Out of Oxygen

When I received an email from Chaplain Kellough telling the Wheaton student body that a recent alum died this past Saturday, I paused and took a few minutes out of my evening to read the details.

Josiah Bubna graduated in 2011, meaning he was a senior when I was a freshman. He was running on Wheaton's track, where I've run myself, when he suddenly collapsed and died. His fiancée was right there when it happened. They were going to be married a month later. It was all very sad. But I didn't know Josiah personally, just like I didn't know Ramie Harris, another Wheaton student who died in a plane crash this past spring, and just like I haven't known any of the numerous Wheaton grads and professors emeritus whose deaths have elicited similar emails from Chappy K over the past year. So I closed my email and didn't give much more thought to Josiah.

Then this afternoon I got a text from my mom of all people, asking if I knew him. I said no, and then she informed me that he was the cousin of my YoungLife leader, Julia, someone I've loved and looked up to since middle school. And suddenly it all changed. It all seemed so much more real. I started hurting for Julia. I went to Josiah's Facebook page and saw that we have a number of mutual friends, and I started hurting for them too. I read through some of the recent posts on his wall, and started hurting for all the friends and family who are clearly in complete shock over the death of such a young and healthy person, right in the prime of life. I saw his profile picture with his smiling fiancée, and his "engaged" relationship status, and started hurting for Rebekah, who is right now going through a world of pain I can only imagine. My mind went back to nine years ago when my own beloved cousin died of cystic fibrosis at age 20, and I remembered the aching and grief and confusion I felt. It hurts just writing about it.

One day not long after Amy died, my mom told me about an interaction she'd had with my other cousin, Amy's sister Stephanie, at the funeral. Steph, who also has cystic fibrosis, had been in the hospital room when Amy's lungs finally gave out. She watched as her sister grew wide-eyed and fearful as she ran out of oxygen, trying so hard to listen to her parents' pleas to keep fighting. And so, as my mom tried to comfort her at the funeral, telling her that Amy had gone to heaven, Steph asked her, "If she was going to heaven, why was she so scared?" My mom, a pediatrician, gave the scientific explanation that as her body filled up with carbon dioxide, it went into panic mode and produced the frantic emotions Amy displayed in her last moments. And that was the end of the story. But I don't think Stephanie was fully satisfied with that explanation, and now, almost a decade later, I think she must still live in a measure of fear about her own impending death.

Why is it that death scares us so? There's a scene in the movie What About Bob? (a family favorite), in which eleven-year-old Sigmund shares his deepest fear with his father's 40-something psychiatric patient, Bob. "There's no way out of it. You are going to die. I'm going to die. There's no way out of it. It's going to happen. What difference does it make if it's tomorrow or in 50 years? Or much sooner in your case." Most of us aren't as melodramatic about it as Siggy, but we all think about death at some point. Especially times like this, when we or someone we're close to lose someone. And it's always a little scary, and it's always a little sad. Sometimes more than a little.

I'm not quite sure why that is, especially for Christians, but it just is. I mean, I'm looking forward to heaven. I hope you are too. Read the post called "Heaven" from a few weeks ago to see what I mean. But I don't know that I can honestly say I'm looking forward to death. Death. I hate it, by the way, when people give cutesy names to it, like "passing away," "moving on," or "going to a better place." Just call it what it is, people. Death. It's going to happen to all of us, just like taxes. And it scares us, because none of us knows how to be dead. Living we've got a decent handle on. But dying is a mystery. There's nothing we humans hate like a mystery we can't solve.

So what are we supposed to do? I, eleven-year-old that I was, wrestled with that question for weeks and months after Amy died. I came to the conclusion most people must come to when death stares them in the face: live. Live with everything you've got. Throw yourself into life like you're dying (to borrow from Kris Allen). After all, you are. As George Santayana once put it, "There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval." Enjoy is the perfect word. Biblical, too.

Josiah is dead. Ramie is dead. Amy is dead. Millions on millions of others have died. We all will at some point. Some today, some tomorrow, most a long time from now. But now, right now, we are alive. You and I are living and breathing, and I believe it's for a reason. I believe God made us to give everything we possibly can to the world, and get everything we possibly can back out. I believe He's using this life to shape and mold us in ways we can't possibly understand. It's a gift. And I don't want to waste it.