WHERE DID CARL GO?

I said goodbye to my dying father a few days ago. He died yesterday. Several other friends died Saturday and Sunday, which makes this article worth republishing, as well as the Leon Burke story. So, what say you - what happens when you take your last breath?   brian



It was quite a week. The deaths of Saddam Hussein, Gerald R. Ford, James Brown. And now, a good friend of Carl's - Gary Hobson. Probably a lot more too, both famous and infamous, well known and hardly known. They all shared the common experience of being born some decades ago, and now they share in the common experience of death. What does really happen when we all enter that second common experience shared by all living things? Need to think about that because no one escapes, we all will partake. So, where did Carl and Gary go?

Lots of friends have been dying lately. One thing I have noticed is that whatever made them who they were appears to disappear about the same time they stop breathing. Even though I am looking at their body laying in a hospital bed or reposing in the funeral home's best casket. Whatever it was that made them who they were seems to have left the building. Gone like the early morning mist, melting fast before the sunrise.

I had a hard time going to sleep a few nights ago. Laying in bed,  I began to think about where this thing that is “me” dwells. I thought of my muscles, the bones of my skeleton, my gall bladder and other assorted organs. Did not seem like the “real” me was in any of those. It is hard for me to believe that  the real me is located in my foot or hand or hair or teeth. Enough people have come back from combat in war zones missing these various body parts to make me think that the essential “them” is not dwelling anywhere below the neck. In my late night meditations I settled on where I have always thought the real “me” lived. That is, inside my skull where my brain sits with all 70 years of  various electrical bombardments pulsating by the millions per second. A lifetime of colors and voices and foods. Touches from parents, to children. Stitches by doctors, drilling by dentists, lectures by teachers.

That gets a little complicated though doesn't it.  A brain may be the greatest computer ever, but sometimes it just doesn't work right. Mental disease occasionally sidetracks some people, accidental head injuries sometimes traumatize others, and some are just born with not much there. To some extent the essential person  who is really me, is the result of that brain absorbing and assimilating sights and sounds and touches and smells and tastes, and parking that information in my brain.

Childhood memories last forever, don't they.  Remember the first time you felt and tasted the ocean or smelled the pine trees in the mountains. I still can remember the taste of a Mint Bar from a Good Humor ice cream truck that drove down my boyhood street along with a Cream Puff delivered by a Helms Bakery truck driver who had a shrill whistle he blew to attract attention. No one ever forgets certain smells either, like the odor of a skunk. I remember a lot about my growing up experiences of the 1940's and 1950's – but yesterday I could not correctly remember the last 4 digits of our telephone number. And, even though all of the data from the past is packed in the various convolutions of my brain, there are still millions of bits of raw data coming in every day, maybe every hour, maybe every minute. So, that is who I am – the real me anyway. A combination of 70 years of life experiences that are stored inside my skull, and occasionally peep out so that my wife can say, “Wipe that silly grin off your face.”

Well, where did my friend Carl really go? What happened to the person I knew for over 30 years? The one who spoke and listened and thought.  I know he is not where he used to be, inside that worn out old  tent he lived in. And, where do "I" go when my body begins to shut down for the last time? Where will the real  you go when it happens to you?

We downsized several years ago. From a house with a lot of bedrooms for our six children, who have now all moved away, to one of those nice little two bedroom senior citizen places. We had some yard sales and gave away a lot of treasures that we never used. Although it is called “downsizing,” even that is only a brief stopping place on our way to the small box we will ultimately occupy. However, I don't think the real “me” will ever inhabit any 7 foot casket or urn on a shelf. My empty shell might, but the real me has left that house for good. I'll be gone and I won't be coming back. Here is how Paul the Apostle put it.

^{2CO 5:1-10} Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. We live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.