He Scores, Once More

By David Simmons

The days of our years are threescore years and ten;
and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,
yet is their strength labour and sorrow;
for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

– Psalm 90:10

The place was teeming with people; it was some sort of travel terminal, for ferries or maybe an airport.

Outside, there was a cataclysm: The Earth was collapsing into itself. We had been warned that there was no escape; the passenger terminal would be crushed within minutes, and us along with it.

There was remarkably little panic, even as the inevitable happened: The walls closed in on us, and our bodies were pushed closer and closer to one another.

My own thoughts were not fear, but curiosity: What would it feel like to be crushed to death? Would there be pain?

The answer came quickly. No pain, just a relentless sensation of squeezing on my head.

Then, nothing. Blackness.

But not quite nothing. Memories emerged from the darkness. The most prominent was the memory of breathing, that simple pleasure of drawing air into the lungs, the invisible stuff of life. How appropriate that the Latin spirare gives us both “respire” and “inspire”; the latter in the sense that the gods breathe truth or ideas into our souls.

But was it only a memory? It seemed so real. And then it was: I woke up, perspiring, my heart racing.

As far as I can recall, this was the first dream I’ve ever had in which I died. I have recurring dreams in which I am submerged in water, and in many of them I take a breath before I reach the surface, but they are Aqua-Lung–type breaths, never fatal. Normally the water is calm, though after my experience in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, the dreams occurred in rivers or rapids for a while.

I write this on my sixty-first birthday, officially the day when my sixth decade of taking up unproductive space on this planet draws to a close, and a seventh begins. We are often taught that the Bible limits our time to “three score and ten” years; in fact that phrase only appears once in the Good Book, in Psalm 90, “A Prayer of Moses the Man of God”.

Forty years ago this December, I entered the hospital room where my mother was nearing the end of her battle with cancer. She was awake but her face was in an oxygen mask, so I couldn’t talk to her; only her eyes smiled at me. I left for my afternoon shift at the local plywood plant. I returned home after midnight and fell asleep, to be awakened by a phone call from my father, asking me as his voice cracked to call our pastor and ask him to come to the hospital. I did so, groggy with sleep, then crawled back into bed. Then I realized why Dad had called, got up, jumped into the car and rushed to the hospital myself.

When I entered her room, she was alone. The tubes and oxygen were gone; she lay there in peace. I tiptoed out to the hall. Dad appeared; “Did you know she’s gone?” he said quietly.

Still in my early twenties, I had not had much need to think about death; it was an abstract, faraway concept. Now it had become reality, taking from me the person with whom I had always been closest, and no one has matched that closeness since. But though of course I was sad, sadder than I have ever been before or since, the more overwhelming feeling was of gratitude that her suffering was finished forever.

I’ve not feared death since. Despite that, my own brushes with it have been very few. The most recent was last month, when I contracted a serious infection that dragged my blood pressure down to dangerous levels. But this was very brief and by the time I learned I had had one foot in the grave (literally; the left one), I was recovering. Today I begin Decade 7 in excellent health.

And so we look again at Psalm 90, this time in a modern English version, where Moses pleads:

Teach us to number our days,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Amen.