Today, my dad would have turned 75.

Here he is some years ago, as I like to remember him, tall and perfect and seated at a table with a glass of wine nearby:

My dad’s parents and grandparents lived until ripe old ages.  His paternal grandfather died in his nineties, killed by a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting in his neighborhood in Chicago when he was taking his daily constitutional.  So, we all always counted on the fact that Dad had lots of time to enjoy his children and grandchildren into his later years.  What we hadn’t counted on was the effect of all that exposure to Agent Orange during service in Vietnam; what we hadn’t factored into our calculations was the fast-moving deadly prostate cancer that would kill him before his 72^nd birthday; what we hadn’t imagined was that his grandchildren would grow up without him – that beautiful, warm bulk of him – as one of the staples of their childhoods, that he would never even meet – in this life – his youngest grandson, that he would never see and celebrate even his 75^th birthday, which would have been today. 

August 21 is also the day that my khalo Sami died, thirteen years ago.  My maternal grandmother’s only brother (out of nine siblings!), my khalo was an integral part of my own childhood, and though never ordained, an example to me of what it means to live as a priest, as a person steeped in faith, an empathic listener, a kind and wise leader and mentor, a follower of Christ.  Cancer killed Khalo Sami, too, much earlier than I would have liked; it’s always much earlier than we would like.

But, by some weird accident, August 21 is also my mother-in-law’s birthday.  In fact, my mother-in-law, Carolyn, and my father were born on the exact same day – same year and everything (weird, right?) – one in England, one in the States.  So, today is also Carolyn’s birthday (hopefully, she won’t mind that I’m outing her age to the blogosphere!).  And I am so thankful and grateful for this day that saw her birth because she is one of the sweetest blessings in my life.  Obviously, without her, there would be no Ben, so that’s a definite positive!  But also and especially, her love for my children – her grandchildren – is a precious thing.  Carolyn visited us recently and the joy of watching her with my children, of seeing them bask in her particular kind of love, of appreciating how wonderfully they take her love for granted, as a constant that they can rely on, such joy fills me up to overflowing.  So, I give thanks, for her sake, for this day, this August 21.

And the various strands of this day, the accidents – or providence – that leaves so much centered on this one 24-hour period, brings to the forefront of my mind how closely life and death, joy and sorrow, beauty and tragedy are bound together.

In Scripture, when the psalmist imagines God’s kingdom made real on earth, he (or she) sees a time when “mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” (Ps. 85:10).  And I think for the rest of my life I will see August 21 as a foretaste of God’s kingdom, for on this day especially, it seems to me that life and death meet together in the same way that mercy and truth, righteousness and peace do.  These things are not, finally, opposites of each other, but rather parts of the same whole, reflections in a windowpane that both mirror each other and call us forward into new places, new realms beyond where we stand right now.

I was in the room in the moment that my father died.  My mother and sister were there, too, all standing right beside him.  He must have been glad to know that.  When he was still conscious enough, he had told us that he hoped we wouldn’t “miss the moment.”  And we didn’t.  We were all there for that profound moment.  He gave three powerful, deep, guttural, primal grunts – of pain? of effort? of emotion?  Yes, I think.  And then he stopped.  Everything stopped.  It all stopped. 

And I remember at the time thinking it all felt so familiar to me.  Not like déjà vu.  Not because I had been at other death-beds in the course of my ministry.  But just weirdly – and comfortingly – familiar nonetheless. 

It was a few days later that I realized the root of that feeling.  My daughter, Beatrice, was nearly 18 months old when my father died.  I was still nursing her (minimally) at the time of his death.  It had been only a year and a half earlier that I had delivered her and so the memory of that experience of child-birthing was still pretty recent.  And even with an epidural, even though I felt very little pain, I had had to push her out with a lot of effort.  Ben held one hand and one foot on one side of me and a nurse held me on the other side and the doctor stood ready to receive her, repeating over and over to me with each contraction, “Push push push push push push push.”  And I pushed.  And as I pushed I grunted: powerful, deep, guttural, primal grunts.  And then she was out.  And this little scrawny infant, wet with fluid and blood was on my bare chest.  And, for a moment, I stopped.  Everything stopped. 

Birth and death are so close to one another, in the end.  They almost kiss.  The span of our lives is so short, so precious, and yet so abundant with love and joy and tragedy and beauty and suffering and pain and exhilaration and mercy and humanity all at once.  If I dwell in its abundance too long I am overcome by it.  And so instead, I just keep going on in the daily lived experience of it all, as we each must do, until August 21 rolls around and for a moment, I stop, and see.