Letter to a Dead Friend

 

The Letter:

It's funny.

You would think, after all this time, it wouldn't still bother me. After all, by now our lives would probably have gone different directions and I wouldn't see you that often anyway. There are partings in life that are nearly as final as death. And to be honest, it usually doesn't bother me. I don't think of you that often. But then I will run across something which reminds me of you—some tidbit of information that I would have shared with you or some question I would have liked to ask you or some issue on which I would have loved to hear your opinion—and then it strikes me again, as something cold and sudden, that you're gone.

It comes to me with a fresh reality that there will never be another evening sitting across from you sharing our thoughts and opinions; that I can never see your laughter or annoyance at some strange idea; that we will never share another idea, another joke, even another disagreement. It seems strange and somehow impossible to realize how, with you gone, there are few people left who feel a slight chuckle or shudder at the mention of nachos and red Kool-Aid. There is something almost dizzying about the realization that I might search the world forever and yet never catch a glimpse of your face again or hear the distinctive sound of your laugh or your Stitch impression. 

To call the feeling loneliness or sadness would be probably too strong. It is a sense of something missing—but not merely absence, but an absence which is also a definite presence. It reminds me of Frost's comment about the mountain: “I noticed that I missed stars in the west,/Where its black body cut into the sky.”

And if that is my sensation on the matter when was I was, after all, only a somewhat distant friend, I cannot imagine the feelings of those who were closer to you; your closest friends and family. 

All I really know is that when I think of you, I cannot disentangle the reality of your life from the reality of your death; and with every echo of your life—your ideas and opinions which are still somewhat shaping mine; your jokes which still sometimes make me laugh in remembrance; your virtue which sometimes rises up suddenly in my mind as a beacon of light—with all of these sounds there comes the equally strong echo of silence, of a hall which once was full and is now empty. I do not question that its occupant has moved into higher and better quarters. But that does not make the old hall seem any less lost in shadows and cobwebs and haunting mockery of the echoes.

The Moral:

And that is why I am an optimist.

There can be no progress made in an attempt to craft a cohesive or coherent view of the world without taking into account the stark and startling fact of death. G. K. Chesterton, speaking of the death of St. Francis, said:“What was passing from the world was a person; a poet; an outlook on life like a light that was never after on sea or land; a thing not to be replaced or repeated while the earth endures... Huge and happy as was the popular work he left behind him, there was something that he could not leave behind, any more than a landscape painter can leave his eyes in his will.” And while that is especially true of a dominant and impressive character like St. Francis, it is true of every man. Kenneth Foreman expressed it by saying that no man is indispensable, but all men are irreplaceable. Death leaves a quite definite impression of absence, of loss.  To have loved and lost may or may not be better than to never have loved at all but they are most definitely two entirely dissimilar states. A widower is a very different species than a bachelor, though it is an open question which is more unfortunate.

And that is why I have no patience with the cheap and shallow pessimism which is current in the world today, a view that life is ephemeral or valueless because it terminates in death. It amounts to saying that the tragedy of death proves that life is meaningless—to which the obvious reply is that if life is meaningless then death is not a tragedy. You cannot say that life is nothing more than a molehill and prove it by showing that its removal leaves a hole as big as a mountain. You cannot be melodramatic about death and then use that as an excuse to be cynical about life. If that absence and removal we call death is something definite and concrete and almost tangible then surely whatever it removes must be something equally definite, concrete, and tangible. And if death is a loss, then surely life must be a gain.

The fact that life inevitably ends in death may make the story of life more tragic or more heroic or more comic or more dramatic; the one thing it cannot do is make it meaningless. Perhaps to a purely inhuman and inorganic intelligence, life and death would be equally meaningless. To any normal man, they are equally meaningful. Perhaps on some higher spiritual plane, one would see that life is meaningful while death is something more ephemeral or temporary. The one thing that cannot be seriously believed on any assumption is that life is meaningless and death meaningful. 

And while, as I said, it is a tenable position that life and death are equally meaningless, no sane man believes it. When the subject of death comes up in our mind sentimentalists weep, religious men pray, cowards shiver, cynics laugh, and most of us change the subject. And each of these reactions, in their own way, preach the same message: that, to all of us, death is something real and highly significant. Whether we treat death reverently or irreverently, we must treat it is as important. Macabre comedy, every bit as much as tragedy, is based on the fact that death is something stark and definite; just as obscene humor and sentimental romance are both based on the fact that the relations of the sexes are something stark and definite. And if death is something stark and definite then life has to be equally stark and definite. Death is the one fact no one can be mad enough to deny and it stands against all the casual pessimism of our era. I believe in life because I believe in death.

