Life is sweet.
That’s what I was thinking just last week as I thought to send
flowers to a friend whose husband underwent a liver transplant. I was thinking what a
miracle the transplant could be and how his life could be changed from very ill to
healthy. I was smiling on that sunny, windswept day, driving down the road, just thinking
how great life is.
Then came the weekend. The weekend before last. The weekend Ryan
Walz died.
Driving the same road, in the same sunshine, I thought how stupid
and naïve I was. Life isn’t sweet! Life is bad! Life is fleeting and too horrible
and who signed us up and when did we agree to take these awful risks?
Everyone who has put their precious child into the driver’s
seat of their most expensive possession, knows what I mean. A little mistake can cost
thousands of dollars but relief only the car is hurt. Other mistakes, momentary lapses,
corrected without consequence 99.9% of the time, can be catastrophic.
If you believe like I do, that we lived before this life and somehow
wanted to come to this earth, there is a problem with full disclosure. I’m sure God
or our higher power or whomever you attribute this life to, laid out the dangers of this
world, but did we really understand? Could we understand without experiencing it? Could we
really give full consent to the chance we might get cancer, or have financial problems, or
worse, have to bury our firstborn son? I imagine we decided the odds were slim, and signed
on the dotted line.
Eternal perspective is tough. Even though I believe with all my
heart there is a heaven and Ryan is there and it is a happy place, I have a tough time
applying it to life here. I can’t help but think the world is lesser without Ryan and
his promise.
I tend to think in terms of this world as a dangerous place God
presides over and, as a loving parent, is there to comfort and bind our wounds when
humanity swallows us in awful hurt.
That brings me back. It’s the sweetness of Ryan’s life
that will be missed. Isn’t that why we cling so fiercely to life, even knowing and
believing in a loving hereafter? It is the promise of sunny, windswept days, after all,
lots of days, to send our kids out the door, some days with an argument, some days with a
hug, one day with the tears of their departure to a grown-up life, but always with the
naivety of more days ahead, that is so delicious.
Between tragedy and triumph, the irony remains. One is only the
other because life is sweet.