What is this life and what is a person?
Even those who lived so recently are already being forgotten. Ancestors and strangers aren't so different when they are dust.
Thoughts, feelings, memories, experiences, all the hard work of one's life, and the sparkle in lovestruck eyes all vanish as if they never were.
The most exalted days of one's lifetime, intricately planned and looked forward to for months with all family and friends become crusty relics of browning paper and ink smeared from a flood or rain or a dusty trophy in a box whose inscription nobody reads.
One lives in poverty or torment in this life while another lives in luxury and mirth, yet the relentless wheel of time drives both equally into perpetual silence where neither the sufferer's pain nor the comfort of the rich whose treasures could not follow to the grave are in existence any longer.
Whether we read only a comic in youth or endless volumes of encyclopedias and history books and science books and accumulate vast stores of knowledge, our brain's cells will eventually become non-living matter, breathing but the air of forgetfulness rather than any more oxygen.
Beauty or ugliness, health or sickness, fame or obscurity, all alike we succumb to a tomb of earth and its quieted, haunting deadness.
And yet we can smile an invincible joy as if that darkness can never touch us because we who will be forgotten by those behind us likewise forget those ahead whose aged, decaying corpses demonstrate the erased path in front of us.
I have reached the age where my mortality is felt seeping into my bones and blood, yet rather than fear or dread, though they peek in, taking up habitation in my being, a blessed comfort reigns within in knowing that all my suffering has an end. The one who made my mind and physical self gave me promises that He has made a place for me in the life that comes after this one. It is both a miracle that I am thus loved and a miracle that I am able to believe it in faith, being a fallen sinner who is unworthy to enter any kind of good paradise where only good people belong. That I have been given a goodness not my own because the Maker of the world loved me enough to die perfect and innocent to save a dirty wretch like me is the miracle of miracles.
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. - John 3:16
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