I finished a really great book today – The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton. Like the best of fiction, the story has left me pensive. Happy, too. But a happiness tinged by bitterness; joy inseparable from the sorrows of life. In the novel, a woman lives through her elderly mother’s hospice care and eventual death. She reminisces a time in the 1950’s when she observed her mother and father dancing together in their living room after all the children had been tucked into bed. It was a deeply personal moment that stuck in the child’s mind as one of the most beautiful things she’d ever observed.

It seems incongruous, even cruel, for that young and happy mother to wilt with age. To fade until she is little more than a shadow on her death bed.

It’s easy to pretend that you won’t grow old. Maybe pretend is too flimsy of a word. We don’t believe we’ll grow old. It’s an unfathomable process, something that’s always ahead, not quite anything we can hold in the present. There is no single moment of growing old. No second in time when we make the switch from up-hill to down-hill. 

A few years ago my sister uncovered a projector and box of slides that belonged to my father or maybe my grandfather in the 1950’s and ‘60’s. There’s one shot in particular I’m always struck by. My dad is a boy of sixteen or seventeen in the driver’s seat of a convertible. A shock of blonde hair. Eyes squinting up into the camera as he smiles and grips the wheel. He could never have imagined the life to come – the good or the bad. Not the wife and three daughters. Not the cancer. 

It’s funny to imagine your parents thinking of you back then. To try to picture what it’d be like to spin back to 1975 and stop at your mom’s locker in Dunbar High just to say, “Hi Ma,” and see the look on her face. She couldn’t have known what was coming – the disappointment or the victories. Not the unanswered prayers or the answered ones. The trip to see the glaciers in Alaska nor the plans for Tahiti left unlived. 

Just like my parents, and your parents, I don’t know what’s ahead of me. I dream of what’s ahead. I dream of bravery, of making a difference. Of children made from my DNA, or maybe not. There are so many things that could be ahead. But as the years pass, my vision shifts like fog over a field, sometimes obscuring and other times revealing. 

Despite that, as I live my life here I don’t want to lose sight of the end. Not to be morbid or dark or depressing, but rather in an effort not to lose sight of my own fragility. One day I will be the old lady approaching her final breaths. My hands will be empty. There’s nothing I can take with me.

But, oh – the things we can leave behind. I remember gripping my father’s cold hands as he left us, my whole reality slipping and shuddering and cracking like a derailed train. With such little effort, a human life gone. Like a leaf in autumn, his life broke from the tree and drifted to the ground. Just one in millions. Not one more important than another.

But he left behind me and my sisters. He left behind his words and his kindness, years of sacrifice and hard work and suffering without complaint. And I watched, I saw, I knew. Who he was and the choices he made have shaped my thoughts and words. My kindness. This world will never again hear the sound of his voice. It will never again be privileged to hear him laugh at another Aflac commercial or lecture a student for leaving their Sprite bottle in the computer lab. But it can hear my words, and by hearing me, you hear him.

It’s true that death can make idolaters of us all. Average Bob in life, saint in death. It’s easier to think of them this way. In a way, easier to love them when they’re gone. But I think of my mother who is still with me and how she continues to shape who I am as a woman.

For all of life’s cruelties, I have never once seen her falter in her faith. There has never been a single word to cross her lips that blamed God or blamed others. She has faced it all with an indeterminable amount of steeliness and grace that I find both intimidating and inspiring. She ages with composure.

I must grow old, too. It is inescapable. For everything its season, and I am part of a season. They say to live your life like tomorrow is your last, but I believe what that really means is to live your life ready to leave it behind. What words, what kindness, what grace will still hang in the air even when your name is just a word engraved in stone? Because ultimately, your love for others is the only gift that goes on breathing when you’re no longer here. 

It’s hard to know exactly what we should be or do, and harder still to know who we should be with or be without. But through the grace of God, we can all be givers of encouragement and patience. Champions of the weak and marginalized. Lovers of truth. Soldiers for justice. Friends to the friendless. Ears to the lonely. 

We can be those things. And when the day comes for our leaf to break away, to tumble towards eternity, perhaps the other leaves will be just a bit stronger because we were there.