Hate is a strong word; I hate going to the post office. I especially hate the experience, when the only reason I am there is to pick up a package that was supposed to be delivered to my threshold. And I extra super duper hate it (with two scoops of frostbitten ice cream covered in coagulated chocolate fudge with a rancid cherry on top), when it happens often. My postal office is a repeat offender.

When FF brought the mail in on Friday, I was surprised to see him holding a “Sorry we missed you!” notice from the postal service. How could they be sorry, they hadn’t even tried? How could they have missed me when I was right there? Knowing that a package was being delivered that day, I had intentionally stayed home.

So what they really meant wasn’t “Sorry we missed you,” but, rather, “Sorry one of our postal employees is willing to come to your building, but not to your apartment.” Was there a time in this world when, even if people didn’t particularly like their job, they would still do it—to completion? I hate when someone makes more work for me by not doing the job they’re paid to do.

So, when FF came in with that “missed you,” notice, I was annoyed. This was something my post office had done before—“missed” me when I was right there in plain sight—if you were looking. But I swallowed my aggravation, and made a plan to visit the post office the following day. I arrived at the post office about thirty minutes before they were scheduled to close. I stood on a line long enough to be inconvenient, but not so long as to throw me into an internal temper tantrum. I received my package, and walked home happy to be outside on a cool but sunny day in autumn.

Now what do you think was waiting in my mailbox when I got home? Another (insincere) “Sorry we missed you” notice! Profanities reached the very tip-most tip of my tongue before I swallowed them back down. I couldn’t even go right back out, the post office was closed by now. I’d have to wait until Monday. (Curses!) They had done it again—two days in a row! (Curses to a higher level!) My rant was full-blown now.

Which brings me to today. Today is the Monday I had to wait for. First, I stopped at the market. I bought blackberries, clementines, grapes, green beans, and salmon. I think it more than possible that among one of Murphy’s Laws is a clause explaining the conservation of time spent in lines. That is to say, you will spend a good deal of your life waiting in lines of one sort or another—even virtual ones. Should you find for yourself a joyfully short line on any given day, an abominably long one lies in wait. So after being second on line at the market, I found myself faced with a monstrosity at the post office. It was most disheartening to note that despite the twenty or thirty-odd people on line (each clearly carrying packages and questions that would require at least five or ten minutes of attention at the window), only two clerks were working at the time.

I knew what this meant. I took out my book and tried to ignore the children playing a combination of tag and hide-and-go-seek-then-scream. My silent temper tantrum was brewing. I was already cranky: having recently come off of an over-crowded train on which I was the captive audience to the banal conversation of the two teenagers standing obtrusively next to me. I hated this line. The bags in my hands were starting to feel heavy. I hated the loud kids who kept bumping into me. My stomach was grumbling, and I was too annoyed to focus on my book. I hated this line. And I hated that the only reason I was there (losing precious moments of my life to a tedious task), was because a postal worker had decided to skirt some of his or her responsibilities!

And then it happened. I became acutely aware (as some of my line-mates had probably become already) of what was in my grocery bags. There’s nothing quite like standing in an insufferably long line at the well-heated post office, starting to sweat under all your wintry layers, holding the heavy bags from your trip to the market, and remembering that one of the things you just bought was fish.

Death. What a small yet ominous word. I remember being so afraid of death as a child that I put off reading “Superfudge” for a whole year. Of course, once I actually read the book I loved it. In fact, Judy Blume was my first favorite author. Why did I procrastinate? You see the first word in “Superfudge” is “life.” I was so afraid of death, that its antonym gave me pause. Technically birth is death’s opposite, but I didn’t know that at the time.

Death made me think about the afterlife, and as a Christian, I believed in a forever afterlife. So death made me think about forever, and sometimes, late at night, trying to grasp eternity would make my stomach fall out from under me. So, as a child, I avoided anything that might make me think about death with great vigilance.

Then my mother died. All of a sudden I was acutely aware of death. I wanted to understand everything about it. Up until then death hadn’t really hit home. Until then I’d only buried a pet. He was a much-loved pet (Timothy—the greatest dog in the world), but his death wasn’t enough to propel me into an existential thought tangent.

Once I had to bury someone who had framed my whole existence with her own, my questions about life and death changed drastically and became urgent. And unfortunately, my mother was the person I used to take such questions to. Who was I without her?  Who and what was she now? What did I believe? Suddenly “You live, you die, you go to Heaven (if you’ve lived your life for Christ),” wasn’t enough for me. I wanted all the spaces filled. I wanted a more detailed itinerary.What happens in between? What was the route from point A to point B? Where was my mother now…where was she? Was she in heaven or did that come later? I knew where her body was buried, but where was her spirit, her consciousness, her love? And if I told God I loved and missed her, would He pass along the message? Could He? Couldn’t He do anything? My faith was at its thinnest then.

Death. It is no respecter of persons, and it is diligent. It is at once simple and inscrutable. It takes us out of birth order—parents burying children, some never being born, others born but never given time to mature. The dying bury the living and then live on. When my grandfather got sick, we all travelled to see him one more time. He was on his deathbed, but he lived to see my mother die. Death caught us all looking in the wrong direction for its arrival. And after we’d turned to look the other way, my grandfather died.

So why am I thinking about death today? Yesterday in the midst of all those that chose to get married and those that happened to be born or have birthdays on a numerically interesting date, my uncle died.

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” ~ Romans 8:38-40