In 1971, singer-songwriter Gilbert O’Sullivan produced what has been the saddest song I have ever experienced in my life. I am sure it is the same with many of you who suffering then plagued by the sorrows expressed in this searching ballad. It was markedly so for me back then because the year after, in 1972, my grandmother died at the age of 79 of lung cancer. She was the only grandparent I had the opportunity to know.
We kids called her “paw-paw”, which means the ‘grandmother on our mom’s side’. The Chinese language is much better than English at describing relatives with different names depending on where they are on the family tree, the details I will not belabor in the post. Paw-paw lived with us, time-sharing between our home and my uncle’s about an hour away, So my siblings and I had ample time to get use to her being part of our lives. Her loss was a significant one, the first of my immediate family to die.
Even though we kids didn’t speak much Cantonese, my comedic older brothers and I could make her laugh with goofy antics. Being true to the Old World pioneer variety of grandma, she would say things to us misbehaving cretins that were better off us not knowing what it all meant in English, which would have succeeded in terrifying us. had we known.
Our neighbor had some chickens that laid eggs along our fence line under some bamboo brush. The fence had gaps between the vertical planks just wide enough for paw-paw to reach through. She could reach her arm through those planks and place the eggs in her apron then bring them income them for the next meal.
One year my brothers and I went to the local creek to gather tadpoles. We kept a bunch of them in a big 55-gallon barrel cut lengthwise and filled with some rocks and plants to make them feel at home. One weekend when the family travelled and she stayed home, we discovered when we got back that paw-paw’s idea of making good use of left over waffles was feeding them to the tadpoles. They were all dead when we got back. Death by waffles.
Like many quiet non-bilingual grandmas she loved watching television. When she wasn’t helping cook or tending the vegetable garden with her trusty garden hoe, she enjoyed the best of American TV entertainment: ROLLER DERBY and ALL-STAR WRESTLING. At other times, she would eat corn on the cob pulling kernels off while watching our tropical fish swimming around in their aquarium. At least she never felt inclined to deposit waffles there.
I remember the last time I saw her. I was with my brothers at her bedside at the hospital. It was a bright day as the light shone through the windows behind us as we stood by her left side of the bed. My brothers could still get her to smile, maybe even laugh, in her weakened state.
Source you-tube: https://youtu.be/gU3ubk8u7dA
Returning from her funeral in our yellow 1968 Chevy Impala station wagon, I remember a song I heard on the car radio: Alone Again. It struck a chord in me so strongly, triggering unspoken and unexpressed grief, I can never forget how heartbreakingly it expressed the sorrow associated with the death of a loved one.
That song underscores many realities of life that haunts us, including being isolated, loneliness, rejection, suicidal ideation, being “shattered” by loss, the severing of a close relationship, and the finality of life experienced through the death. This song hits so many depths of the human experience, it’s hard to believe it can be lifted up by the simple, beautiful yet melancholy melody by which these tragedies are cradled from. And maybe therein lays hope, that the unseen Spirit that ties it all together, like the notes of the song that brings these real sorrows of life to the forefront of our minds, can also bring profound meaning to what would otherwise remain life-destroying cruelties.
Many of those were fears and anxieties I had at times in my life, but in particular when I was younger, the inevitability of death, knowing that one day my parents would die was this returning darkness in my mind. It is possible, those fears could very well have been exacerbated by the words of “Alone again.”
I did not fear my own death but I feared the death of the two people I loved who were present in my life throughout my formative years. It is perplexingly unjust that people who were full of vigor, who were a daily influence in my life, would someday disappear and be unable to reach out to.
Many years later, my father died in 1996 and my mother in 2017. I was grief stricken by both.
Looking back now, from my perspective and a believer in Christ, I was spiritually weak with a non-Christ centered point of view though family and friends may have thought I was the spiritual one. I’m not talking about grieving, that’s a necessary process that can crop up at the least expected moments. What I am addressing is spiritual awareness, my connection with the divine, the God who cares, the God who also suffered sorrows. I didn’t know how far off the mark I was with a lifelong mind full of secular knowledge and philosophy that passed for wisdom. I was critically self-centered, more than I realized.
When my parents died, the Gospel of Jesus Christ and God’s glory expressed through my parents, was not the first and foremost issue in my mind in the way God ought to be glorified. By confessing this, I am not behaving in some ascetic manner, I am just sharing my reflection on my past self. The Holy Spirit affects our discernment. Christ makes more clear the straight and crooked paths. Christ comforts us in our suffering.
Photo by Masoud Mostafaei on Pexels.com
And our sorrows He carried
The sorrow and grief that is felt in “Alone Again” is contained within the experience and understanding of our Lord Jesus. In The Book of Isaiah, written about 700 years before Christ lived as Jesus of Nazareth, it is written:
He was despised and forsaken of men,
A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
And like one from whom men hide their face
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
4 Surely our griefs He Himself bore,
And our sorrows He carried;
Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten of God, and afflicted. – Isaiah 53:2-4
Jesus knows the depths of your own anxieties, sorrows, grief, and loneliness, even your deepest fear that your sins are too grave for you to be accepted by God.
Will you believe and trust Him to transform and restore you with His glorious love?
Do you desire to be released from your fear and anxiety, the obstacles this world can dump on you to derail your life? Will you give them up to Christ who will make all things new? Trust in Christ, the One whom has already conquered this world, this world which only offers things that are passing away.
The Bible speaks about how people can suffer anxiety over the fear of death, the fate that we all face:
Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, 15 and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives. – Hebrews 2:14-15.
What this passage indicates is that people may fear death and be slave to that fear throughout their entire lives. What kind of attitudes and behaviors may be fostered in the mind of one juxtaposing the reality of death and the wonder of life, then be unable to reconcile the two?
The passage, also suggests that the devil is ultimately behind the anxiety related to our uncertainty, making us subject to the devil’s plan to view life and death for what it is not. The devil would be pleased to beleaguer our minds never to see the light that is the saving grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Just like in the Garden, Satan only needed to introduce enough doubt in the mind of Eve of God’s trustworthiness to make Adam and Eve Fall into sin.
From a Christian perspective, the power of Christ and his solution of Salvation by Grace is life transforming, freeing us from the deception of the devil’s lies.
How might we live our lives released from the specter of death? Come and accept this free gift that God offers to all: rich or poor, the religious, dreamers and bums, drunkards, liars, idolators, fornicators, thieves, adulterers, coveters, the sexually immoral, and sinners all, we depraved self-righteous lot of humanity… come to Christ who loves us and has paid the price for our foolishness, wickedness, and depravity that we might be liberated! Repent and Believe!
With Christ as Lord and Savior, the specter of death is destroyed! The head of evil is crushed!
54 But when this corruptible puts on the incorruptible, and this mortal puts on immortality, then will come about the word that is written, “Death is swallowed up in victory. 55 O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” 56 Now the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law; 57 but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! – 1 Corinthians 15:54-56
For a one minute explanation of the Gospel from the late Pastor John MacArthur, watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCP9UcC7BzE
For a review of the Ten Commandments: https://www.challenyee.com/the-ten-commandments/
ACT LIKE MEN a short talk given by John MacArthur (click on the link)
All quoted excerpts have footnotes removed, usually from Legacy Standard Bible (LSB), sometimes from New International Version (NIV), on rare occasion the Amplified Bible (AMP).
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8-17-24