ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 25, 1996 TAG: 9608230031
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: THE BACK PEW
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
The longer one lives, the more death one sees.
It's an old, unpleasant - but unavoidable - truth.
Many of us have a vision of how our exposure to our own mortality is supposed to go: As children, perhaps, we experience the death of an aged grandparent. Later, when our own children are grown, our parents age and die. Then our friends - peers - grow old around us and die. Then we are ready to go, and we die in our sleep.
Yet almost nobody has quite that experience, I suspect. Something goes wrong with the system.
Actually, that hypothetical progression doesn't even make sense. And we know that such expectations are unreasonable.
We know that children sometimes die. That young adults die. That middle-aged people die.
It happens all the time.
But it always seems wrong. Out of the order that we expect from this orderly universe.
And we ask God, "Why?"
In the last few months, those of us who work at The Roanoke Times have buried three colleagues - the oldest of whom was 40 - in what feels like an avalanche of premature death.
Tony Stamus, Christopher Reddick, and, most recently, Kathleen Wilson all "were taken" from us too soon.
That is what if feels like. That they "were taken" away - snatched up by God or evil or something.
We don't talk about older people "being taken" - only the young, as if we assume that if they die, somebody or something must have caused it, someone must be to blame.
While sometimes there is some human agent at fault in the premature death of friend or kin, very often there just isn't anybody culpable.
So we teeter, as the Rev. Paul Henrickson described at Kathleen Wilson's memorial service, between the perils of believing that we live in a chaotic world devoid of purpose or in an oversimplistic world where such deaths must just be the way God wants it.
Neither of those is very satisfactory to most religious folks. Certainly, not to me.
I can't help asking "why," but I guess I no longer expect an answer to the question.
What I have come to believe is that we may not understand the full consequences of such deaths until years later.
When my wife and I lost our first child almost 20 years ago, I could not imagine what good could ever come of that.
Friends and relatives tried to console us with words about "God's will" that only made me more angry. One of my wife's "friends" told her it was her fault.
It took me more than a decade to forgive that man, and longer than that to get any sense of purpose out of my daughter's death.
Then, in the unlikely darkness of a movie theater, a screen character contemplating the arrival of a new friend realizes that if his former best friend hadn't died, "you could not have come."
In a flash it came to me that if our first daughter had lived, in our preoccupation with caring for her long-term illness, my wife and I might not have found the time or the will to have other children.
And I wondered how I could have lived without the love of the two daughters we had after Tracy died. My world - and yours - would have been a poorer place without them.
There is still a lot I don't understand - why Dale Laxton, my brother's best friend, had to die at age 13. Why my dad died at age 41. Why Kathleen Wilson died at age 38. I refuse to believe that God wills it.
I don't know what good ultimately may come from the deaths of these friends in recent months. I can't imagine what that could be.
But I'll try to stay open to the possibility, that somewhere, sometime, I'll know.
Remember you have one more day to get in your response to last week's column about the possible discovery of life from Mars. Does that discovery affect your religious faith? Does it make the Bible more or less believable?
You can call InfoLine at 981-0100 in the Roanoke Valley, or 382-0200 in the New River Valley, and enter your response by punching in category MARS (6277). Or you may e-mail me at cloweroanoke.infi.net. Or you can write me at The Back Pew, in care of the features department, P.O. Box 2491, Roanoke 24010-2491.
The deadline for responses is 5 p.m. Monday.
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