If death is a joke for a Christian…why does a Christian mourn?
Because we all lose something when a human dies.
Often we lose the false hopes we had. We lose something we already had lost, but while they were alive we had deluded ourselves into thinking it was possibly still true.
When my parents who raised me die I’ll have to let go of the last vestiges of hope I had that they actually did love me. I’m fairly certain they did not…but…when they die that’ll be the end.
That’s grim.
Of course loss upon death isn’t always grim. Sometimes you lose good things. But that’s why death isn’t a tragedy for a Christian.
…The mourning is what I want to focus on today.
On Tik Tok there’s supposed footage of a ghost woman who walked through a hospital after she died and fooled the night watchman into thinking she was alive. …Even if she’s a hoax, I doubt every supposed ghost in a hospital is a hoax. And what do those ghosts mourn? If they were in a hospital presumably they’re better off dead? No more suffering.
They mourn the simple things. Well, the so-called simple things.
Sitting on the hospital floor, still dressed in a gown a ghost leans back against the wall by the elevator. She died in her 30’s of an inoperable disease…and that was certainly traumatic but now what she’s really thinking about is her senior year high school prom. She weeps. Why? Because it’s over. Her life is over.
It was a horrible dance. The boy she went with broke her heart.
He was close to perfect. And…the dance had started off so well. They arrived together in style and yet as the evening wore on he became more and more distant. And it was unclear what was going on.
The moment of death occurred when she saw him dancing with Stacey Turner. He’d left to go, “Check on something for a minute.” and never returned. And yet, she had intuitively clung to that moment her whole life.
Why? Because he was her first love and he was so perfect. And…it was just…so weird.
“Like…why did he do that?!” she whispers to herself, crying on the hospital floor.
What she can’t process is that he seemed to like her. He actually liked her. And it was supposed to be a great night. Possibly one of the best memories of her whole life. Her dress was made by Dior. Growing-up in California in the 1980’s and 90’s she had a mother who bought her nice things… And that dress was amazing. The whole thing had been planned so well.
But in that moment seeing him dancing with Stacey it was as if this very moment on the hospital floor had disappeared and emerged in life. How had her death occurred before her death?
She bites her bottom lip. She cries.
A nurse walks down the hallway to the break room dressed in scrubs. The ghost woman looks at the nurse in an attempt to get the nurse’s attention. She can sense that the nurse feels uneasy but the nurse doesn’t look behind her. The ghost woman reasons that that’s wise. She could easily be an evil entity, even if hates just a ghost in Purgatory in this specific case.
The ghost woman prays to God.
Things feel calmer.
But then it’s that darn memory of the Dior dress again.
Turandot: Nessun dorma by Luciano Pavarotti plays.
Does she sit here and wait for him to die? Or does she go find him and haunt him? It’s just that she’s dead…and…if she’s real and in Purgatory she’s stuck. Not stuck in evil. Her life and after death is actually fairly pleasant… A dead nurse brings espressos for her and a few other dead patients who can’t decide what to do. A dead non-creepy clown chats with her as he goes to keep an eye on things around the hospital. It’s…nice.
“But…what about that moment?” she asks. “We’re all human?”
If you should be in Christ when you die…and Purgatory is your resting place until you deal with your sin to be fully actualized in Christ in Heaven what will you be figuring out?
Keen to Cross the Pond 