The four of them jogged past me in a downpour.
I was walking, holding my umbrella. But these four boys were in high school or perhaps early college: running in a pack, swift and effortless as deer, in nothing but track shorts in the pouring rain. Nothing about the damp weather or the chill bothered them or slowed them, and their laughter brightened the evening dark.
I just turned forty-four.
This means I am old enough to think of these boys as young, still, and old enough to realize as they passed me that it will not be this way forever. Old enough to know that even the most graceful and athletic youth eventually slows. Those days of full-throated laughter and effortless ease will fade.
This is the way of life, and it’s the way of autumn, too, as we open this season. Autumn, for all its beauty, is a season of dying. Of gathering-in. The growing has ended, and now is the harvest. The golden pools of summer light shrink evening by evening. And yet this is my favorite time, in spite of everything. I look forward to this season all year, and it feels all too brief as it passes me by.
My mother died during autumn, a fact which seemed awful at the time but now somehow seems apt. Her last trip out of the house was to mail me a birthday present. She died less than two months later. I remember, when she was very sick, wandering around her house feeling sick at heart at the sight of all the cheerful fall decorations. Now, I’m glad that she had them to look at in those last days.
Always darkness before light. Always mourning before joy.
The thing is that autumn is a beautiful season. There is a ridgeline near my house lined with beech trees and in fall the entire place glows gold. The maple in my backyard crimsons. There are scents special to this time of year: fallen split crab-apples, damp leaf-litter, cinnamon. The light slants a particular way, the birds sing a particular way, the wind blows a particular way. Autumn is a feast for the seasons not in spite of, but because of what it means and portends.
I think of death more these days than I used to.
I’d say it’s the death of a parent that did it, but maybe it’s also the forties and watching the Christmas card list shrink; losing pillars of your childhood church; observing the illnesses and conditions that once seemed impossible and far away crop up as prayer requests for your nearest and dearest. It’s seeing grays and wrinkles where there weren’t before; realizing that the muscle soreness lingers longer than it used to; wondering when staying out past ten became so devastating.
It’s realizing—in a way those blessed boys I saw tonight cannot yet know in their soul, will only understand with age and loss—that we all must eventually pass through the valley of the shadow of death. And yet.
And yet.
There is, of course, hope to come after that: life and redemption. But there is also hope before that and in the midst of that. Autumn is beauty-in-fading. God gives gifts even in the valley, and those gifts are of exquisite and finely-wrought provenance. I recently learned that chameleons, in their dying, producing a series of brilliant color bursts as they pass away. Somehow, the realization made me weep.
That kind of beauty matters.
As a Christian, what I hope is that beauty emerges from good living into good dying. I don’t mean that you get to pick your death, or that everyone who lives richly and beautifully for Christ dies without peacefully and without pain. It doesn’t work that way. What I mean is:
If I am suddenly hit by an errant bus or have a freak accident, I hope I am in the middle of telling a fabulous story, or laughing at a good joke, or saying “I love you” on the phone. If it quick and brutal I will hope that I will have noticed the pleasures and wonders of that day. And if I must face something long and ignoble I hope that I am granted patience and perseverance of such quality that I can face trials with a smile and authentic serenity. Whatever happens to me in the end, and if Christ’s return does not precede it, I hope that there is something of autumn in that ending: beauty in suffering, or beauty in sadness, and all the richer for it.
All the richer because, if I may paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien, it is a passing thing, this shadow.
But the beauty remains.
Samaritan's Song 