“He will swallow up death forever. 

The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from all faces…
The LORD has spoken.” Isaiah 25:8

Death.

It’s like a 100% probability. 10 out of 10 people will die. It happens everyday. To those we least expect and those we most expect. In moments we are never prepared for. Death is an inevitability. Young, old, healthy, sick, no one is immune. Death carries out its sentence peacefully and violently, the grim reaper is simply a fog of mortality that sweeps over us all.

“Gosh, Leslie! Such a downer!” Yes. But there are very few good things we can say about death. Very few encouraging statements find their foothold in its language. It hurts. Maybe not for you or for me, but always for those involved. We know the finality of it, and it’s such a simplistic word for a complicated event; there is nothing easy about death.

Emily Dickinson once wrote, “I heard a fly buzz – when I died.” So wise that woman. Because, whether we like it or not…life goes on even as death overtakes us. That’s not so hard for the dead to hear as it is for the survivors.

I’m sure the mother as she cradles her daughter, dares the fly to light, the clock to tick, the world to move. How dare it!

She cannot imagine.

The same for the daughter that watches the final rise and fall of her mother’s chest, but life continues in the questions of the child in the room, “Is she gone mommy?”

Or, the wife that stumbles upon the body of the love of her life as he collapses in the midst of a race, so unexpected, so unnecessary, and yet…the runners run on.

Very real moments.

Very real pain.

And still, the fly buzzes.