The final struggle of life before it slips away, through an intermezzo of agony, from the one whose body it energised, seems to carry no hint of a miracle. It’s an image you’d want to turn away from until the grotesque faces of the crushing moment fade. It’s a passing—rarely gentle—into the rest that follows life’s final flutter of wings.
“I praise Thee while my days go on;
I love Thee while my days go on.
Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost,
With emptied arms and treasure lost,
I thank Thee while my days go on.” (De Profundis, Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
I stood by her bedside, experiencing the heartache of a healthy person who understands so little of the nameless suffering of someone confined to bed for the last time. Words are so powerless when you’re faced with the shadow of a loved one who, after suffering exhaustion, has been reduced to skin and bones. I had no words left, just a flood of tears, and I had to fight back the urge to cry.
Yet she, who, despite her long period of frailty, could still grasp the depths of a life now confined to one position—flat on her back—had so much to say about the past and the present. She even spoke about her fragile future, which choked on syllables not quite pronounced correctly. Beyond that, she spoke to me of another future, the only one free from uncertainty—one where the ending would be rewritten differently to what any harsh diagnosis might foretell.
With her old, radiant smile now dulled by suffering, she spoke to me of the past, unravelling her reasons for gratitude one by one. Had it not been for her obvious frailty, she might have gone on endlessly. Despite finding herself in a marriage full of unhappiness and long-standing hardship, far from her loved ones, she was content with the life she had lived. Her gratitude poured forth from every word: for her family, her friends, the members of her church and their prayers, the strength to work for so many years, and even her pains, which had not yet become unbearable.
So there it was: the miracle, seemingly banished from the final stretch of suffering, was alive and laid bare before my eyes. I was hungry to dissect every contour of it: gratitude at the very heart of a suffering that was extinguishing the lights of life one by one, yet failing to dim the flame of thankfulness for all that had been good in an otherwise turbulent existence. It was an attitude that had been practised throughout her life and embraced with just as much naturalness at the end of her journey.
When gratitude no longer defines us
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1).
In a world defined more by what it lacks than by what it possesses, the psalmist’s words have an old-fashioned ring to them. My dying friend’s gratitude may also seem old-fashioned, but perhaps we find it easier to accept the good and bad of life once it has come to an end.
Whilst we are still in the race and still revving our engines without much caution, our day-to-day contentment is characterised, at best, by a hint of anaemia. Our wish lists are endless and, although one might expect each ticked-off item to prompt gratitude, evidence shows that gratitude is often absent amidst our real or perceived shortcomings.
Writer Max Lucado speaks of an unusual prison, probably the most overcrowded in the world, with suffocating walls, exhausted inmates, an oppressive regime, and little hope of release. Most of the prisoners are serving life sentences, even though the key to their cell is always in their pocket.
They are captives in the prison of their own desires: they desire a newer car, a more spacious house, a more fulfilling job, a more attractive body, and a more appealing partner.
Lucado also offers ways to test whether we are affected by this syndrome of captivity in the abyss of desire.
Does your mood fluctuate in direct proportion to how much you possess? How would you finish the sentence, “I will be happy when…”?
According to Lucado, you are a prisoner of want “if you feel better when you have more and worse when you have less.” You are a prisoner if you decide that you cannot be happy until a dream is fulfilled, an illness is cured, or your marital status changes. Because all the while, you are not experiencing life in its fullness, but rather the anticipation of a life that aligns more closely with your expectations (however legitimate they may be).
The pursuit of great things
“The present moment holds infinite riches beyond your wildest dreams but you will only enjoy them to the extent of your faith and love. The more a soul loves, the more it longs, the more it hopes, the more it finds.” (Jean-Pierre de Caussade)
During a challenging period in his people’s history, Baruch, the secretary of the prophet Jeremiah, was confronted by God with an unsettling question: “Should you then seek great things for yourself?” followed by a resounding exhortation: “Do not seek them!”
Clearly, his position as secretary to a prophet who was not particularly popular due to his messages about the imminent Babylonian captivity of the Jews was inferior to that of his brother, Seraiah, the “chief chamberlain,” that is, the chief administrator of the royal court.
