I'd recommend taking three minutes to listen to this song before you read this post.  The song is "The Last Time," sung by the Blind Boys of Alabama.  (I'd highly recommend the whole album - "Spirit of the Century".)

     I loved that song from the moment I heard it.  The serious theme of the lyrics, the simplicity of the melody, the gravel in their voices - it all comes together so well. And for the past six months, the refrain of that song has haunted me and my family. It hit particularly hard on Mother's Day and Father's Day this year. We found ourselves wondering, "Is this the last time we celebrate these kinds of moments together?"

     Holidays, birthdays, special events - these can be very hard after the loss of a loved one. When you celebrate special moments after someone's death - the first Christmas, the first wedding anniversary, the first birthday, the first family wedding - the joy of the occasion feels bittersweet. There is the joy of the event itself coupled with the reminder that not everyone is there that you want to have there. That kind of grief fades, but it never fully goes away.

     When living with a terminal illness, there's a different kind of grief. I've taken to calling it "anticipatory grief." It's a grief that anticipates the pain that seems to be coming. It's a grief that mourns a loss that hasn't happened yet, encroaching on happy moments and trying to steal the joy right out of them. It's a grief that haunts us with the observation that "this may be the last time we fellowship together." It's a grief that looks at the future and sees a shadow, then finds that shadow creeping back into the present.

     How do we deal with anticipatory grief? We can't just stop those thoughts from ever occurring to us. But we can put them in their proper context. I would even suggest that there is something we should learn from this grief. But once we take that lesson, let's move away from it and not let it have the power to steal the joy of the time we have been given.

     In the New Testament, we read this warning: "Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit'— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.' As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil" (James 4:13–16).

     What James is saying is precisely what the Blind Boys of Alabama are singing about - "This may be the last time... I don't know." Is it wrong to live with that sense of foreboding in mind? No. In fact, James tells us that to ignore it is to be arrogant. Arrogant like the rich landowner that Jesus warns against in Luke 21:16-21. He had reached a point of financial comfort, so he expected to dwell in peace the rest of his days. He took for granted that he would enjoy life tomorrow and for many more tomorrows after that. The Lord calls him a fool because for all his wealth and success, his life would end that night.

     Here's what anticipatory grief teaches us: we are utterly contingent beings; that's a fancy way of saying that our continued existence depends on things we can't control. Neither worry nor joy nor ignorance can extend our days. Any moment could be our last. That's the message I missed the first 100 times I listened to the Blind Boys of Alabama sing that song. I heard them as a group of old men reckoning with their own imminent mortality because they were old. I should have heard them as mortal men reminding us all that our lives are brief and that tomorrow is not promised to us.

     If we have eyes to see, Scripture is painfully repetitive on this point:
Psalm 103:15-16 "As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more."
Isaiah 40:7-8 "The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the LORD blows on it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever."
Job 14:1-2 "Man who is born of a woman is few of days and full of trouble. He comes out like a flower and withers; he flees like a shadow and continues not."

     So yes, remember - this may be the last time. The last time you sit down to a meal; the last time you talk to a friend; the last time you see a sunrise; the last time you hear the voice of a loved one. I don't say that to depress you, I say that to (believe it or not) inspire you. The anticipatory grief that encroaches on our brief and fleeting days and which seeks to overshadow our joy can only be forced into retreat when joy is reaffirmed. Yes, this may be the last time, and because it may be the last time, I will cling to the joy of the moment while I have it. When something (such as the time we have together) is rare, it becomes precious.

     The fewness of our days should not make those days sad. It should make them valuable. Each moment we do have is gifted to us by God, and there is a time for everything. There is "a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance" (Ecclesiastes 3:4). Now is not yet the time for weeping. The only thing I've lost is a future that was never promised me in the first place. Anticipatory grief is a response to the painful reality that our future on earth is not a given. That is true for all of us, every day, for our entire lives. It's not something we easily remember. It's not something we feel to be true until a big interruption threatens all those tomorrows we've taken for granted. But once we see how contingent we are, once we realize that we only see tomorrow "If the Lord wills," then today can be a moment of tremendous gratitude and delight. A gift that wasn't guaranteed or owed, but which we have anyway.

     It's hard living in the ambiguity of that. As the Blind Boys of Alabama sing, "May the last time... I don't know." I don't know if I've celebrated my last Christmas, my last birthday, my last Father's Day. But I pray for the wisdom and strength and faith to walk with peace and gladness, even if it is the last time. I don't know if it is. But even if it is, every moment before was a precious gift, not something I had a right to demand. And now I have been awakened to receive that gift of time, rather than grieve the times I might not get.  

     The song ends on a more hopeful note than you may notice at first: "May be the last time we ever mourn together. May be the last time, I don't know." I'd always paid more attention to the "together" part of that phrase: We may not be together again, even to mourn. But now I see there's a great hope in there. Mourning will end. Worldly grief looks to the days ahead and sees them as darkened by loss and despair.  The Christian's grief (as 1 Thessalonians 4:13 reminds us) looks to the days ahead and has hope. Grief - anticipatory and otherwise - will have no power when Christ returns. And that is something worth anticipating.