Chuck Kuepfer, Spin Cycle

There’s something terrible about death.

Yes, we all know it will come one day for every one of us.

But when it hits close to home we are reminded of how suddenly it can strike; that our own mortality hangs in the balance.

A recent funeral this week was a reminder that our lives can be snuffed out in a moment.

It’s that reality that compels us to hug our kids, mend petty arguments with our spouse, and work toward making the world around us a better place.

Not in grandiose acts, but in the simplest gestures.

The stuff of please and thank you, of offering a hand to those in need, especially the sick and vulnerable.

It is the reminder that life is entirely too short, that the sand in the hour glass empties too fast.

There are no good ways to die, but some deaths are more memorable than others for all the wrong reasons.

The kind of untimely incidents that make newspaper headlines and cause many to question what kind of cruel God runs this place.

Words are particularly ineffective when dealing with tragedy.

We can’t begin to make heads or tails of why good people are struck down way too young, before they have reached the golden years when the aging of our earthly bodies becomes more acute, when the shadow of the grave becomes more stark.

We can only hope that, if tragedy strikes close to us one day, we will have the comfort of family and friends which makes all the difference when the cruelest of grief presents itself.

Death’s finality is perhaps most difficult of all to swallow.

There is no undoing its sting.

For that, funerals are a necessary reminders that one day too our time will come.

That one day those gathered around a grave site will do so at our own farewell, a morbid reality but unavoidable future nonetheless.

A sobering truth that rights the balance when we forget how frighteningly quick our days pass by.