Perhaps Baruch longed for a similar position to his brother’s. He may have been tempted to feel discontented with his humble role as scribe to a despised prophet and with the dangers of his association with this man of suffering, whom many of his fellow countrymen wanted dead.
We do not know what “great things” captured Baruch’s attention, but we are familiar with the desires of our own hearts. Perhaps we even have a meticulously drawn-up list. Its legitimacy is rarely questioned: we are convinced that we need all these things and more to live a fulfilling life. In the meantime, many of us put any remaining sense of contentment, joy, or gratitude on hold, waiting for the day when we will be rewarded with all the great things we have achieved and can finally start living the life we have been dreaming of.
Sometimes, while we’re captivated by important things, we lose sight of the blessings in the little things. We forget to be grateful or to relax, and fail to see the gifts of life in their true splendour, which would constitute unattainable happiness for others.
Take the beauty of the mountain opposite the house, for example, which remains constant whether sunbeams stream over it or it is hidden behind curtains of rain. A generous smile offered on a day when good cheer is in short supply. A night that turns to dawn amidst cheerful conversation in the home of dear friends. A book from which fragments of beauty spring forth, hitherto hidden within its pages. The rustle of loved ones’ footsteps on the path leading to the front door. A hand resting protectively on another’s, melting silences and loneliness with its warmth. A Japanese rose blooming in fierce beauty for just a single day, like a remnant of grace enveloping our world. The scent of baked apple dusted with cinnamon filling the kitchen and the rest of the house at dinnertime. Little things. Or are they? What is the right scale by which we measure the value and importance of things?
God, who advises Baruch not to be consumed by the pursuit of great things, prepares a future for him in which He promises the most precious gift that can be offered in times of war: life—with all its remarkable elements and abundance of details. Sometimes, we chase after grandeur and splendour, ignoring the overwhelming blessing of ordinary experiences and mundane moments. Yet the joy of life is made up of ordinary things. At life’s turning points, great things reveal their tremendous smallness whilst small things take on a radiance that was previously obscured.
Rethinking life’s sources of joy
Transported under guard from one camp to another and having endured the torments of mass convoys, the renowned Russian writer and anti-communist dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has a revelation about what carries real significance. He knows what it means to undertake a journey lasting many days, during which the overcrowding in the carriages means that some prisoners cannot even touch the floor, suspended amidst the throng of people. He knows what it means to be served the same salted fish for breakfast and lunch, accompanied by tiny rations of water so that toilet breaks are not wasted. He knows what it is like to be stripped by common criminals, or even by the guards, of any possession that might mean the difference between life and death inside the camp.
By contrast, the civilised journey under escort seems to him like a journey during freedom, even though hell awaits him at his destination. Sitting on the old benches in the waiting room, he overhears snippets of the travellers’ conversations. A litany of complaints serves as a recurring theme, but his experience as a prisoner leaves him unable to process it. There is an unbearable mother-in-law, a runaway husband, and an irritating neighbour who leaves the light on in the common corridor.
What the other passengers see as genuine tragedy seem like mere trifles to Solzhenitsyn, once his experience of imprisonment has revealed the true measure of things in the universe. Not being tormented by hunger or cold, not being forced to work in temperatures of minus 40 degrees Celsius under the threat of a bullet or having your meagre food rations cut, not having to witness the piles of corpses in the Kolyma which are only buried in the summer when the ground thaws sufficiently, and being able to move freely without an escort—these are all things for which to be grateful. Solzhenitsyn adds to the list the supreme privilege of the free man: being surrounded by loved ones. “Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory!”
It is only when the former officer loses his life in all its naturalness that he realises the wealth of blessings within it that went unnoticed by him.
The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl describes the joy of life he experiences with his comrades as prisoners, in conditions that would otherwise be unimaginable. Exhausted after two days and three nights spent being transported in cattle trucks, left out in the rain and biting wind until a missing comrade was found during roll call, then punished by being forced to spend the whole night outside, though soaked to the skin, all 35 men were indescribably happy. Any suffering they had endured paled in comparison to the joy of discovering that their destination was Dachau, not Mauthausen. This meant that they had arrived at a camp that had no ovens, crematoria, or gas chambers, offering them a glimmer of hope that they might survive until the end of the war.
