Walkin' With the Reaper

 The Reaper - you know, the Grim One - the long arm of the Law or is it Chaos?  Is an odd one, it's decisions often peculiar.  Not always.  Most of the time death follows the patterns of it's past, noted in actuarial tables.  

 

I wait on Him as I walk with Him - for the image of death is an image of the Creator who made a material world of vast complexity in which creation and what looks like destruction is always happening and nothing material outruns the slow dismanteling of physical form - we are stardust and to stardust we return and that piece of us that is immortal - whether I call it the Soul or The Holy Spirit -- either goes back for another round (a friend of mine thinks the soul chooses while I tend to think there's some karma happening) - or right back into the creator.  So for me, death truly is swallowed up in victory.

My issue right now is not death's ooooh scariness but waiting for the knock on the door ("It's a Mr. Death or something and he's come about the reaping?")  

Now how can I be walking with him while waiting for his knock on the door? And why am I  calling my anthropomorphized death "Him"?  Does that follow my "true personal systemic theology" in which I understand that the Creator and all the springs from the Creator is without gender?  No.  But it's traditional and poetic.  As for the first question, well, it's all done with mirrors or on computers, depending on your age.

It's the length of the walk that challenges me.  It forces me into the day to day, into the sacrament of the present moment.  Throughout the day I check on my sweetheart if he is in bed.  On somedays he sits up and is present, some days not so much.  We're on Hospice.  I am in a strange place in terms of my identity.