Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

death

One Fish…Two Fish

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We picked up six minnows for 15 cents each at Petco and gently poured them from the plastic bag into the black tub. Noah pulled a metal chair across the concrete patio and sat hunched over the water garden, silvery scales glinting as the fish darted beneath the water hyacinth.

Ten minutes later all six were dead, floating glassy-eyed and white-bellied like sardines on the surface.   

Noah carried them in a garden trowel to the bird bath tucked up against the oat grass in the back yard. “Why waste good food for the birds?” he reasoned. Later he reported they were all gone but one, who was missing its head.

The next day Brad and Noah came home from Petco with two more fish – this time an orange goldfish and a black googly-eyed creature with a feathery tail. He named them Gills and Arrow. 

That night he and Brad emptied a third of the water from the tub and hauled it into the sunroom. The temperature was expected to dip into the 40s, and Noah was worried about his pets.

{Let it be known, I had a plastic tub filled with outdoor water plants and fish in the middle of my sun room. Not exactly the House Beautiful aesthetic I aspire to.}

About noon the following day I stepped away from the computer and peered into the tub. Gills the goldfish skirted into a shaft of sunlight. Google-eyed Arrow was nowhere to be seen. I grabbed a flashlight and shined it into the murky depths. Arrow had sunk to the bottom, where he lay on his side next to the brick. He wasn’t moving.

I jiggled the tub with my knee. Water sloshed onto the doormat, and Gills panicked, flitting from side to side, but still, Arrow didn’t move. Not willing to slide my hand into the dank water to touch the slimy black scales with the tip of my finger, I reached for a badminton racket and lowered the handle slowly to the bottom of the tub. I gently poked the immobile fish. He didn’t move. I poked him twice more.

I dreaded telling Noah when he got home from school. The kid had lost two grandparents, Big Blue (his snail) and six fish in the last 18 months, and now another loss, on top of all that? What if this was the breaking point, I fretted. What if this one sent him reeling into depression? My anxiety and dread intensified as the clock clicked toward 3:30. I wrung my hands and forgot to pray because I always forget to pray at times like these.

At first he didn’t believe me. “Maybe he’s just resting,” Noah suggested, brown eyes round, brow knit. I put my arm around his thin shoulders as we walked toward the mini-van. “No, I don’t think so, honey. He didn’t move at all.”

Noah held out hope for Arrow until he saw the state of the fish for himself. And then he fetched the trowel from the garage, gently plucked the tiny, limp body from the water and buried him in the backyard between the bee balm and the day lily. 

“I think I’ll just stick with Gills and see how that goes,” he mentioned at bedtime as I pulled his comforter up to his chin. “One fish seems like enough for now.”

I think I may have to add Gills the goldfish to my prayer list.  

So tell me, have you ever prayed for a pet?

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Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday: With His Death

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When I was 25 and working as an editor at an art magazine in New York City, I came down with a mysterious illness. For several weeks doctors couldn’t figure out what it was – test after test revealed nothing, despite my worsening symptoms: searing headaches, blurred vision, twitching, aching muscles, extreme fatigue, severe nausea. Once a long-distance runner, I didn’t have the energy to walk to the mailbox or lift my arms to brush my hair. Riding Metro North for an hour to my job in the city and working 50 hours a week was out of the question, so I took a leave of absence from work and moved back in with my parents.

Each night, limbs splayed, window open to the stifling August heat, I’d lay gripping the sides of the twin bed in my parents’ guest bedroom, paralyzed by the fear that I was dying. I was convinced I’d be dead by the end of the year. In my mind there was no other explanation – no one, I reasoned, could feel like I did and survive.
The absolute low point was the night I crawled into my parents’ bed and slept between them. I was 25 years old and sleeping with my mother and father like a three-year-old.

I eventually recovered from the illness, but the fear of death that had dogged me since childhood and intensified during the year I was sick never abated. More than ten years after that illness, married and the mother of two children, I continued to lay awake nearly every night gripped by the fear of death.

I didn’t pray about it, because I didn’t believe in God. I didn’t hope for a reprieve from the ever-present fear, because I didn’t believe that hope existed.

“With His death, the power of death over us is no more,” I heard Pastor Sara exclaim yesterday during Easter service, and as she spoke those words, I nodded yes, yes. It’s true. I believe it now.

I still think about dying from time to time, but not the way I used to. I don’t obsess over it any more. It doesn’t keep me awake at night, sheets balled in my fists, eyes wide at the ceiling. Nor do I believe that when I die, I will simply cease, that my body will be put into the ground, end of story. While I can’t quite envision what eternal life will look like, on most days I believe in my heart that it exists.

I tell you this story today, the day after Easter, for one reason: to give you hope.

It may be that you know someone lost, unmoored, hopeless. Someone who feels the talons of death grip tight. Someone who doubts or downright doesn’t believe.

It may even be that that someone is you.

