Chapters

Grace Choi sat next to me in my Senior High School English class. She was Chinese,  slight (5' 2" maybe 100 lbs), quiet, and she was an incredible pianist. I once saw tiny Grace pound a piano into submission - attacking it with a fury - demanding it's loyalty - until at long last she drew out the sweetest music you would ever want to hear.

After a typical weekend, my friend, Ramon, and I entered our English class to find our teacher, Mrs. Prince, crying at the back of the room. We asked her what was wrong and she said that Grace had died over the weekend. 

Grace had been feeling poorly on Friday but didn't want to miss school so she came anyway. Friday night her parents took her to the hospital where the doctors diagnosed her as having the flu and sent her home. She died the next day of an infection that stopped her heart.

"I don't know how to announce this to the class," Mrs. Prince cried. 

"I can do it," I said . . . and that's what I did.

Once the class had mostly entered and taken their seats, Ramon and I stood in front of our friends and peers and announced what I now see as the opening in a new chapter in our teenage lives. One of our own had died. Not a suicide, not a car accident - but a mysterious illness had taken her. We were all mortal after all . . . .

Life is full of stages. There is High School with all it's angst and strife and hilarity. Then college with freedom and responsibility and future plans and work. Then weddings as most people begin pairing up and settling down, establishing a home and a career and learning what it means to love. Next come the babies and baby showers and diapers and formulas and "did your son ever have a rash like this . . ."

I wrote last week that we attended services for a high school / college friend of ours. As friends gathered, then made the drive to the church, then reunited in the fellowship hall after the service, you got the sense that another chapter in our lives had begun.

Our friend Jay Gould, had a problematic mole on his skin removed about 15 years ago. It turned out to be malignant and so all the requisite follow-ups were scheduled and attended with no recurrence of the melanoma. Jay went on to establish a career, marry, buy a house and have two children. A year ago he went to the doctor complaining of pneumonia-like symptoms. Further tests revealed that the melanoma had spread to his lungs and he was given three months to live. He passed away at age 37.

As we all sat there remembering and honoring our friend, you could tell that this was something different. Similar to Grace 20 years ago, this was not a suicide or a car accident - but unlike Grace, this was not some unknown, unlikely, mysterious illness either . . . this was cancer. And just like the first of your friends to get married or the first to buy a house or the first to have children . . . Jay will not be the only one of us who is taken by this devastating disease. He is just one of the first amongst us to pass from the these shadowlands we refer to as "the real world" into the great ever-after.

As I sat there last Saturday, it occurred to me; We are not only mortal in the "some day" sense of the word. We are mortal in the very real "here and now" sense of the word. And while we often claim an inalienable "right" to life and health in our younger years, I could not help but feel that those years of "right to life" are fading . . . in many ways from here on out we are living on borrowed time.

But I don't mean that in a sorrowful or morose sort of way - I mean it in a bracing splash of icy-cold-water-to-the-face sort of way. As I sat in the sanctuary I could hear silent voices shouting "Wake up! Life is now. Tomorrow is but a wisp of a hope. Stop waiting. Get on with it!"

A page has turned and a new chapter has begun. This life is terribly beautiful and none of us are assured as to the length of the mortal road we are on. More than ever before, I have the sense that everyday is a gift. 

A page has turned, and I am trying very hard to pay attention . . . .