Victor Frankl recounts how life in the Nazi camps was more sinister than a nightmare. He was reluctant to wake someone thrashing around in their sleep because he was convinced that reality was far worse than a nightmare. However, life could be enlivened by the splendour of a landscape or a sunset. Summoned hastily by a fellow prisoner to witness the final moments of a sunset, the inmates rose from the floor, where they had collapsed after an exhausting day. They were met with vivid colours that seemed to have escaped from an unguarded watercolour painting. This riot of colours spilling over the gaunt group of people and the grey barracks evokes a sense of wonder at a beauty that is so easily overlooked in a life of freedom and busyness: “Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, ‘How beautiful the world could be…'”
Many years after her liberation, in an interview with journalist Anne Applebaum, Irena Arghinskaia, a survivor of the Soviet labour camps, recalled the incredible beauty of the North, the tenderness of the sunsets, and the vastness of the taiga, which left her breathless.
A labour camp is the last place on earth where you would expect to find gratitude or wonder at the beauty of the world. The fact that such feelings can exist even in those enclaves of horror suggests that contentment has less to do with favourable circumstances than with a mindset that recognises and cherishes every spark of goodness in a world ravaged by suffering, chaos, and injustice. The way we see the world depends on the makeup of our inner world.
When all reasons for gratitude have vanished
Life can be hard. We may never end up in a concentration camp, but there are other forms of suffering that we may encounter: a friend who betrays us, an unfaithful partner, a miscarriage, a devastating diagnosis, the breakdown of a marriage, or a disabling accident, for example. You may be caught off guard by a sudden, deeply painful turn of events that upends your somewhat predictable existence, shattering all your certainties and hopes. True gratitude shifts our focus from life’s gifts to the Giver. Christians know that life is like a kaleidoscope, changing its hues and patterns at every crossroads, and so they have a keen sense of relativity. Everything may change, but God remains the same. For this reason, rather than focusing on the good things that happen to them (or don’t), Christians concentrate on a love that they can never fully deserve or understand.
On a July morning in 1940, Chiune Sugihara was serving his country as ambassador in Lithuania. That was the day his career and life were shattered beyond repair, though he did not realise it at the time. The embassy courtyard was filled with people that summer morning, and as it was too small to contain them all, the crowd spilled far out into the street. They were Polish Jews fleeing Nazi extermination. There were few safe places left for them in Europe and they needed a transit visa to reach them. Curaçao, a territory under Dutch jurisdiction, was one of their desired destinations. Sugihara sent a telegram to Tokyo seeking permission to issue the visas, but the negative reply left no room for interpretation.
Faced with a difficult dilemma, Sugihara decided to disobey the orders he had received, knowing that he was risking not only his career, but also his life. He issued visas to Jews day and night until his shoulders and fingers were affected. Furthermore, since the Jews lacked the required documentation, he accepted any document they had, including blank sheets of paper on which the applicants wrote their desired destination. When he was eventually forced to report to Berlin, he continued to issue visas, even throwing them out of the train window to Jews running alongside the tracks. After the war, Sugihara was dismissed from the Japanese Foreign Service and forced to sell light bulbs for several years to support his family. It was not until a year before his death that he received the “Righteous Among the Nations” honour from the Yad Vashem Institute. However, he was too ill to travel and unable to attend the ceremony.
When asked why he had sacrificed a promising career, Sugihara spoke of his encounter with tearful refugees, including women and the elderly, who were so desperate that they bent down to kiss his shoes. Taking pity on them, he granted them a visa to life.
Once, after mankind had been infected with the virus of sin—the inevitable outcome of which is death—He who created us leaned over from heaven and looked down upon us, a great throng of souls running along the stage of life and crying out that they did not want to die. His heart could not bear to see us meet this end, so He said: “Father, from eternity I have decided that we will pay the full price for their lives. I am going to fulfil what must be fulfilled!” He signed our visa for life with His blood after becoming not just any human but a “man of suffering, and familiar with pain”—a stark testament to our lack of gratitude—so despised that “we held him in low esteem.”
Our visa for a life as long as eternity has been signed. I can’t find any other more lasting reason for gratitude in the entire universe.