Deathbed Promises and Predictions

Deathbed Promises and Predictions
Genesis 49:1-28

When you know you are going to die soon, it may concentrate the mind. You may see things more clearly. The poet Jason Shinder found his voice as a poet through the cancer that brought his death in middle age. His friends saw him as living in denial about his illness; indeed, he wrote in a short poem that he had been avoiding his illness because he was afraid he was going to die: “And when I do / I’ll end up alone again,” he wrote. Yet the poems he wrote during his illness brought him a kind of clarity about life. He is breathtakingly realistic about the fact that a few decades after we die, there will be no one left who knew us. Yet “the hours are left for vanishing and also for joy and for blessing and gratitude.”...