Blue Monday

This past Monday was Blue Monday – the (unscientifically) saddest, most depressing day of the year.

Blue Monday fell on the coldest day of the winter this year here: -34° C, with a windchill of -43° C.

Incidentally, it also fell on the anniversary of my first introduction to Mortality. I remember the day, the supper, when the phone call came that my beloved Grandma had died, suddenly and unexpectedly. I was five. Death smelled blue, pale blue.

It seems to me that Mortality has been skulking around this winter, flashing it's black and ugly coat.

Earlier this winter, I was at the funeral of an older gentleman, the church filled with friends and family, children, grandchildren, great-grand children accumulated over many well-lived years.

A few short weeks later, I attended the funeral of a childhood friend who died suddenly and unexpectedly. It was heart-wrenching to see her grieving parents, her little motherless children, sitting bewildered in the front row.

The evening before Blue Monday, we were invited over for supper with a kind older lady, who told us of her son who had been killed in a vehicle accident many years ago. He had been five at the time. Had he lived, he would have been the same age as me.

I have too many friends and acquaintances my age who are being compelled to look Mortality in the face because of illness and disease. And this uncomfortably compels me to look at Mortality out of the corner of my eye. I thought this was a state for old people, for people twice my age, not for me.

It just reminds me again and again that one doesn't know how much time one has in this life. It may be long, it may be short. One may get some forewarning as to the nearness of the end, or the end may pounce suddenly and unexpectedly. But one is assured of an end; it is only the how and when that are unknown.

Which makes the how of living the life one has that much more critical, important, momentous. To value the moments and the days. To cherish relationships, to make the most of opportunities, to pursue dreams. To forgive and be forgiven. To do good and not harm. To live in a way that is worthy of the gift of life that one has been given.

Above all else, guard your heart,

for it is the well-spring of life.

Proverbs 4:23