Intruding Death

(A look at Approaching Death)



In most cases we have no inkling of what awaits us, without warning within seconds our lives hang in the balance. The only reason I’m alive today, and not in my grave is that I’ve been rescued by God’s crew so many times, I’ve lost count. Death is so commonly looked at, reported in the media, broadcasted on television, we are mere statistics, and we only pay attention when it hits us in our own home. There are a few jokes out there: “Life is just death and taxes,” or “Now that I’m old, just learning about life, I’ve got to die,” or “Here today, gone tomorrow,” or “I’d rather live it up now and live in hell, than be bored in heaven.” But no matter what, everyone, everywhere, sometime within the future, will die, the rich and the famous and the paupers alike.
Each person is granted a short day, a funeral, a grave, it is no longer sleeping, and no makeup in the world will help. We are all trying to eat better, live longer, not necessarily happier, but longer; people stopping drinking, smoking, reducing the risk of early death; not necessarily living a better life, but a healthier one.
I have friends and family members taking more vitamins pills than eating food. Lower the cholesterol, to live another day, and then the day comes and they die alone anyhow, and the kids or family members put them in the grave, and before that they’ve already emptied out their bank accounts. So as the old saying goes, “You can’t take it with you…” and so death is proven beyond a doubt—but why did it not sink in to the dying, so the dying could prepare for it?
Even if you knew the moment of your death, I doubt most people would put their lives in order, perhaps cause more chaos. Everyone thinks they got one more day to live, just one more day. Regrettably, when the day comes, the old motto of the boy scouts, of which was—once upon a time for me, “be prepared,” the person about to face death, is not prepared. My mother was, but I doubt any of her sisters or brother was, or my grandfather was. It is my hope those reading this, will be prepared. Each and every one of us will face God, for those who do not know Him, it is best you make peace with him—and the sooner the better. You are his creation; you are in the palm of his hand, carved, if he is for you, who can be against you. Naturally you have to go to him, that’s how it works. Don’t worry what you think he wants you to do; he really doesn’t need you to do anything other than come to him. Not much different than you wanting a son or daughter to come to you, after a long dry spell of not seeing them.
We owe him a debt, gratitude for giving us life. Much like I owe my mother, yet, we seem to think it is so impossible to have a talk with God, Jesus, or even the Holy Spirit, where in essence it is so very simple.
I once heard God say, “Dennis, you’re like King David, a man after my own heart…!” And I pretended not to fully understand that, not sure why, perhaps I felt so far beneath such a statement, it couldn’t be true, but it was true, because I was after his heart. I said, “No, not really,” and he said “What?” and I corrected myself by saying, “I’m sorry, you’re absolutely right, I am after your heart Sir.”
Then, as always I listened to Him, and at times when I had more faith than reason, I could hear him speaking, and I shared my moments from my life with him, much as I’d do with a counselor. It was as if he kept a file on me, he knew my curiosities. I had asked him once, “How it can be, in heaven there are no tears, I’d surely cry if I made it to heaven and knew my grandfather or a family member didn’t?”
It was an unanswerable question I thought. Then in a small room, I was simply praying one evening, my mother in the other room, and the room filled up with light, and a hand appeared, I went to touch it, and it was like a mist, and I could see every pore in my body, and it was as if the light went through me, and I thought at that very moment, of that questioned I had asked, and I knew the answer, more than knew it, I felt it, and somehow, in a different dimension, understood it, it was—heaven on earth. It is something you cannot explain in words, or hope others to understand, it is just an experience I am telling you.

We need to know how to face death, God, and ourselves, and at the same time be at peace with God, man and ourselves. When I was drinking, and I mean drinking for twenty-year straight, I could fell my inevitable death approaching. I said to God, “To be able to see you, just once, I’d be happy to live in hell the rest of my life.”
He knew how to comfort me, “I saw Him appear when I was stone sober, driving down a highway, matter-of-fact, the vision came so clear in my window, I was fearful I might get into an accident, it was a snowy winter in Minnesota, back in the early 1980s. Then shortly after that, I had another open-eyed vision, Christ on the cross, and it was so horrifying, I asked God to take it away. I wrote a poem on it, sent it to a publisher, gave it to my Church elders, and they all thought I was blasphemous, saying “I don’t know how you could have described this unless you saw it…!” it wasn’t a question, rather a statement, so I remained silent on the matter, I wasn’t out to prove anything, it was just a poem.
I stopped drinking on July 25, 1984, stopped smoking two weeks later, said to God, in so many words, “My life is shattered (like glass, broke like a toy), I don’t want to live like this anymore, death would be better.” And the taste for alcohol became putrid, and overtime when I saw a cigarette, or a billboard of a cigarette advertisement, I coughed, as if it was a reminder, and I have not drank or smoked ever since.
For all the upset and suffering I’ve had in my life, most has been caused my own actions.
When my mother died, her death was crushing for me, I went into a depression for a long period, I had to see a doctor, I wanted to drink again, but I didn’t, I wanted to die, but I couldn’t, and my life changed, and I discovered my mother was prepared, she said to me on her death bed three days before she went into a coma and died, “I’m okay with it, Dennis, I don’t want to live this, I even saw an angel.” (She was more than at peace, she was happier than a hound with ten-chicken bones at his disposal.)