My story isn’t dramatic or exciting. There’s no sky-splitting, fall-to-my-knees conversion. I never heard the voice of God or felt the presence of Jesus come suddenly into my life. I didn’t escape death or overcome insurmountable odds. This transformation from fear to hope, from death to life, unfolded slowly and uneventfully over a period of years. Truth be told, it’s still unfolding, this process of God replacing my heart of stone.

My story is pretty mundane, as far as conversion stories go. Yet it’s a story of hope and truth nonetheless. I am free from the power of death. With His death, the power of death over me is no more.

I pray you know that hope and truth in your heart, too.

Welcome to the “Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday” community, a place where we share what we are hearing from God and his Word.

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On Teaching Our Children the Art of Dying: A Guest Post by Emily Wierenga

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{She’s been here before, the lovely Emily and her perfectly Imperfect Prose…but really, can one ever get enough of Emily?}

we walk, and we remember: trent’s papa, the man who did magic tricks and made gun powder in his kitchen and ate fried chicken every sunday, we remember his life and the lives of the saints, here in the snow. flags placed by the stones of the veterans, souls dug deep and we walk where they rest, their bodies holding up the world.

my sons’ cheeks all rose and round, flesh brand-new and trent and i, finding crow’s feet and the slowing of step as we pull blue sled in the quiet. “he left so peacefully,” auntie marg told me on the phone, uncle jim passing after years of suffering, and she cries, this snow-haired lady from pine creek, and she misses him she says, but he’s with God now. and jim spent his whole life preparing for the day he would die. the day he would meet his maker. a leaf, falling, orange edge curling and impressing the snow and there’s beauty in the drifting down: in the tree losing color. and age is the wind that blows us gently to God’s doorstep.

we unfurl hats, mitts, scarves and cling to each other by the wood-stove and the art of dying is in knowing how to live. in knowing how to let go of the branch, in drifting down and letting the wind blow us… while others marvel at our color, and remember.

{Thank you, Emily friend.}

Snail Tales

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Gary died.

Gary was Rowan’s snail. He lived in the same tank with Reddy, Rowan’s scarlet Beta. When we arrived home from Florida, Gary was floating shell-up in the tank. The Petco guy had warned us when we bought the two snails (Gary for Rowan, Shelly for Noah) that an upside-down snail was a dead snail. I’d wondered at the time how a species that lived in water but couldn’t right itself in water had managed to survive for so long. How did the lowly snail find a loophole in Darwin’s survival of the fittest?

Brad quickly thrust a hand into the water and turned Gary upright, affixing his shell to the faux castle before Rowan noticed the floating carcass. And then we strategized a Gary replacement.

Brad picked up another snail at Petco on his way home from work and switched out the dead snail for the living one while Rowan was at school. We talked for a moment about how to “dispose of the body.” Though it seemed undignified, I suggested the plain old kitchen garbage can – the timing was good; trash pick-up was on Monday.

The trouble was, once he was positioned in the tank, G-2, as Brad and I referred to him on the sly, didn’t look exactly like Gary. While he was a similar buttery color, G-2 was markedly smaller.

“What if Rowan notices that Gary shrunk?” I whispered, peering into the tank on Rowan’s desk. We debated whether to tell him the bad news, but given the loss Rowan weathered recently, we decided to protect him from further grief. Brad and I agreed to tell Rowan the truth about Gary’s demise only if he asked about the puzzling shrinkage.

Luckily he didn’t ask.

Isn’t that one of our many roles as parents, to protect our children from the world’s hurts and sorrows as much as we can, for as long as possible? I, for one, have been known to take this inclination to its extreme. I used the euphemism “past its prime” for the word “death” for the first several years of Noah’s life because I wanted to protect him, and in some way myself, from the knowledge that everything dies.

Yes, I spoke to a counselor about this.

I think I’ve mentioned this here before, but I stopped using the phrase “past its prime” the day Noah asked me, “Mommy? Are you past your prime?”

Believe me, I’m all for truth-telling, but sometimes I ask myself, “Does he really need to know this? Will the knowledge serve any real purpose right now?” In this case, we decided no, knowing Gary died a lonely death while we flounced down the beach in Florida was not something Rowan needed to know.

So life carries on in our household. G-2 thrives, Reddy the Beta tolerates him, and Rowan is blissfully ignorant.

I, on the other hand, miss Gary the Original quite a bit.

Have you ever withheld a piece of information from someone you loved to protect that person?

Photos: G-2 the Snail and G-2 with Reddy the Beta.

Back Home (Part 1 of 2)

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The boys and I visited over Labor Day weekend. We sat on the edge of my mother-in-law’s hospital bed in the living room, surrounded by Stargazer lilies and gladiolas. We told her how much we loved her, lavished her with drawings, clasped her body in a gentle-tight embrace.

And then we returned to Nebraska, while my husband stayed in Minnesota. He spent three weeks at his parents’ house, where he changed bandages, met with hospice nurses, fielded phone calls and held his mom’s hand.

…I’m over at The High Calling today. Will you join me there for the rest of the story?