When Death Haunts

When death haunts you, stare at eternity.

Death has always haunted me. I came to the faith as a shaking, silent seven-year-old, creeping into the dark of a hotel room to ask my father what I had to do to avoid death and get to heaven. The fear that night shaped me, molded my mind and found its way into my muscles. It drew me into asking the question, which was my salvation. So, great good came from haunting evil that night.

Years later, at 18, as I stared down at my father’s limp and decaying body, shaking and silent again at the ghost of death taking away the shepherding giant of my life, I wept. Death had come to haunt me and my hero. I’d nearly forgotten about death, lived many years without acknowledging his presence in every room. But no more. I had what counselors tell me was a PTSD response to his passing that June evening, which rolled into a full-blown anxiety disorder that’s followed me around for fifteen years. 

Death comes back regularly—when leukemia claims your dear grandmother, when spinal cancer comes for your friend at 31, when a car crash claims that basketball teammate you were never that close to, when pancreatic tumors steal away a sage in the faith and threaten a new friend with an early end. Oh, death . . .