HUNT: Beginnings and endings

By Patricia Hunt
Published: June 27, 2008

I write this on the eve of a wedding. Our family is expanding to include a new bride. We will gain a member, and by extension, we will gain her family as well.
I write this as another member of the family is dying. The sands in his hour glass are running out. We will light a candle symbolizing his presence in spirit at the wedding, and he will see it on video later in the week.
Hello and goodbye, beginnings and endings, the circle goes ’round. What has struck me this week is that the happy, young couple is living out an ending as well as a beginning, leaving behind life as they know it. She has moved here from another country, and her parents are grieving the loss of their beloved daughter. I hope in time they will count it more of a gain than a loss, and that she will visit often, and they will come to cherish their new son-in-law, but today the loss stings. Both bride and groom are assuming new responsibilities and putting the last vestiges of their growing up years behind them. As much as they love each other, I wouldn’t be surprised if in the middle of the night they don’t take one last look over their shoulders at the children they once were.
For the dear one who is leaving us, there is the leap into The Great Unknown. Christians talk confidently about heaven, but I remember one old saint whose dying wife asked him what he thought about life beyond. He said he knew what “our faith” taught, but didn’t know for sure about heaven; he hoped. He fervently hoped and trusted it was true. We on this side see our family member ending his story that began nearly 90 years ago, but it could well be that this is just a beginning to a story more glorious than we can imagine.
People get married every day, die every day. Babies are born every day. We know that, but when it happens to me, I am astonished. How can this be? How can it be that a person I love is gone? How can it be that the little boy I remember is a grown man shouldering adult life? How is that possible? I want to get out in the middle of the main street in town, stop traffic and shout into a megaphone, “Do you know that people actually disappear from the planet? Do you know that children turn into grown people? Do you know that people can actually create other human beings? And it isn’t even hard; they don’t even need permission from anyone. Completely new humans suddenly appear. Well, after nine months of causing nausea and swollen ankles.”
The police would come and lock me away for sure. After all, everyone knows about beginnings and endings. They say they know. But I don’t believe them. I’ve seen them look at a new baby as if it were the very first new baby that had ever been born. I’ve seen them bawl at funerals as if it were fresh news that people are taken away. I’ve seen them cry at weddings because it is coming to them like sea water burning their eyeballs that this brief little ceremony is a gigantic beginning and ending, not only for the couple but for every single person who loves them.
I have to go and do the two dozen things on my list toward making a wedding happen. It is good these great transitions are accompanied by tasks and errands and general busy-ness. It keeps us from losing our minds. But when I finally drop into bed tonight and turn down the lights and listen to evening sounds out my raised window, the shock of life will come back to me. No matter how long I live, I will never get used to it. 
Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.