My mother passed away last Friday evening. She had been in hospital for the last eight months, a place she never wanted to be, though I think she had little realization of that most of the time she was there. She had taken a seizure of some kind in early December, at the seniors’ home that she never wanted to be in either. Fiercely independent, she tried in vain to avoid these places, knowing that when you enter near her age (91 last week), you seldom leave. Her avoidance of hospitals extended for years to hiding any illness or injury she had– not an ideal practice, since it jeopardized her health and sometimes concealed illness that her children needed to watch for in their own lives.

A few weeks ago my wife’s uncle Ralph, only slightly older than my mother, died as well, at a nursing home that he went into against his will. Later a fall there put him in hospital for a time and accelerated his growing list of problems. Like my mother, he valued his independence to a fault, and struggled against the limitations that each year of declining health forced on him. He loved the sea, and loved his house that overlooked Shelburne Harbour and the boats coming and going each day. He once had a small sailboat on which he took me and others, then later a powerboat when he no longer could handle the business of ducking booms and “coming about”, and loved nothing better than motoring us up and down the harbour. That last boat sadly was blocked up on its trailer in his yard, unused for several years, when he died miles away in the seniors’ home.

Ralph adapted as best he could, being creative and capable, probably showing a pattern of what I will do at that age, since we shared the “good with hands” ability. He devised jigs to do all kinds of work he could no longer handle, from holders for his chain saw when he started it, to pulleys and ropes and winches to use invention to overcome inability. Gradually though, his body cooperated less and less, his vision faded, and even the mechanical adaptations were not enough, and life at home was becoming unsafe.

While the body rebels, the mind unfortunately often follows. My mother was into mixing up my brother and me a couple of years ago, and on one occasion scared my brother with an early morning phone call to say that one of my sons had arrived in the night and was sleeping in her bedroom, when in fact he was in another province. Ralph seemed as capable mentally as ever when you went to visit, but if you returned the following day, the previous visit was gone and forgotten.

It seems at times that those who fight the assault of age the most end up lingering on beyond what might be a more ideal time, and having difficult final years. Some seem to be more fortunate. A lady at our church told me Sunday that her mother baked beans the day before she died, and warned them not to let them spoil. I guess that’s the way to go, but we don’t get that choice.

Like a beast in the brush and long grass, death starts stalking us early in life. The biologists tell us that physically things start to go downhill at about age seventeen, a shocking thought, reaffirming the old adage that youth is wasted on the young. Fortunately, they claim that we don’t reach a peak mentally until decades later, when we acquire “wisdom”, though this is likely questioned by the seventeen year olds. The aching bones, the vision troubles, the starting of what might be chronic complaints, are all indications of the beast nipping at our heels as it tracks us along life’s way.

Occasionally it leaps out unexpected and viciously attacks, as it did with my friend Wendy two years ago, felling her with cancer in only a matter of months after her marriage. More often it worries us with nips and scratches, until the “declining years”, when the attacks come more frequent and the defenses grow weaker, until finally all of us succumb to an attack.

Even those of us who have a belief in a better world after this one fear the event, since outside of Christ himself, we know no one personally who returned to tell us of the journey. Even Lazarus, brought to life by Christ, died. “You gotta walk it by yourself,” says the old spiritual. We console each other at funerals with Psalm 23, but avoid the previous Psalm that Christ himself quoted from the cross.

Certainly the death of people we hold dear is a wakeup call for the rest of us, as we count the years we have left with the misguided notion that we are guaranteed any of them, and, if we are wise (it comes with age), recall the Chronicle Herald cryptoquote from a few days ago:

“And in the end it’s not the years in your life that count; it’s the life in your years.” (Abe Lincoln)