Death Sucks

As I type, I am sitting next to my sleeping mother.
Tomorrow is the last time I will see her. She is entering the latter stages of a struggle with cancer.
I watch her breathe and wonder how many breaths she has left. She doesn’t know that I am here, and in many ways it makes no difference. It is therapeutic to me to know that I spent my last hours with her in a position that is so familiar to me as a refugee worker - presence. nothing but presence.
Soon my father will be the only one who has known me since birth, who knows my story in its entirety. My mind keeps racing keeping a lose count of the hours I have left, what haven’t I said that I should have said, what will regret later not having done.
It all sounds so selfish I know, and I suppose it is.
She is in no obvious pain, apart from the pain of existing if that makes sense.
I kind of feel guilty that the whole issue of where she is headed once she breathes her last, isn’t front and centre in my mind. I’m pretty sure she knows Jesus in the same way I do. I just sense intuitively more than anything else, that “the Judge of the earth shall do right”

One last thought on the whole christians and death zeitgeist.
What do you say to someone who is confronting death whether in the first or second person? I know it is difficult to work out what to say and how to be a blessing. Thankfully not many have come at me with that line most hollow. “Don’t worry she is going to a better place”
The inference is that death is good because it is the pathway to something better. There is a reason death was not present in creation. There is a reason Christ sweated blood at the prospect of his own death. Death is the enemy to life. Life was what Jesus invited us to.
Death is not good.