For better or worse, I was introduced to the concept of mortality at a very young age.

My maternal grandmother died by the time I was 5 years old. I have two memories of her. The first was a random visit to her house before she got sick. I remember her warmth and love and the way her voice pitched up in joy as we played together. I remember singing her a song while standing up on the couch. I remember the tight squeeze of a hug she gave me after. I was probably 4 years old.

My only other memory of Grandma Miriam is from the hospital, when she was days away from dying. I remember being scared to see this bright and boisterous sunbeam of a woman broken down to a shadow who struggled to breathe.

The next death in my family was my four month old half brother Matthew, who died of SIDS when I was 7. He somehow wrapped himself up in his baby blanket one night and stopped breathing while the rest of the family slept. I will never forget the shrieks of my mother when I was getting ready to go to school and she found him.

Two years later my dad died of cancer when I was 9 years old. His journey towards death hit me the hardest. My dad was a barrel-chested bear of a man, a police detective, a comic book and pop culture geek. He was my hero.

He showed up in full uniform and a squad car for show and tell one day when I was in 1st grade. I had no idea he was coming. He brought the whole class out of the parking lot and demonstrated his red and blue lights and even turned on the sirens for a few seconds. I was the coolest kid in my class for a couple of months after that stunt.

When I first learned about his cancer, I did not believe I had anything to worry about. I did not believe he would die. I prayed for him to beat it, and he fought. For more than two years he fought. By the end, he had dropped from a weight of around 270 to maybe 115lbs. He was little more than a skelaton before giving up the ghost.

In the last three months I knew he was suffering more by clinging onto life than he would by letting go. He wasn’t an active Christian, and so I started praying that he would be saved and go to heaven, if he had to die.

About a week before he passed away he was visted by a Lutheran pastor, who walked him through the sinner’s prayer of repentance. By that point my dad was entirely bed-ridden. His ability to speak had been reduced to whispers. He had no strength in his body. He was basically clinging on to life through stubbornness alone.

Despite his total lack of strength, when my dad prayed that prayer, with tears streaming down his face, he lifted both of his arms up in praise, like a little kid asking his heavenly dad for a hug. He lifted his arms up in the last demonstration of strength he had left, and kept them raised for at least a full minute. He surrendered and he was saved.

My dad was a passionate Christian in his youth, and walked away from the faith when he got divorced from my mom when I was two years old. As much as I miss him, I can’t help but wonder if God knew it would take a 2.5 year battle with cancer to bring him back home to the body of Christ.

After my dad died, I had a very specific awareness of the fragility of life, and felt that I was somehow cursed to die young, especially since every male in my family except my grandpa had died before I was ten years old. I felt doomed. My youthful sense of invulnerability was taken from me. Life itself seemed like a daily roll of the dice. Unsafe, uncertain, unpredictable. What happens after life seemed to be the most important issue of being alive, and I grew to see the afterlife as more real than my own daily existence. It seemed to me that life itself was merely one semester of the school of eternity, and the condition of my character was going to be the final exam that determined whether I ended up in heaven or hell.

I was filled with the fear of the Lord, and presumed that I would be cut off by middle age at the latest, like my dad has been, so my one job was to make my early years count.

My response to this feeling was to wholeheartedly devote my life to God, in case I could make myself useful in the long term and possibly stave off the early death curse that surrounded me.

I read Revelations the summer of the year my dad died, at nine years old, whispering the words out loud in various pockets of free time during church camp. I plowed through it specifically because the end of that book promises a blessing to anyone who read the words out loud.

I felt deeply in need of a guaranteed blessing, and decided to go for it, even if I was technically whispering the words to no audience and not proclaiming the words to a congregation (as the blessing promise assumed an ‘out loud’ reader would do). I was a weird kid.

I share all of that because my view of mortal life and afterlife are skewed compared to the normal standards. I see this life, even if long-lived, as a tutorial and trial run of our eternal existence.

I see the pursuit of money and power as foolish, if those pursuits lead to spiritual compromise or eternal death. I see the games we play to seem important to each other as eternal tests of character, either proving or disproving our individual capacity to love one another.

I see scriptures like the parable of the Sheep and the Goats as very clear, solid, and scary warnings about how we are judged by the way we approach each other, what faithful obedience to God actually requires, and why we are all here in the first place.

God says we are here to learn and practice the core principles of loving one another and loving God.

Jesus said things like “You cannot serve both God and Money”, or “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and yet forfeits his soul?” These words do not compute with modern conservative Christianity, or Christian Nationalism.

They do not compute because the modern cultural standards, values, and expectations have abandoned the original teachings, not because the original teachings needed to be updated or modernized.

“There is a way that seems right to man, but in the end leads to destruction”.

I will publish a follow up post that explores this concept further by comparing the story of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol with the parable Jesus gives of Lazarus and the Rich Man.

The comparison and contrast between those stories has been stewing in my head for awhile and I’m looking forward to exploring it. Sharing my experiences with and perspective of death in my personal life is necessary context.