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I'm still too young, I still have too many dreams and delusions, to be ready to die. I tell myself I'm not afraid of death because I trust the promise of the resurrection, but that is a pious lie. Death is the great terrifying beyond, and God (seriously considered) is pretty terrifying too, especially when I realize that death will someday remove the curtain of matter and sin and creation groaning in labor pains that buffer me from his countenance.

Meanwhile, as I live, death is nothing but the heartless divider, separating me from my departed loved ones. So I call it the enemy, the instigator of chaos, the void and abyss and predator and devourer and jaws of hell and eternal pit of nothingness without a single spark of redeeming value—death, the senseless plague.

But my grandpa was ready to die, and for sensible reasons. He was nearly 80 years old. He had lost his wife to malpractice three and a half years before, and his heart had never healed from the break. His health fled after my grandma, leaving arthritis and depression behind, which in turn dragged off my grandpa's vocation as preacher of the Word and administrator of the sacraments.

Funny thing about my grandpa: He retired because he lost one of his legs to circulatory problems, but for the next 15 years he kept up interim preaching anyway, sometimes spending two years with a congregation. The loss of his leg meant nothing, but the loss of my grandma meant everything; it put him out of the pulpit for good. With no wife left to love and no words left to preach, Grandpa did not see the purpose of remaining alone on this earth. Death was no longer the enemy but the gateway to the beloved.

As death crept closer, it was starting to make some sense to me too. I was insulted by it. Death shouldn't make any sense, I thought, ever. Any talk of good and timely death smacked of euthanasia logic, and I hadn't yet learned to distinguish the two. But life, in an apparent act of conspiracy, was pointing us toward death, almost cheerfully.

It started with the wrongful—and therefore senseless—death of my grandma. The trauma of that death in our family had metamorphosed, not into wrath and faithlessness (as I had originally thought were the only appropriate responses) but tenderness and forgiveness. There were small and subtle manifestations of this newfound kindness—a kindness that recognized our all-too-short time together on this earth—but none was more striking than the suddenly frequent use of the phrase "I love you." These are the most used and abused words in our language, almost suffocated under the multiplicity of meanings they are forced to bear, yet for all that, their effect is stunning. Brothers were saying, "I love you," uncles and aunts were telling nieces and nephews, "I love you." Most of all, Grandpa was telling each of us in our turn, "I love you."

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February 5 2001, Vol. 45, No. 2