COVID and an Unfinished Life

COVID and an Unfinished Life

from F. LaGard Smith

Out of an abundance of caution in the week before the Smith clan was due to arrive for Thanksgiving, Ruth and I went to get tested for COVID.  Both of us had felt just a bit “off,” especially me. Meanwhile, with growing concerns about a spike in infections, we cancelled Thanksgiving altogether, and I drove up to our little mountain retreat to do my usual writing. Over the next three days, I began experiencing increasing symptoms, so I wasn’t altogether surprised when I got a call from the Health Department with the chilling words: “You’ve tested positive.” As with Job, what I feared had come upon me. I had COVID.

Thankfully, Ruth’s test came back negative, with no ensuing onset; and, mercifully, I was spared the worse symptoms ravaging others. My greater battle was mental, dealing with the haunting possibility of how quickly and dramatically my condition might change. Was today’s relapse only a temporary setback, or the beginning of a downward spiral leading to hospitalization…or worse?  Unlike other illness, COVID’s deadly potential can play some truly wicked mind games.

Now that I’m safely at the end of my quarantine, I look back with added cause to celebrate Thanksgiving 2020, but also with some somber reflections. As time progressed, I began to notice a diminishing interest in anything trivial. With apologies all around, I must confess that normal events in the lives of others felt remote and, frankly, unimportant. It was as if I were in an airplane at 33,000 feet, looking down on cities and towns bustling with life, but nothing to do with me. I was somewhere else. In a separate world. On a different plane—a higher one.

And then there were the irrepressible “what if” thoughts. What if, within days or hours, my time on earth should come to an end?  Unfinished business flooded into my mind—the book awaiting publication, the screenplay yet to be produced, the planned renovation, the hoped-for return to England and the cottage. I thought of the JFK book, “An Unfinished Life,” and wondered what dreams, aspirations, and plans Kennedy never got to fulfill. Same with his brother, Robert. And Martin Luther King, who famously said, “I may not get there with you” (to the Promised Land). No mystery what his dream was, likely never to be fully realized.

And then I think of my own father, brought down in a heartbeat after his Sunday sermon. His unfinished life was to be a period of preaching for a smaller congregation in retirement, and holding Gospel Meetings across the country. Enjoying his grandchildren. Performing the wedding for my kid sister and the husband Dad himself had “scouted out” for her. Sadly, it wasn’t his knot to tie, a reminder that unfinished lives can rob others of their own expectations.

Given human hopes and dreams, and plans and schemes, it’s hard to think there’s ever a life that isn’t, in the end, an unfinished life. The cruelty of death from longer-debilitating diseases may be a blessing, allowing time to tie up at least some of the loose ends. But at the final hour, all that matters is on an otherworldly plane where there’ll be no such thing as an unfinished life—at least for those who’ve taken seriously the One who, alone, could utter the words: “It is finished!”

To say the blindingly obvious, an unfinished life on earth awaits us all, in which case COVID might be a small price to pay for the caution that—in view of life’s brevity and uncertainty—most of what we deem so terribly important from moment to moment is, in truth, terribly trivial.