The Letter

8/16/19: A local funeral home sent me a letter offering a meeting and a free meal in order to plan my funeral and cremation. I was offended. I thought it seem really crass of them. I just turned 65 years old, and receive such letter invitations for a "free meal" to drum up sales for their business.

Now truth is truth. Death one day will come for me--hopefully not too soon--and there will be no slick evasion that I can implement to evade what awaits me.

I am a man of deep faith and profound hope. But there is no denying that death, emptiness, silence, barrenness and encountering nothing are all there at death time. I too fell the fear that a cold, indifferent, impersonal is all there is and all that awaits me.

When my bodied is burned down to a pile of ash, is that emblematic of what I have been and have become--the end product of my whole, senseless, purposeless insignificant life? I hope not.

I believe in God, salvation and the afterlife, but am frightened by my looming death--that constant, gnawing threat of death, terminating my existence. I worry that my sense of meaning is but a thin, ineffective barrier enveloping my frail ego, to forestall the approaching Grim Reaper, out there pending, nipping away at my feelings of worth, dignity and security.

It is no wonder that we settle for herd-living and a life of comforting delusions, escaping from freedom and awareness into "the they", ever drowning out reality in our social whirlwind of commotion, noise and games.

In the end, we will go out of this world alone. Nothing is  more fraught with promise or more terrible to experience than being utterly alone, naked and exposes on a platform of aloneness, waiting for our oncoming train with its plaintive whistle blowing, finally alert to the fact that only God can save us from eternal death, to assure us that our biological death need not be spiritual death too.