KINGSVIEW

IT ALL ENDS

Michael A. King

It all ends. From one angle, I’ve always known that. As a missionary kid I was shuttled from country to country, from ending to ending of one home and then another. By my teens I had learned that amid clinical depression my grandfather had ended his life, a legacy which, as any family therapist will confirm, has its effects on our family to this day.

So the realization that it all ends has accompanied me as long as I can remember, and I couldn’t count the times I’ve drawn on it preaching and writing or to spin for my family and friends far more doomsday scenarios, I’m sure, than they ever really wanted to hear.

I thought, then—and perhaps this is one reason I so often pondered and spoke of it—that as I grew older I would find endings less painful than most people. I would already have faced and worked through the reality that to say it all ends is to include the fact that my life will end.

That approach has in fact worked in one area: having gone bald at 15, I do find myself feeling a certain carefree sense of having been there, done that, when my peers begin to lose their hair. But the end of hair, it turns out, is not the same as the end of life. And so it has come as something of a shock to me, as I draw ever nearer to 50, that I am after all just a plain old normal human being, one more person not exempted from times of fear and sadness as I see that the hourglass of my life is fuller on the lower half than the upper and that the sand is trickling ever more quickly into the bottom.

One way I’ve tried to cope with this is to keep lengthening my life expectancy. I’ve always felt comforted by the possibility that I might still have at least half of my life left, and even now I like to think so. However, the fact that from this point forward I’ll have to live nearly to 100 to be only halfway through concerns me—though it did relieve me recently to note that the oldest woman in Massachusetts is 112. This means maybe I can get there too and leaves me with oodles of time.

Or very little, since how true it is that none of us know the day or the hour when it all will end for us or the world. And how true as well that the odds of my living for endless decades are inexorably turning against me.

At the Edge of My Own Ending

But a few weeks ago I had an experience that somehow both deepened and lightened the fear. I had a dream that went on forever through strange plot twists it would bore even me to recount, and I never did figure out what the plot had to do with the feeling I had when I awoke, so let the plot be the chaff and the feeling the wheat. The feeling was this: finally I had really and truly stood by the edge of the abyss. Finally it had sunk in, into my bones (which will turn brittle) and into my flesh (which is, as Scripture says, like grass), and not only into my theorizing brain, that it all ends. Finally I truly believed in my own death.

On the one hand, I still couldn’t believe it—how can any of us? Don’t we all go through life startled each time to realize what has happened to us? Don’t we each, as we enter every new life stage, think that it can’t be, that we who were a baby are now seven and nearly grown up (I remember thinking exactly that); or 15 and know everything when just last year we were so dumb; or 21 with the whole grand vista of life just starting to spread out before us when once we thought 21 so impossibly distant; or parents gazing at that first baby, puzzled that no one has ever before quite grasped the magic of a newborn child; or 30 and trying to figure out how we became the age we once said couldn’t be trusted?

Or beyond, when it really gets scary, to 40 or 50 or 60 (I don’t dare look much farther yet, but I know some of you are already there), startled that our children really do think we’re old (but our job is to be children thinking our parents are old—when did it turn around!), watching our flesh wither ever more like grass in drought, trying to understand how we can be so old when so much of us is still so young?

So I couldn’t believe it, and yet also, after waking from that dream, I could. I could believe that I would die. Part of me, if I dare put it that way, was scared to death. I pictured life up to the point of death as solid earth, the solid living reality I have known since birth, and death as a great chasm. Suddenly you get to the edge of the world, as in the days when people thought the earth was flat, and there is nothing there. It just drops off and down forever, and who would not be frightened to fall into that.

I do have faith. I believe that in some way beyond my and our full knowing as we now gaze only dimly at what eludes our understanding, who we are does not just fall off that edge but into God’s spirit and lives on.

But I don’t know that. None of us can know it in the same way as we know we are alive in this life. Maybe despite lack of proof some are sure what happens after they reach that edge, and if so, maybe that is a gift.

But I’m not sure. I’ve shaped my life according to the faith that when I reach the edge God won’t let me fall entirely in, but still, at least as I see it now, if I am conscious as I draw my final breaths I won’t be sure what’s next until I enter it. I will die, that is clear. But only then will I fully learn to what extent my faith was sound—or, if there is nothing after the edge, I may fall into death too fast even to find out how wrong I have been.

Confronting such realites was a wrenching thing. I suspect I will stand at the same edge and at times feel even more afraid of that drop into forever as I journey ever closer toward it.

But the odd thing—and here I am reminded of the gospel story and of how often in it things turn upside-down, most notably of course in what happens to Jesus after he falls off the edge—is how much joy also surged in after I stood at the edge. Because if my life and everything in it will end, truly and really, then how dear is every last remaining bit of it before it all slips from me. And how much I want not to waste it on useless things but on what I would want to cherish if I knew, say (and I realize some actually face this and can speak to this more reliably than I), that I had just months or weeks left before arriving at that edge.