I called this belief optimism. In casual conversation, optimism and pessimism are often used to refer to a general attitude, to a general tendency to expect something good or something bad. Since, on any theory, good things and bad things both happen in life, choosing to always expect one or the other is like the man who stopped his clock so it would always be right at least twice a day. But in this place, I have nothing to say about such attitudes and tendencies. There is a deeper meaning to the words optimism and pessimism which is more closely akin to a creed than a personality trait. Optimism is something like patriotism; a fixed and final loyalty to life itself; a firm and unshakable belief that life is meaningful and significant. This is not the place to discuss political controversies, but there was one catchphrase prevalent during a recent debate that summarizes the creed of optimism: #alllivesmatter. (As I said, it is not the place here to enter into the political debate, but it is worth noting how that debate does prove my point. The whole #[*insert favorite color*]livesmatter debate began, not with life, but with death. It was the assertion that death matters which gave rise to the assertion that life matters.)

Jack Kirby coined the phrase “anti-life.” I do not exactly know what he meant by it; (I'm not entirely sure he did either); but it will do here for the attitude which stands against optimism. Anti-life is the refusal to take life seriously; it is the denial of the intrinsic value and significance of life, whatever form that denial may take. And, as I said above, it finds its rebuttal in the cold fact of death. The pessimist's belief that life is not worth living; the pacifist's belief that life is not worth preserving; the warmonger's belief that life is not worth saving; the evangelical's belief that life is not worth sanctifying—to me, all these heresies have an answer in any day's obituary.

It will be noted that, up to this point, I have not brought up any specifically religious arguments. And that is because life is a fact which all men know (and death a fact which most of them know) long before they ever open a Bible. Revelation is not given to men in a vacuum; it supplies answers which implies that people are already familiar with the questions. There will always be such a thing as natural theology because all men know nature before they know grace, even though it is only by grace that they are able to know nature at all. They can come at last to the Word, because the Word was in the beginning; because Christ is the Alpha, He can also afford to be the Omega.

But now we have reached the point where it is necessary to bring in a specifically spiritual ingredient. However, to come to what I mean, we will have to take a detour through the woods. Someone once posed this question: if a tree falls in the forest, and there's no one around to hear it, does it really make a sound? There are two greater questions behind this apparently trivial riddle. First, is reality consistent? We can only see and observe so much of the world; does every single part of it obey the same rules and follow the same patterns? Or is the universe making faces at us whenever our backs are turned? Second, does reality have a meaning in itself or do we impose a meaning upon it? Is the sound of a tree falling an objective fact or is it merely a personal impression of our own? We can only know matter through the medium of mind; so does matter have a meaning of its own apart from mind? Does matter even exist on its own apart from mind?

And this really is relevant to this article. My whole point here is that death leaves a definite and concrete absence; that life must be something large because it leaves such a large hole when it is removed. But that is obviously merely a matter of perspective. Grief is an experience in our own mind; just as hearing a tree fall is an experience in our senses. The fact that we perceive death as something definite doesn't necessarily mean that that perception is accurate. And, again, we perceive this definite character of death when someone we know dies; but what of those without friends or acquaintances? If a man dies alone in the forest and there is no one to know it, does his death leave a gap?

And that is why I said there is a specifically spiritual point to be made in this discussion. Because the existence of God is the answer to both these questions. We can put it briefly by saying that whenever a tree falls in the forest, God hears it. All reality is known by God because all things were made by Him and by Him all things consist. And because God made reality, reality does have an intrinsic meaning. We often mistake what that meaning is. The sound of falling trees and the meaning of life are both confused sometimes with other things. But the point is that God made the tree and God made me. The forests of foliage and personage both were planted by God.

This article is already long enough and I do not intend to delve deeply into the spiritual meaning of life or of death. Indeed, as we study God's revelation, we will come to have a better understanding of the meaning of these two things and their somewhat complex interrelationship, but we don't have time for that at present. Nor is there space to discuss the doctrine of Resurrection, which is closely tied to this whole idea of the significance of life. All that we need to grasp here is that a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without God's notice; a tree cannot fall in the forest without God hearing it; and no man ever died without God reading his obituary. Our perception of death, therefore, is not something subjective or relative but is a perception of reality. And if death is a reality, then life is a reality and optimism is the only creed for a sane man. The Bible says “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.” And if their death is something precious and significant to God, then surely their life should be something precious and significant to man.