Eternity on Our Eyeballs

I’m at church, and service is over. Everyone walks downstairs to the kitchen where there are round plastic tables set up and toddlers folding sail-sized pizza slices through their small mouths. I stand in a semi-circle, maneuvering my body between two friends and the steady stream of people stopping by the nearby garbage can, the pile of pie-stained plates growing as one by one they pass me by.

Conversations are fine, but I feel a bit self-conscious. My voice isn’t very loud, and I repeat myself several times. I overshare because I feel like I have to say something to fill the silence, which is dumb. I’m preoccupied with the same set of worries I typically feel when meeting people for the first time. I look down at my phone when the conversation dries—although I know I shouldn’t, I should stay engaged.

My dad texts the family group chat, and he says Grandma died earlier this morning.

I read the text again. I’m not used to seeing messages like this, but after a few reads, it finally registers that what the text says is what the text says.

Someone tells me we’re leaving. I look up, startled. “Ok,” I say. “Let’s go,” I say, like everything is normal.

There’s snow outside in the middle of March. We lost an hour this morning to daylight saving. My friends are gone for spring break, and I return to an emptied room, thinking about what it means now that Grandma is dead.

•••

I really don’t know how to feel. I wasn’t particularly close to Nai Nai, what I call my dad’s mother. I had just seen her a few months ago over winter break (the last time I had visited her was when I was in middle school), although at that point, her Alzheimer’s made it impossible for us to have a conversation, much less one in a language I couldn’t fully speak or understand. The Nai Nai I remembered was still physically there: Short, wispy gray hair, with a loud voice I once disliked but now strangely admired. But age had rattled her. Her questions spun in an interminable cycle, regardless of how many times we answered. Rather than converse, all she could do was squeeze my hand and stare at the television, as though she could see her life drifting away on the screen and so held on tight.

I can’t say I’m devastated, but I do get the sense that something significant has happened. I only get two grandmas. Now one is suddenly gone. It’s also the first time I’ve lost any one of my immediate family members, so this is all very new.

This June, I’m planning to go to my friends’ wedding. I’ve known the couple since our freshman year before they started dating, and having seen them go through these stages together has made me realize that I am and am becoming more of an adult. For me, it’s an exciting process of becoming more independent and building the life I’ve always dreamed of living. In some ways, with each successive year, I feel as though I access greater degrees of life: more privileges, freedoms, and opportunities—so much more so as I go into the last eight weeks of my time in college.

Seeing that text message made me keenly aware that I am dying. A second for me is the same second for Nai Nai, though I think of myself as gaining more life, but her, as losing it.

When do we go from living to dying? Is there an age, some inflection point? Maybe when your first grandchild is born. Or is that too old?

I’m not sure how to land this, but I think it should go something like this. In my freshman year, a friend was praying for me and mentioned this quote by Jonathan Edwards, which I love: “Lord, stamp eternity on our eyeballs.” The image is striking, and the prayer is severe, because Edwards is asking God to interpolate the timeline of heaven into our small and limited existence, to give us hopes and dreams incompatible with a world that imagines life to be the few short years we spend breathing, and to end when we are buried. A life lived on the assumption of infinity will be markedly different from a life of finitude. Practically, that can take on several different forms, but I believe they all hinge on joy: Dying people are typically frustrated, lonely, and despondent; dying saints demonstrate steadfast joy, aged like wine. For them, there is no transition from growing to aging, living to dying, but Christ from beginning to end and eternity. Like King David, it is they who sing—though with purpled veins and folded spines, cracked lips and molted skin, and though bearing a lifetime haul of errors and sins—“let the bones that You have broken rejoice.”

So I hope, like many saints who have gone before me, that I will be dying rightly into my early twenties.