We need to deal with death the same way we deal with life and tragedy. All too often we desperately seek out our earthly treasures, spending all our time on trying to get them, then sell them, or try to keep them, and take only glance at death, and when tragedy comes, then we take time out to pray; once the tragedy is over, back to the old ways.
I remember when I was in the hospital in 1994, I had three heart attacks, and a quadruple bypass, two strokes on the operating table, and it left my left side paralyzed. My mother went on a crusade, from church to church to pray for me. The doctor said I was a fruitcake, and for three days a man stood at the end of my bed, a large man, broad shoulders, and I asked the doctor and nurses who it was and nobody knew, and I said it must be Dr. Bush, my doctor, and the nurse said, “He doesn’t come in at 4:00 a.m., in the mornings and stand at the end of your bed or anybody’s bed, he comes in around 1:00 p.m., and makes his rounds with two nurses.” Then I checked the doctor pictures on the wall in the nurses area, everyone of them, all twenty or so, and downstairs, I checked the other billboards with every worker in the hospital of a doctor or administrative status, he was not to be found, so the only conclusion can be is what one of the other patients said, “It was an angel.”
As it turned out, my paralyzed side, and my heart rhythm, went back to normal within a short period of time. Nevertheless, the fruitcake was no longer a fruitcake. In all situations, one needs to think about the dire possibilities—had it not been for the guard whom was an angel, perhaps the demonic world would have stepped in and I’d still be paralyzed.

Now back to death, the human mind would rather deal with life, not death, like anything, we want to push it out of sight, so it remains out of mind. You know how it goes—it only happens to the other guy, until it happens to you.
We need not count wars for death or epidemics, why point them out, from my understanding, death is total in every generation. It takes every one of us, like it or not, in one way or the other. We are not going to out live our children in most cases. Who you see today, you will see later on in death—after death, he or she will be of your generation. Who is born late in your life, will long forget you—in most cases, as a lifeless victim to death. Hemingway, and Faulkner, who now live on in their books, died two generations before me—that is, I lived to know about him, but at his death I was thirteen-years old. Why did this happen to such people like them? Hemingway was around sixty-years old, Faulkner a few years older when they died. My friend Sid, died at nineteen-years old, a friend in war died at 43-years old, going home from Vietnam, had a heart attack. Why did the Lord choose them for the death sentence when He did (if indeed they did not die before their time?)
There are a lot of “why’s” here. Perhaps the broader question is, “Why has God chosen for us to die?”
Biblically speaking, it is an appointment God has made for us, like it or not. Perhaps because it is the most dramatic if not democratic of all life experiences; when I was in the Army in Basic Training, we had to go through the gas chamber, and take off our masks. I asked the sergeant why we had to take our masks off, when I knew the gas ultimately intrudes the eyes to the point of disappearing vision, and excruciating pain. He said, “It’s an experience you need to face only once to know how it is how it feels, and hopefully never again.”
I wanted to deny the pain and the blurring of vision, long before I felt it, but when I experienced it—and I was prepared for it because I held in a deep gulp of air, and when the mask came off, and I had to say slowly my Social Security Number, I let out the air slowly, and I did it—now it became real. Oh yes, there was an awkwardness to it all, whichever is the case, I was glad to have experienced it—who’s to know when in future time you’ll need that experience.
Living in Peru now for the last four-years folks call me a survivor of the Vietnam War, now thirty-four years later, the word ‘survivor’ is rarely used, but it implies a long death row took place. But why must we experience death? Perhaps the angels will ask me someday, “How was dying, death?” They don’t know. If I can tell them anything, it will be that.

What is your life like? Life in its simplest form, is but a mist in the wind or flicker in a fire, then it’s over, vanished faster than it appeared. If we want to live each moment in life—it is best we do as much as we can now before it ends. The improbability of death is not the disappearing from earth one day, it will take place for certain, and it is what you are going to do now with it and the grounding for the coming event.

When I was fifteen-years old, in the middle of winter, my 1953 Desoto, a large bulk of a car ended up on the Mississippi River, I think I died that day, I ended up in a tree looking down on myself in the car, it was dark—I was not prepared and the inevitable came to my doorsteps. I just stared aimlessly at the Desoto that went over a thirty-food embankment, and crashed to about four feet in height. My body half out of the car; can you imagine anyone saying (looking at that boy half in the car and half out) “It reminds me that I will have to face death someday?”
To me, that evening was my Pearl Harbor, the heart in me I felt stopped, and of all places I was in a tree looking down upon myself, trying to find me in the dark, in the dark that is, the Desoto was like a battleship that hit an iceberg. No one knew the car landed on the thin ice of the Mississippi River, unheeded, and I was unprepared to die, like Sid I imagine, who wanted me to go drinking with him the night he and three others got in a car accident, and I happened to say, “No,” for some odd reason, blindly refusing to face a girlfriend’s scorn if I did, which saved my life, and killed all of them.

No. 511 (11-5-209)