. Because I had arrived early for the afternoon funeral, I took the opportunity to wander the cemetery, looking at some of the graves. Many of the gravestones dated to the time of the American Civil War. A lot of them held the remains of young men who had died in their late teens and early twenties. Frequently, the grave markers of young men in that age-group also contained references to the young man’s rank in the confederate army.

In addition to seeing more graves of young men than I expected, there were also a surprising number of young women’s graves from the 1800’s. Often the graves of these young women lay next to the grave of an infant child. The death of young women in childbirth during those years was a fact of life far more common than we moderns have had to face. Wandering through a cemetery, because it contains the history of a community in such concentrated form, the wanderer catches hints of common and repeated hardships, such hints being more diffuse when experienced as fragmentary events scattered across the passage of time.

In the cemetery that day, an enormous stately oak tree stood in one corner of the grounds, casting shade from its boughs, which reached like enormous arms extending out from its trunk. In the shade of that oak, many dozens of tiny grave markers were fanned out in a semi-circle on the ground. Generations of dead children from that community had been buried there. Later that afternoon, my friends would come and lay their own baby under that oak and she would take her place alongside all the other babies who had preceded her.

There is a fascinating diary from the civil war entitled The War Outside My Window. It is the diary of a young man in the south who was confined at home, suffering from tuberculosis during the war years. In his observations about life in the south during the Civil War, one of the things that stands out to the reader is how often little scrapes and cuts, minor injuries which we moderns dab a little antibiotic ointment onto and forget about, would blow up into massive infections leading to amputation and misery and death. The imminence of death was a conscious part of everyday life back then. Modern technology and medicine have enabled many readers, I suspect, to shove the persistent awareness of life’s fragility back into the recesses of their thought life. But such amnesia is not available to just everyone. People are still dying, and our hearts perceive that some of them are, even now, dying “too soon”.

I have a friend - a young mother with children at home who are at an age where they are very much in need of their mother. The mother has cancer, and it seems that many of the medical reports she has received over the months have delivered disappointing blows to her family’s hopes. The odds of being able to see her children through to adulthood seem to be mounting against her. What does it mean for someone to “succeed in life” when she is possibly being robbed of the opportunity to love and care for the very ones who need her the most?

I myself am no stranger to scrapes with death. I have to say that one of the hardest aspects of my own encounters with nearly dying was facing the prospect that I could become a source of pain to my family. Dying is hard. Truly.

Nevertheless, I still maintain hope for my friend and for her children. The children will be desolate if their mother dies. Death is an enemy, make no mistake. I hate it. We should fight it tooth and nail. If my friend dies, and I pray she does not, her children will be irreversibly changed. But I take refuge in the knowledge that it does not then follow that all of those changes, excruciating though they may be, must inevitably result in lasting harm.

More than once I have pondered the possibility that exhibiting courage in the face of death might offer a pathway for a parent to condense an entire lifetime of parental guidance into a single act. Perhaps suffering and loss can be redeemed by leaning into this virtue. I make no suggestion that there is anything easy about this. But I also confess to catching a pleasing whiff of defiance wafting around the very notion of responding to impending death with courage. It was C.S. Lewis who said (paraphrasing Aristotle perhaps?) that courage is the form of every virtue at the testing point.¹ There are even those in heaven who were hailed in John’s Revelation because “they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death”². So perhaps showing courage in the face of our death plants a potent seed of wisdom for the benefit of those who follow after us. Such a seed might blossom in the future and yield its fruit in the hearts of our children, even if originally sown in the ashes of their desolation and loss. I have seen this happen before.

“Success” in a foreshortened life, or any life for that matter, may turn out to be a matter of nothing so much as facing our trials with grit and grace, love and courage. Those who die “too soon” will almost certainly be the first to learn - to really learn - that a successful life is measured, not in time and accomplishment, but in the courage one displays while living.

Sam hesitated for a moment, then bowing very low: “Good night captain, my lord,” he said. “You took the chance sir.”

“Did I so?” said Faramir.

“Yes sir, and showed your quality: the very highest.”

Faramir smiled. “A pert servant master Samwise. But nay: the praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards.”

1. “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. ” - C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

2. Revelation 12:11