Holding on to Everlasting Hope

Holding on to Everlasting Hope

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always to be blest: The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.” – Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man”

I came in from a snowy run and took my phone off airplane mode, so I could check my email.

Standing in the kitchen alone, I scanned a subject line and immediately started uttering a litany of “No, no. No, no, no, no.”

I walked back the hallway to our bedroom. My husband was on his knees on our bathroom floor, laying out a gridwork of tile pieces. I told him what had happened, and then I started crying—not mourning the one who had died so much as the loved ones that person had left.

“What’s wrong with the world?” I said, still sobbing, for this was the second person in my acquaintance who had died in a month.

Sitting on my side of the bed, I stared out the French doors at the flurries blowing sideways across the yard. I knew what was wrong with the world: it had fallen, and in that fall, a deep part of it had broken beyond repair.

But then I remembered a conversation I had had with my daughters while tucking them in a few weeks ago. Somehow, they started discussing death. I’m not sure if it was the book we had read, Black Beauty, which talks a lot about death for being a children’s classic, or if their philosophical musings were just a ploy to extend bedtime.

Regardless, I sat there on the teal bird print chair where I read each night and listened to my seven-year-old tell my four-year-old that someday she’s going to die.

My four-year-old was astonished. Turning to me with big blue eyes, she put a hand to her little chest. “I’m going to die?”

Oh, heart, how could I nod? How could I have given birth to a child only to know that one day that child of mine would die?

In that moment, I experienced a twinge of the pain Mary must’ve felt.

She kept looking at me. “You’re going to die?”

I nodded again.

She looked at her two sisters—stacked in their white bunkbeds across from her coordinating twin—and understood the same was true for them.

I told her with an earnestness meant to squelch any lingering disbelief, “But if we all ask Jesus into our hearts, one day we can be together again.”

My four-year-old was silent a while, digesting this, and then she leaned across her nested floral covers and rubbed my leg. “I will still love you even after you die.”

Last night, after I once more tucked the girls into bed (no philosophical musings this time, although my husband had accidentally run over a chicken that had been huddled beneath his truck), my husband and I sat on the couch, and I talked about the person who had died.

From the time I held my miscarried child in my palm to my husband’s first brain surgery, I have become so fully aware of how thin the veil between this life and the next. I remember going to town shortly after his surgery and standing in line only to stare at the backs of patrons’ heads.

Having studied MRI scans, I could so clearly picture their brains and stems and spinal fluid all perfectly coiled and flowing, and yet they stood there putting in their order as if the very act of being able to speak while simultaneously swiping their card wasn’t somehow miraculous.

My husband, last night on the couch, said, “It’s good to fight for life, but it’s not good to be afraid to die.”

That weighty truth I must allow to sink deep into my bones, into this fragile dirt shell that is 60% composed of water.

We must fight for love because love is the purpose of our human journey, and yet we cannot fully love if we’re living afraid to die or, moreover, if we’re living afraid to lose our loved ones.

Our loved ones who have passed are more alive now than they ever were on earth. We must fully live while living with this awareness, with this everlasting hope, that one day we will shed these fragile seed coat shells and the souls, the essence of who we are, will spring eternal.

How are you coping in this season of loss? How do you hold on to that everlasting hope?