Next

I remember where I was when I heard the news in late 2012. While I was wedging my car into a spot along Main Street in Cape Girardeau, using my best approximation of parallel parking, the cellphone went off. I was trying to be attentive to the traffic bustling past my vehicle, and the voice was familiar.

"Son, do you have a minute? I have something to tell you."

"Shoot, Dad. What's going on?"

"I needed to tell you that, well, I visited the oral surgeon and he found something."

"Found what?"

"I'm getting to that. Will you wait, please? He found a spot, took a biopsy and sent it off to the lab. I just got the results."

"OK ..."

"It seems I have stage four oral cancer and will need to have surgery."

At that moment, for the first time ever, I actively pondered life without my father.

Dad soldiered on through two surgeries, radiation and chemo before he left the Church Militant and joined the Church Triumphant on Feb. 24, 2014.

Life ends for each of us. Only the manner and timing of its conclusion are in question. The result is never in doubt.

All of us know this -- and yet we will delay and deny admitting the reality with all of our mental energy.

When I broached the subject of Dad's coming death with one of my siblings, the reaction was a mixture of anger and, imputed to me as an accusation, disloyalty.

Just acknowledging the elephant in the room was seen as giving up.

A friend is a health-care professional, and one day I told him it must be nice to work in a profession where you can demonstrably help people.

His reaction was a curious one, but in retrospect, entirely understandable: "All I do is delay the game."

He knows. He knows he can't change the outcome. He can be an instrument of correction for a while, but none of us leaves the game alive.

It's not morbid to admit this. It's the reality of the human condition. Yet, we resist.

Earlier this week, Doris Roberts, an actress on the one-time hit TV program "Everybody Loves Raymond," died.

The headline of the article announcing the demise referred to Roberts' death as "tragic."

Doris Roberts was 90.

Merriam-Webster gives one definition of the word "tragic" as someone who has died in a way that seems very shocking or unfair.

If the death of a 90-year-old woman due, apparently, to natural causes -- e.g., old age -- can be called tragic, then we truly have become confused as a culture when it comes to life and death.

Death is not unnatural. The normal life process of a human being ends in death.

Life is special because it ends.

Imagine, just for a moment, being immortal. If you consider the ramifications, living forever in the body is a terrifying idea.

All of us, eventually, begin to long for what lies beyond this life.

You get to a point where, by faith, you ponder in the privacy of your thoughts, "Next. I'm ready for what is next."

One of the casualties of our modern age is that we have lost that perspective.

A friend of my dad's came to see him near the end and said to me upon departure, "I keep praying for a healing."

Thanking him for his prayer and for his love for my father, my response to him may seem unusual: "Everybody dies. Everybody. And it's his time."

I'm not ready for Next. Not yet. But when Next finds me, I hope my dying thought is: "Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor the human mind conceived, what God has prepared for those who love Him" (1 Corinthians 2:9).