The hiss was now becoming a roar; the whole world was a vast moving screen of snow, but even now it said peace, it said remoteness, it said cold, it said sleep.
From Silent Snow, Secret Snow, by Conrad Aiken
Last week, I felt as I once did as a child, realizing his helplessness in an indifferent world.
I might have been 9 or 10, and I had developed a severe stomach flu or something. Nothing my parents thought serious enough for a trip to the doctor, but for several days, my entire digestive system rebelled against any form of nourishment I tried to put in it. I began to feel weak and listless, and then I watched a television show about a child dying of cancer.
The child’s desperate mother took the stricken boy to a quack who promised miracles and attached him to a contraption she claimed would cure him.
But the child did not improve.
I remember the mother describing the child’s condition: “He is sleeping more and eating less.”
Which described me unambiguously.
Of course, I was dying too, and I knew it.
Death seemed to be circling in the shadows all around me, pitiless, unhurried, and unpredictable. Even ordinary activities seemed surreal, odd. But it wasn’t necessarily painful. In some ways, it was epiphanic.
The nights were warm and silent; the dawn — with its renewal of chaos — was unwelcome. I waited for the end stoically, a child resigned to his fate.
I felt uncertain of my steps. The ground seemed little more than a thin grey shale that could barely support my weight. Below the shale, I imagined a world of black rivers filled with strange, carnivorous fish.
H. P. Lovecraft’s version of Disney World.
The present possessed me, the now, as it glowed and pulsated inside me like the engines of creation; ultimately, I realized that I belonged to a future that would lead me nowhere, to oblivion, but perhaps to peace, to quiet, to remoteness.
My thoughts were filled with disturbing images of hospitals, funeral homes, and cemeteries, all just necessary obstacles as I waited for the moment when I would begin to rise into the vault of the sky. My oblivious parents seemed unaware that I was drifting away from them.
I slumbered among the ghosts of long extinct animals like the Tasmanian Wolf and the Quagga, the Passenger Pigeon, herds of Aurochs, and the West African Black Rhinoceros.
I maundered among ancient temples built for unremembered gods, great stone halls filled with oppressive silence and dust.
I wanted to call it beautiful, but that wasn’t the right word. Perhaps it represented some kind of raw truth I was yet too young to grasp.
But I did not die. My digestive system righted itself, and my energy returned.
The torment, if I can call it that now, was ended. The pulse of life grew stronger until I scarcely remembered my “brush with death.”
But as I have gotten older, some of those thoughts have returned. Some of those obsessions with the hereafter linger. Now it seems all those years I put behind me are nothing more than a reprieve, and a brief one at that.
As we all know, Death remains undefeated.
Or does it?
According to Google Translate, the English word “song” translates to “wimbo” in Swahili, and the English word “wave” translates to “wimbi” in Swahili.
I believe that similarity is intentional.
Thousands of years ago, as the Proto-Afroasiatic languages were developing in East Africa, men and women listened from the shore to the hiss and crash of the sea and recognized its beauty, its rhythm, and melodies.
Perhaps they would have been surprised to learn that seawater and human blood are quite similar.
Eventually, the families that made up the human tribe spread all over the globe.
You and I are their descendants.
I find that somehow comforting.
But the attraction of the sea remains. Forty percent of Americans live in coastal counties today. Some of us live near artificial inland seas like Lakes Oconee and Sinclair that tap into that same marine attraction.
So, whenever I look out upon the water or hear the surf crashing, I remember the family I belong to and cherish them. God gave them life so that they could give me a fleeting glimpse of it.
Selah.