A major part of what I want to cherish in the time left is what most people testify to when they realize life won’t go on forever: friends, family, loved ones. I could go on at length about that. But this time that doesn’t seem what’s calling for expression. Again and again in recent weeks I’ve been drawn to two large things worth cherishing: the earth itself, and the people in it.

At the Edge of the Earth’s Ending

The beginning of acceptance that I will die has made me only more ready to believe that if I can die, so too, huge as it is, can our very planet. In 1988, the year in which a dreadfully hot and dry U.S. summer first brought global warming to popular attention, I had another dream. In it I was for some reason carried up in a helicopter, and from it I caught one last glimpse of waves crashing on the rocks of Maine and cliffs of Oregon, snow comforting the Rocky Mountains, wind rippling across the wheatfields of the world’s breadbasket, sun setting on Manhattan’s towers and then the Golden Gate Bridge.

But it was all about to fall apart. I don’t remember actual images of disaster. I simply knew America was dying and that I was seeing its beauty one last time before the end. In the background there was, of all things, a sound track, sounding thin and scratchy as if coming from an old 78 rpm record. It was a rendition of "God Bless America," but it was no longer what it had been—a hymn to America’s greatness. Now it was a lament, an echo of those sitting by the waters of Babylon and weeping as they mourned their own exile so long ago. Then it became a plea, a plea to God to forget the times we sang it as a blessing on tyranny and hear it at last as humble prayer for help.

The paradox is this: What I find to be true in confronting the inevitability of my own death I also find to be true in facing the possibility of the earth’s death: if it really can die, then how much more do I love it. If it really is possible (and already we see it happening all around if we have eyes to see) that so much of what once seemed never-ending—the woods and pastures and blue blue skies, the snows of winter down here and not just at the poles, the waters flowing clean and free, not just as drainage ditches for the never-ending parking lots—can be taken from us, then how dearly do we treasure it. Then how longingly and sadly, as it slips from us, do we caress this gift from God where "late the sweet birds sang" (to echo the title of an end-of-earth science fiction novel by Kate Wilhelm) but increasingly sing no more.

I can only pray that my faith—unprovable though it is—in my own dwelling in God’s hands even beyond the edge of the world will somehow have implications as well for this planet God once created and of which God once said that it was good. I pray that somehow, between whatever we do for the world as it slips away and however God still sends healing power into this marred goodness, something of the grandeur will live on even as so much dies.

At the Edge of
Too Many People’s Ending

Then there are the people on this good sad earth. As I write the press is filled with updates on who hates whom in just what ways and who deserves what for whatever terrible thing the other person or country is thought to have done or to be about to do. Above all, as memories of September 11, 2001, swirl around its first anniversary, there is that ceaseless insistence of our leaders that Americans know what deserves to end and are entitled to bring it about as we see fit.

As I listen to such talk, I don’t know precisely what should be happening instead. What I do know is that rarely do I recognize in it the nuances of people who truly believe in their own ending or that of the world. They may, they may. But if so, they express it differently from how I would. Because I believe people who have felt death’s reality shiver in their own depths would not so easily say that if some countries, which just happen to have in them more of that oil we cherish, are headed in the wrong direction, well, we’ll just have to do whatever we need to do to stop them.

I don’t mean to minimize the dangers of terrorism or to urge that when jets topple towers we do nothing at all. I don’t mean here to offer a reasoned plan for what should happen when countries harbor those eager to send more Americans up in flames. These are hard times and issues ; I doubt any one ideology, my own included, is large enough to provide all answers.

What I do believe is that even if national leaders cannot be expected to be pacifists, they should be expected to have stared death in the face, to have been sobered by it, and to show evidence that they understand what it means to take a life, whether that of the earth itself or of other people.

Nearly like a classic emperor, one of our leaders is pressing for the explicit right to ensure that our country is forever stronger than any other, empowered to do whatever it thinks right to any other peoples. This same leader is reputed to have done something remarkably close to giggling when questioned about his involvement in the capital punishment of Karla Faye Tucker, whose death he had had some power to stop. If the report is close to true, that leader had not, then at least, begun to look hard enough at death.

Has he since gazed fully on the reality of his own mortality? Has he truly asked what sacred power of life and death over others he holds before he uses it? Has he loved the world and the people in it long enough and hard enough truly to know what he is doing when he exerts dominion over them? If he did fully love, would he be able to kill as quickly as he seems ready to? And if he did not kill, if instead he loved, would those he says want to kill us be as ready to do so as he says they are?

These are the kinds of questions that come to me as—too full now of the knowledge that it all ends—I stand at the edge of my own death, the death of the earth, and possibly the imminent death, at our country’s hands, of countless people in it. As too many endings at once threaten, how much I love what still lives on. How much I hope that where we can we will draw back from the brink. And how much I pray, because I know that some endings at least are inescapable, that where we cannot flee a given ending there will turn out to be so much more beyond it than we now can know. Otherwise where is our hope?

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount (Pa.) Mennonite Church; and editor, DreamSeeker Magazine.