You come to appreciate it best when you find you’re losing it
Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church
Dudley Clendinen is dying. He’s 66 years of age and has Lou Gehrig’s disease. There is no cure.
“I sometimes call it Lou,” Dudley wrote in July 9’s The New York Times, “because the familiar seems less threatening.”
He describes the disease as one where the nerves and muscles pulse and twitch and progressively die. “From the outside, it looks like the ripple of piano keys in the muscles under my skin. From the inside, it feels like anxious butterflies trying to get out.”
There are a couple of types of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Dudley has the worst kind, the one affecting his ability to breathe. That brings death sooner.
He’s discovered it has changed his focus. “We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die.”
I have difficulty believing, as Dudley writes, that facing death is “one of life’s greatest and most absorbing thrills and challenges.” But I can see how it would capture your attention. “This is not about one particular disease or even about Death. It’s about Life, when you know there’s not much left. That is the weird blessing of Lou. There is no escape, and nothing much to do. It’s liberating.”
Sometimes you have to think about death to appreciate life. Perhaps you come to appreciate life best when you find you’re losing it.
Dudley tells how he has come to appreciate a Leonard Cohen song, “Dance Me to the End of Love.” He writes, “That’s the way I feel about this time. I’m dancing, spinning around, happy in the last rhythms of the life I love.”
I’m thinking we should discover these dancing, spinning around, happy rhythms of life earlier than at the end.
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