burst forth into rejoicing

Nothing makes you think more about life - real life - than death. My Opa passed away this week, which has made me do a lot of thinking and brought forth a very mixed bag of emotions.

But one emotion surfaced quite unexpectedly for me. Anger.

I accepted his cancer diagnosis perhaps too easily, understanding that there was nothing they could do to treat it. Maybe it was the palliative nursing course I took only 10 months earlier, having no idea that theory would need to be put into practice so personally, so quickly. But I was not accepting it so easily today.

When I first saw my Opa in the open casket at the viewing yesterday, I was surprised at my initial response. I was mad. "That is not Opa!" was my first thought, which I whispered to my brother. I know, they never really look like how they looked when they were alive no matter how good the funeral home is. But that's not what I mean. I just couldn't believe it was him. Yes, I had seen him recently, watched as the disease destroyed his body in the past few months. But now he looked like any of the little old men that I would care for in the hospital, with the hollow face, bony cheeks, thin shoulders and oversized glasses.

Cancer had done this to him and it pissed me off. Opa was never a small, frail man. Cancer had sucked the life out of him. He was not bony, his glasses not too big (In fact, they were always too tight on his head. What had happened?). This man lying here, weighing literally half as much as he did last summer, was not my Opa, and I hated Cancer for doing this.

My anger was soon lost in the confusion of other emotions, which you can quite well imagine and I won't go into right now. But then today it resurfaced at the graveside. Once again, so mad that Cancer could come in so unexpectedly and destroy this wonderful life. How dare it. This was not Opa. But then it hit me. It WASN'T Opa. Yes, I had long realized that Opa was now in Heaven, this just being his earthly body left behind, but suddenly I knew what that meant. HE was gone. His soul, his very self, had escaped and left behind this shriveled shell.

I had to smile. I even had to laugh (inwardly). For Cancer and Death thought they had won, but in fact they did quite the opposite. They allowed Opa to be released from the confines of his earthly body. Cancer tried to crush him, Death, to destroy him. But my Opa is walking - running! - in heaven with his Creator, free from any walker or hospital bed that had just recently become the "normal" for this otherwise-healthy man. My anger dissolved into such joy.... How great it is to know that Jesus promises a fantastic Forever with Him, if we want it. And Opa was experiencing the gloriousness of it right now. That stirs up a longing in my heart. Despite, and because of, the evilness of Cancer, Opa was able to burst forth into rejoicing in the presence of his Maker.