Another Day Closer

Weeks and years go by so fast that it feels like time is slipping away from me. I hate this feeling. Life is short. Time is precious. I want to savor every day. But so many days have passed away now that my parents have become elderly, I’ve become middle-aged, and my little nephews have become adults. How did that happen?

Where did the time go? Into wrinkles and gray hair?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had the sense of time going by too quickly. Well, not as a child waiting for Christmas or an elementary student a week before summer vacation. But since about the age of 12, I’ve had an underlying, almost morbid sense of fleeting time, probably due to that early prognosis that my disease would cause my death before I reached my teenage years. After graduating from high school, I treated every year as if it were my last until I was 25 and realized that I had no idea how long my life would be. As I’m now approaching … gulp … half a century, I know full well that more of my life is behind me than ahead of me. That’s a slap-across-the-face kind of thought. Although I already believed most of my life was over when I was eighteen, my own mortality is striking me differently these days. For example, I no longer anxiously, terribly dread my own death.

Is that wisdom? Or the fatigue of aging? … Or are the two the same?

Earlier Times

When I was a child, I was so wrapped up in the wonder of my five physical senses that I explored every little thing with pleasure. The drinking in of daffodils and befriending of birds developed into teenage ruminations on a twisted tree or a dead pine needle traveling down a stream of snowmelt. The complexity and delights of my own skin could be philosophy and rapture as I continued well into my twenties. All of life was terribly beautiful to me.

Those were certainly the days, as William Blake once wrote, when I could see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower, holding infinity in the palm of my hand and eternity in an hour. Along with the pains of angst, loneliness, and raging frustrations, there was also great freedom in those years. This was the time in my life when I decided that the natural world was self sufficient and there was no such thing as God; it was also when I realized the ultimate reality that everyone calls God is real. I encountered and chose Christ in those days of wonder and pleasureful joy when I could effervesce into stars and feel a sense of intimacy with infinity and eternity.

Decades later, I haven’t changed much. I could say that my body is much, much weaker now, terribly beyond what most 49-year-olds experience in aging. But my body has always weakened, every year of my life I have been less and less able to do the things that I used to do as my muscles waste from disease. I’ve always experienced aging acutely. I knew increased disability at 20 years old when I struggled to continue writing longhand and struggled, awkwardly as well as futilely, to feed myself. In these younger years, I would freak out over a chest cold, usually getting hospitalized for it, thinking that this would kill me and begging God for my life to continue. I still freak out a little (though amazingly less once I chose Christ), and I still don’t want to be hospitalized. Last summer, I signed a DNR, a Do Not Resuscitate order. Why? Because I’m not as unreasonably desperate as I used to be, and I don’t want broken ribs from misguided attempts at CPR on my twisted body. (More on this in a few months.)

And maybe, just maybe, because I’m beginning to understand what it might mean to be ready.

Timelessness

Yes, it’s true, in the fatigue of aging I’m scared of what more years will hold for me: more difficulty breathing and swallowing, more dependency upon strangers as my parents age, more sorrow than I can imagine in possibly losing loved ones — more pain and suffering. But maybe it’s not just fear that’s causing me to think that death isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe, in wisdom, I am also more acutely aware — not of the fleeting nature of earthly life, because I’ve always had a strong sense of that — but of the incompleteness of it, the inability of earthly life to perfectly fulfill our deepest human longings and the finite, insufficient nature of all that I have sought to hold onto so tightly. Maybe it’s wisdom giving me a profound awareness that this life is not all there is, that infinity and eternity are not mysteries to contemplate — but realities to live.

I may have the feeling that I can “hold infinity” in my hand, but to be held by infinity… that’s completely other. Wildflowers are wonderfully beautiful, but they are not heavens in themselves, they were created by Heaven. To be absorbed into the Source of all that is good, true, and beautiful … nothing earthly can compare. Our limited word of “Paradise” is our best, yet feeble attempt in our earthly limitation to name it.

Paradise

What began this rather rambling reflection was one of the conversations that I had with the godsend of a nurse who takes care of me and reflects with me on life. Recently, we discussed the fleeting nature of time. “The days just go,” she said.

And in my mind came the phrase, “Closer to Paradise.”

I’ve never wanted the days and years to go by quickly. I still really, really, really, really, really don’t. Of course, I can’t stop time. So, for the sake of truth, for the sake of true eternity, whenever I feel that morbid sense of time passing I will try to remember, “Another day closer to Paradise.”

It may take years. I have no idea, it may take decades. But the sure truth for every one of us, no matter how long our earthly lives may be, is that the passing from this life to the next will come. Not thinking about it won’t change that. Here and now, we faithfully follow the path that God has laid down for us, catching a glimpse as we go, detecting a lovely scent, hearing the faint but loving call to go onward. From the necessarily limited knowledge and experience that we have of divine love and mercy on Earth, we rightfully believe that infinite eternity will be the consummation of the truly good and truly beautiful. Coming into full and perfect union with God, the Source of all, will be … well … beyond human words.

Each day gets us closer.

Where does time go? Into eternity.

© 2024 Christina Chase

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Feature Photo by Anton Darius on Unsplash