Status Updates From Coup de Grâce

Have you ever thought to put your life in God’s hands? Is it really so far-fetched to believe he might care? Isn’t that what’s so appealing about religion. That God believes in you. That the universe is always conspiring to grant your life its colour. That everything’s meant to lead you not only up to this point, but further, so that you can see exactly how far it is you’ve come.

The very body that shelters you turns you away, a starving medieval pauper left begging on church steps. Even the language we use to describe sickness is, at its best, rife with rote metaphor, and, at its worst, profoundly dehumanizing. It inscribes a lack of control: we “battle” insomnia, we “suffer” a heart attack, become “victim” to dementia. We “collapse,” at times even “succumb” to sickness. Yielding to death.

It gradually dawns on me that I’ve been denied a destination, caught in a transitional environment, a space between beginning and an end. What I see towers benedictive above my head, and is certainly not Honoré-Beaugrand terminus; I know this now.