Skip to main content

Death Matters



I'm about to leave on a road trip to Utah right now, traveling a road to the heart of a world I have left and that I despise. A road I travel too often. I'm going there to mourn the death of my cousin Meda.



http://m.legacy.com/obituaries/deseretnews/obituary.aspx?n=meda-maureen-barker&pid=188033861&referrer=0&preview=True#sthash.fPspQM5J.gbpl



I'm sad and scared. I will be in the car with my family who are all still in the church. I'll be in my jeans and Star Wars t-shirt and they'll all be in white button downs, ties, black slacks, and repressive dresses. I'll be wishing I could have a drink and share a buzz and tears with those who share my grief, they will be eating heavy starches and sickly sugars and convincing each other they should not be sad.



That is what Mormons try to teach other at times like this. Have an eternal perspective. She is with our other dead loved ones. We will see her again and it will be more real, better, than when we knew her here. We should be celebrating, not grieving.



Not only does this not help the hurt, it compiles hurt upon hurt. It is the inflation that the "eternal perspective" puts upon life. It falsely grants believers the right to shame beautiful people like Meda simply for loving her wife, supposing that this too will be made up in the end. This judgment, this hate, is also not real in the ultimate, eternal, perspective.
Well you don't get another chance to love her. You will never get the chance to see her more, understand her better. The credit of your time with her is maxed out like the cards that fund your MLM schemes.
Have a real eternal perspective. Look the chaos and infinity of time surrounding your experience and account for the wonderful privilege of your being. This time is all you get, these relationships are all you get. Death matters. It is real. It is permanent, and the opportunities you wasted assuming there was an infinity beneath your life are never coming back. That infinity is an abyss. Don't cache your love there. It will slide away from you beyond the gaze of peep stones.
I love you and I'll miss you Meda.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Review of David Tennant's Hamlet

He That Increaseth Knowledge Increaseth Sorrow : How Hamlet Demonstrates That Conscience does Make Cowards of Us All  It is among the most pleasurable, and the most maddening, enterprises in life to read The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare. Pleasurable because of its inexhaustible depth, its perfect turns of phrase, and its expansion of the art form that is the English language. Maddening because of the impenetrable layers of madness throughout the text, and within its many characters. At the end of the play, one is left feeling that something profound has been said, but that one is powerless to reiterate what it was. In Stephen Greenblatt’s seminal treatment of Hamlet he identified eleven essential unanswered questions in the play, among which are, “Why does Hamlet delay avenging the murder of his father by Claudius, his father’s brother? How much guilt does Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude . . . bear in this crime? How trustworthy is the ghost of Ha...
3 comments
Read more

The Tedious Web That is The Book of Mormon

     I set out on this project as a gift for my dad. Growing up there was nothing he and I bonded over more than our mutual love for The Book of Mormon. I have since left the faith in which he raised me, so he has a difficult time understanding me these days. With monumental recent additions to the literary scholarship surrounding The Book of Mormon, I thought it would round some edges between us if I could advocate for the book to be taken seriously within academia. This seemed like it would be easy to do. As a believer I read it many times and had positive experiences with the text, which I think have made me a better person. Also, instead of literary reviews coming out of Brigham Young University exclusively, serious Mormon Studies scholarship is now published in the presses of Oxford, University of North Carolina, and Yale. So, I caught up on the best and most current secondary scholarship and began a fresh read of the text. Let me show you what I found. Since few...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tarzan Kills Cannibals

Tarzan Kills Cannibals Tarzan Kills Cannibals “It seems that uncorrupted nature is good, since these folk, instead of eating me, showed me a thousand kindnesses.” – Voltaire 403             Few practices in any culture fascinate and repulse westerners like cannibalism. The image of benign missionaries roasting in a pot, while savage persons of dark complexion prepare to feast is indelible.  It is a foundational part of the western image of Africa.  The picture has been painted by agenda driven European explorers, and novelists like Edgar Rice Burroughs.  In his novel Tarzan of the Apes, Burroughs uses cannibalism to place white, aristocratic, men of noble birth at the apex of civilization.  That view not only perpetuates false history, it comes with a heavy death toll.  When Christopher Columbus received word of the Caribales in the West Indies, no aspect of the...
1 comment
Read more