I read A Northern Light yesterday, and even though it’s a YA book I want to post on it here, rather than on the children’s book blogs. Because my thoughts about it that have more to do with God and life than with children’s books.

Jennifer Donnelly opens her book with a quote from Adelaide Crapsey:

And if the many sayings of the wise
Teach of submission I will not submit
But with a spirit all unreconciled
Flash an unquenched defiance to the stars.

Of course it matters to whom the many sayings of the wise teach us to submit. But using this as an opening quote signals the author’s intention. So I was prepared for a feminist work. And that’s what I got.

What I want to talk about today, though, is her take on death. In the book, a character dies of breast cancer. Perhaps because of my season of life I am more sensitive than others would be. For whatever reason, that part of her story made me so sorry for the author. In one place her main character speaks of the smell of cancer. The smell of rot. And then she remembers her mother just before she died:

I saw her as she looked right before she died, her body wasted, her face hollowed out.

I saw her as she wept and moaned with pain. And as she screamed and threw things at us, her sunken eyes suddenly bright with rage.

I saw her as she pleaded with the doctor and Pa and Aunt Josie and the Reverend Miller not to let her die. As she cried and cried, frantically telling me that Pa didn’t know how to braid hair or mend a dress or put up beans.

I saw her as she begged me never to go away, as she made me promise to stay and take care of her babies.

As I read that I am amazed at how bleak that description of death is. Utterly hopeless.

A year ago today, I was up all night massaging my husband because he ached. He would die of colon cancer the following day and that night was the only bad stretch he had. And even that was mild. Of course he was paralyzed from the neck down, so he couldn’t feel anything below his chest normally. The night before he died, I think because he was so dehydrated, his muscles in his legs ached and he could feel the pain.

But I don’t think it was merely a lack of physical pain that made his death so peaceful. It was comfort from God. My husband, a day before he died gave me the most beatific smile. I asked him what the smile was for and he said, “Jesus died and came back again.”

I said, “So he knows the way through, huh?”

My husband nodded and said, “I feel so good.”

Every twenty minutes or so, for several hours, he’d wake up and smile and say, “I feel so good, hon.”

He was on his deathbed and he was taking time to reassure me that all was well.

Far from the anguish and anger Donnelly painted in her book, in my husband’s last day he told me he loved me, he thanked me for sticking by him, and he reassured me again and again that he was feeling wonderful.

OK so the guy was paralyzed and not in huge physical pain (though he’d been in pretty severe discomfort for weeks and had not been able to eat or drink for a while, and he was stuck in bed, unable to move and it always made his shoulders ache when he was stuck in bed, and he was so dehydrated that his eyeballs were caked with dried blood–so let’s not get the idea that he had no physical suffering going on) but that’s not why he died so peacefully.

The peace came from God.

And, in a huge measure, it came because my husband was submitted to God’s will. Because he was convinced that God was a good and loving being bent on blessing us. A God who had already blessed us and who had even better things waiting on the other side of the suffering.

My husband had learned, decades before he died, to submit himself to God’s plan. He’d thanked God for his paralysis, believing that he should have died at the time of his accident and God had graciously spared him. Believing that God had given him the paralysis as a help, to correct his waywardness. 

You can, with spirit unreconciled, flash an unquenched defiance to the stars if you want. You will die all the same. Adelaide Crapsey died at the age of 36, unquenched defiance, if she had any, notwithstanding.

I think, though, that the unquenched defiance gives you death as Jennifer Donnelly envisions it. It gives you angry, miserable death that smells like rot and leaves your loved ones remembering your sunken face.

Wow! I am so thankful that I didn’t see that with my husband. Here I sit a year later, and all I remember is how peaceful he was. How kind. How happy. Always encouraging, always comforting, always reminding his friends and family that God had a plan and it was good.