Lately I’ve found myself thinking a lot about mortality. My own. This is not something that I used to think about much. But as the hospice nurse who looks in on Dad said to me, “It’s in your face.”  The last six months seem to have been filled with death – it seems every week someone I care about passes on. Sometimes the deaths have come quickly and unexpectedly, and sometimes they’ve come slowly – after long illnesses.

I could go a couple different directions here. I could be all philosophical – offer detached (and really profound) thoughts about death and dying. Or maybe I could talk about my fear of getting sucked into a vortex where I might be expected to give up control of my own body to the “experts” – maybe seen as an interesting medical experiment, and clucked over with much head-shaking and criticism: “She ate how much cheese every day?!”

But… yeah… I’m thinking I’ll do something else here.

Here’s what I know about me – and about you, too, actually – we are the children of God, Love. We are perfect right now – made in the image and likeness of perfect Love, Truth, and Life. We are strong, fearless, and beautiful – without blemish or flaw. There isn’t even the teensiest, tiniest part of us that can be unlike our perfect Creator – for all we can be is Her reflection. “There is no spot where God is not.”

Death is an illusion – a shadow – and it has no might or right or power to stop Life, or alter perfection. Death has no power to separate us from Love – not now, not ever. Those loved ones who appear to have walked through its shadow are unchanged, perfect, beautiful, still unfolding and learning and progressing.

I ain’t going to be afraid of death, or sickness, or evil of any kind. I know that all things work together for good to those who love Love – nothing can prevent Love from reaching me, or you. I ain’t going to be afraid of fear, either. “Fear never stopped being or its action.” (Mary Baker Eddy)

In The First Church of Christ, Scientist and Miscellany, Mary Baker Eddy writes: “Beloved Christian Scientists, keep your minds so filled with Truth and Love, that sin, disease, and death cannot enter them. It is plain that nothing can be added to the mind already full. There is no door through which evil can enter, and no space for evil to fill in a mind filled with goodness.”

And in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Eddy writes: “Stand porter at the door of thought. Admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in bodily results, you will control yourself harmoniously. When the condition is present which you say induces disease, whether it be air, exercise, heredity, contagion, or accident, then perform your office as porter, and shut out these unhealthy thoughts and fears.”

So that’s what I’m going to do here. I’m going to rouse myself – wake myself up from this mortal dream – and be the child Love made me to be.

Take that, death!