Live Forever

I was in the room when my grandfather died. We were very close and I remember a wave of finality washing over me. For the rest of my life, I would never hear his laugh or see him walk into the room and tell a story. Nothing will take his place. There will always just be a hole where he used to be. 

When I see my reflection, I see the same thing: someone who is already gone. All these senses I now feel so powerfully – the warmth of the sun, the stiffness in my fingers, joy, opportunities, memories, relationships – will one day be snuffed out and leave no trace. Living things are all trapped in the shadow of this certainty. Baudelaire said, “I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy.” When I see beauty in myself or another, there is not just joy in its presence, but a pang of sadness at its soon passing.

The constant awareness of impending death fuels my need to write the narrative and leave a legacy of self. Everything humans do may be an attempt to overcome our mortality. We build businesses and reputations, acquire money and friends, have children and midlife crises all as an elaborate attempt to either avoid death or live on after we die. 

But it is hopelessly futile work. After we’re gone, everyone who knew us and encountered our work will die, too. Whatever butterfly effect we may have been involved in will be transformed by so many other people and actions, that in a few years every remnant of our lives will have vanished from the earth.

There are moments when this oblivion paralyzes me. I can feel my internal organs working, and I wonder at how fragile they are. Anything I do today seems hopelessly futile and meaningless in light of my imminent death.

These are dark and heavy thoughts. I have no religious or philosophical shield to protect from this reality, and no inspiring speech will do. The only thing left is to look at it from another point of view.

Instead of focusing on the past or future, I see this moment for what it is. Since it is the only point at which linear time touches eternity, God is here. Emmanuel – God with us. He is no longer with us in the past, just as we are no longer in the past, and He is not with us in the future. But He is here with us now, and He has given this moment as a gift. So many who have gone before us – my grandfather, Alexander the Great, Marilyn Monroe – no longer have this. One day we will not have it either, but we have it now.

Slowly, my grip loosens. I can not hold on to this moment, but I do not need to. I release the control I never had and relax into this space.

I’m so easily obsessed with writing my story, making it the story I want it to be, and engraving it into mythology. But the truth is, it’s not my story anymore. I have been bought with a price; it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me, and I no longer live for myself, but for Him.* God writes my story. He may not write it the way I want and it may be short-lived and ill-remembered. But He will write it the way it needs to be written, fitting perfectly into the bigger Story.

When it’s over and I no longer feel the Sun or the movement in my fingers, my story will end here, but it will not end. I can take nothing with me to the place where I’m going and where the Story continues. My time, narrative, and legacy – none of these were ever mine in the possessive sense. All we have, as Bono said, is immortality.

J.

* 1 Corinthians 6:20, Galatians 2:20, 2 Corinthians 5:15

June 1, 2021