So Many Little Deaths
When we said goodbye to our son at Logan Airport, his sisters cried and his mother hugged him hard, and I did too, and he looked embarrassed. Then they announced his flight, and he walked down the long corridor to the plane. Every now and then he’d turn around to wave, and yes, we were still there, and then he turned the corner and was gone.
It doesn’t matter whether you leave by train or plane or car or on your own two feet, but there is always a corner that you must turn and then you’re gone.
We walked to the car parked on the top level of the garage, and, I imagine, we looked as if there’d been a death. In a sense, there had been, for every parting is a death, and so is every goodbye. We were giving up the someone we had heard bellowing in the shower at 5:00 in the morning, who ate the brownies his sister had baked for her friends, who left his bicycle in the front hall, who made quiet funny jokes and wonderfully crazy drawings, and who left emptiness and silence where he used to be.
So, yes, you must die to the one he was and die to the one you were to him, so that he and you can each go on and become the one God created you to be, not the one you’ve grown comfortable with. This dying-to-each-other is as much a part of life as breathing and sleeping, but knowing that doesn’t make it any easier.
So many little deaths we die before we die the big one. We die these deaths so we may live, so we may move with that inexorable force called life. The favorite mug smashed on the stone floor, the lost book, the job gone, the song sung, the face now seen only in that unrealistic photo—all these are part of the dying-to-live.
In the 1940s Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in his prison cell in Berlin and wrote a letter to his parents. It was the first Christmas he had spent away from home and he wrote,
Nothing can fill the gap when we are away from those we love, and it would be wrong to try and find anything. We must simply hold out and win through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation since leaving the gap unfilled preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap. He does not fill it but keeps it empty so that our communion with each other may be kept alive even at the cost of pain.
That’s another way of making my point. Perhaps it is simply dying to the one thing or one person whom we love, so that, although we may not know it at the time, another thing, another person, another love, may happen—not take its place.
Three months after our son left, we returned to the airport to welcome him back. We knew that a young man would step off the plane at Logan Airport, and he would look very much like the one we said goodbye to. But he wouldn’t be. He would be different, and we would be different too. That difference is good, and it would happen because we were willing to say goodbye, to die a bit so that we could grow a bit and meet each other as the people we became.
The church has known this for a long time and reminds us in the liturgies and scriptures. But every now and then we must rediscover it for ourselves. I guess Logan Airport is as good a place for that as any.
From Never Far From Home: Stories from the Radio Pulpit by Carl Scovel, minister emeritus, King’s Chapel, Boston, Massachusetts.
- At the Heart of All Creation - July 1, 2016
- So Many Little Deaths - November 26, 2014
- The Great Surmise - July 1, 2012
