The Year is Dying

Today, right before the Christmas Program, the Bishop's counselor announced the death of a member of the stake. He said it with a little bit of irony: my ward is being transferred to another stake at the beginning of next year. Most of the members of my ward don't live in these boundaries, and I'm sure most people shrugged off the announcement, but I'm afraid I was too surprised to look at anyone.

I'm a local girl. I grew up in this house. I've been a member of this stake since the mid 1980s. The name was familiar to me - not because it matched a face. I have no idea what he looked like. I only met him once. But his signature is as familiar to me as my own. He was the stake Patriarch who gave me my Patriarchal Blessing.

I'm not particularly sentimental. I was as surprised to find myself crying through three hours of church as anyone else would have been, if they'd noticed. But words mean a lot to me, and those words are alive.

St. George is thickly dotted with retirement communities, several of which are in my immediate area. Although the Sunset stake was so named well before the nearest communities had been built, it is symbolically named. I've been a visiting teaching companion to a woman who was 93 (and we had our visiting done by the fifth of every month. She was amazing). My best friend down the street is 83. Lynn Bunker is only the fourth of my personal acquaintances to die in the last year.

It gets into the language, all this aging and dying. My dad constantly talks about wishing to die, and he's only in his sixties. Until she was asked to direct her ward's Christmas production, Elizabeth was convinced she was going to die soon. I am nearing forty, and I'm single with little hope of that ever changing. I have no real career prospects. I'm not getting younger or thinner. It's impossible for me to avoid the resignation that borders on despair.

Spoiler Alert: Everybody dies. Oh yes, your favorite movie is cheerful only because they stopped the cameras before they got to that scene. Your favorite book makes you happy for the same reason: the writer stopped writing before your favorite character grew old and obsessed with adult diapers, blindness, and aching bones.

The end of The Book of Mormon is depressing: everybody dies. Twice. The last protagonist alive writes a few more lines before he hides the record and runs from the pursuit which will assuredly overtake and kill him.

The end of every life is death. "Happily ever after" only lasts as long as your heart, or your liver, or your patience with your spouse. And as far as we experience here, it ends in death.

But somebody made me think once, and I think I believe this: the end doesn't matter.

Oh, it totally matters in movies. I probably won't ever see Rogue One, for instance.

But in life, and in The Book of Mormon, and in the cycle of the years, the linear narrative from embarkation to descent and destruction is . . . sideways. We experience time sideways. The climax of our narrative transcends time. There is always light in the darkness, and the sun shines even when we can't see it. Jesus has risen.

Christmas celebrations have for me always symbolized a kind of anachronistic light in the darkness, from my days in Germany when daylight only lasted for four hours a day and the darkness was lit for the holiday in that glimmer we know so well. So today, in mourning and in winter, I celebrate a victory over shadows.