Private Window

When Jacob finished commanding his sons, he drew his feet into the bed and breathed his last, and was gathered to his people.  Genesis 49:33  NASB

Gathered to his people – I stand in the window of the second floor apartment in Glenview, looking at the snow.  Suddenly I begin to cry.  To shake.  My whole life seems an utter failure, a hopeless trek against the dark forces maneuvering to overthrow me.  I collapse onto the floor.

I sit on the beach in El Salvador listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Life Without You, weeping at the beauty fading from the sky as the darkness invades.

I am suffused in blessed warmth, holding the tiny girl in my hands, the last of my children, an angel of hope.

I feel the conscious adrenaline overdose of fear as I rush to my four-year-old who has just fallen from the barn onto the driveway.  Nothing matters except his life.  I scoop him up, frantically searching for injuries, carrying him to the car.  “It’s okay, Dad,” he says, “an angel caught me.”

How can I explain any of this to you?  How can you possibly know what was happening in me?

Irvin Yalom suggests that there is an individual private world inevitably lost when we die.  “As death approaches, many are aware that when they perish their whole unique separate world will perish as well—that world of sights and sounds and experiences unknown to anyone else, not even life partners.”[1]  Since each of us travels our own particular journey, Yalom’s comment serves as a reminder that death ends the great and wonderful experience of what our roads were like—roads that were traveled in ways that even we have trouble explaining to ourselves.  In the end we are reacquainted with lĕbado—aloneness.

Yalom’s instruction is to bravely face this ontological aloneness and invest in the present because life is a fleeting whisper in the vastness of eternity.  He’s right, of course, if this is a place without God.  As a Jewish atheist, he had nothing more to offer than finding some human purpose as we fade into the coming night; a purpose which is entirely self-generated.  After nearly ninety years of living and decades of acting as a therapist, Yalom writes, “I’ve had a lifetime of exploring, analyzing, and reconstructing my past, but I’m realizing now there is a vale of tears and pain in me I may never be done with.”[2]

The paradigm of the Hebrew world doesn’t see things this way.  Yes, death comes, and in its coming sweeps away so much of our personal journeys.  All those private moments we treasured, the beauty we experienced, the loves that enriched us—all that will disappear from the earth, from human history, but not from existence.  Why?  Because God also shares what was ours, in the smallest detail, in the most intense emotion.  God has accompanied us, intimately, completely, fully.  We are not lost to Him.  Jacob doesn’t go quietly into that dark night.  He is gathered to his people.  He is still in community—the community of the dead remembered by God.

Does that offer any solace?   For the atheist, it’s merely a psychological crutch to help weak-minded people ignore the inevitable.  But for us, those who believe that the universe is, in fact, the handiwork of a God who cares, it is essential.  It shouts that our end here isn’t all that there is.  Jacob might not have thought about an afterlife.  The idea wasn’t a part of his tradition.  But neither was extinction.  God remembered him, and continues to remember him for all eternity.  His life mattered.  It was not a momentary blip on the stage of eternity.  It was an essential element of divine purpose because God remembers.

That might not seem like much consolation if you were expecting something like the Christian view of Heaven—another world filled with goodness and light, so much like this one without evil that you can actually imagine living there.  Jacob has no such presumptions.  But he has this: he has never been completely, truly alone—and he never will be because whatever comes next is God’s weaving his life into the gathering of all kin.

Maybe I can rest now.

Topical Index:  gathering to his kin, afterlife, memories, meaning, Irvin Yalom, Genesis 49:33

[1] Irvin D. Yalom, Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir, p. 198.

[2] Ibid., p. 341.