More random thoughts on my journey following the death of my wife, Renee.

As I typed, and then re-read the sentence above, a sentence I have been using to start each of these little musings for the last several weeks, it suddenly occurred to me - I don’t like the word “death”.  Maybe none of us do.  It’s so dark.  It’s so final.  It’s so terrible.  It’s so terrifying.

And so, we do our best to avoid using it, to avoid writing it, to avoid saying it.  We have come up with other, nicer, cleaner, sweeter, less frightening ways of saying it, such as -  She has passed away.  She is gone.  She has fallen asleep.  She was called home.  She has, to quote Shakespeare, “shuffled off this mortal coil”. 

This use of less-than-precise terminology is fine, when everybody knows what is meant.  But it can become a little confusing.  Just two weeks ago, my cousin sent a text to me and my sister informing us that one of our old friends had had an emergency and was in the hospital.  Four hours later, he sent us a text saying that our friend “got to go home”.  My sister, being much more spiritual than I, took those words to mean that our friend had not survived the emergency, and that she had gone on to her home in heaven, to her “mansion just over the hilltop”.  My sister then immediately sent a text to the rest of our family to inform them that our friend had “passed away”.  Of course, that was NOT what our cousin had meant by saying that our friend “got to go home”.  At all!  Our friend was fine and back in her house in Baton Rouge – a lovely city, but not one anybody would ever mistake for Heaven, with perhaps the exception of Tiger Stadium, but I digress.  It took a few more texts to get everybody straightened out and back on the same page.   

One of the euphemisms we use for death is – “She breathed her last”.  Have you ever given much thought to the act of breathing?  Probably not.  Our bodies, our “fearfully and wonderfully made” bodies [Psalm 139:14], were created so that breathing is done automatically, without the need for conscious thought.  We don’t have to do anything consciously to activate the nerves that control the muscles that expand the ribs that open the lungs that allow for the inflow of air, and then [without getting into the unbelievably complex processes of how the red blood cells release carbon dioxide and then become re-oxygenated inside the lungs] relax the muscles to deflate the lungs to expel the carbon dioxide out into the atmosphere.  Easy, right?  Aren’t you glad you don’t have to think about all of those steps every time you want to take a breath?

In my former life as an attorney representing health care providers who had been sued for medical malpractice, I had the opportunity to represent a physician in a case in which a young woman ended up on a ventilator, and was never able to breathe on her own.  Death was inevitable.  The family was understandably upset, but the case was eventually dropped because no one had done anything wrong.  It was simply a failure of her body to continue to perform the incredibly complex processes of breathing – processes we never think about - until it becomes all we think about.

Breathing.  Genesis 2:7 tells us that God breathed the “breath of life” into the man he formed from dust, and that was the moment when that man began to live.  God did not “speak” us into existence, as He did everything else in the Universe.  In the words of Max Lucado, “God stooped” to our level, He stepped into the very dust and mud of the Earth, and, after forming us with His hands, He leaned down and breathed life into us.  Anyone watching might have described that moment as a kiss.  And isn’t that a beautiful picture? 

To breathe is to live.  Breath is life.       

Over the last few months, there have been more than a couple of times when I have woken up at night because I could have sworn I heard her breathing in the bed next to me.  And each time, it has not been a loud breath that I have “heard” – just a soft, light breath.  But it has been so real to me that I will sit up and look, and even reach out to her side of the bed to see and to feel if she is there.  And I will wonder for a few seconds why she is not. 

Then, I remember.  And even as I remember, even as I come to my senses, the thought of the sound of breathing – the sound of life - makes me wonder, just for a moment, if this has all been just a terrible dream.  Then, reality sets back in, and I know that it is the sound of life that is only a dream.  There is no life, not anymore.  So I make myself lie back down, alone, in the dark, and I try to go back to sleep.

I wonder if the reason I am “hearing” the sounds of her breathing in my dreams is because I literally heard her take her last breath, and then I tried to breathe for her that day?   It was, as mentioned in an earlier article, our last kiss.  But it was a kiss without the gift of life. 

OK.  Maybe that is the reason for this recurring dream.  But if it’s a dream I’m “hearing” so plainly, what does it mean?  Where is Joseph when you need him?

Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.  I guess dreams don’t have to mean something every time, do they?

Or maybe the sound of breathing in my dreams - the sound of life – means that there is still some living to be done.  Maybe that’s what she’s trying to tell me.

I think I’ll go with that.

Ambrose Ramsey | Pastor and Shepherd