There is something peculiar about the human relationship with death.
A person can spend years hoping for a visit from someone they love. Months can pass between telephone calls. Invitations are extended, plans are discussed, promises are made.
"We really should get together."
"I've been meaning to come see you."
"Things have just been so busy."
And then one day, the telephone rings with terrible news.
Suddenly, the impossible becomes possible.
Work schedules are rearranged. Appointments are canceled. Money is found for gasoline, airline tickets, and hotel rooms. People travel hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles.
The same people who couldn't find a free afternoon somehow manage to find an entire week.
It is remarkable how much time we can discover when we believe we are running out of it.
And perhaps even more remarkable how little of that time we seem willing to spare when we believe there will always be more.
I don't think this is necessarily a question of how much we love someone.
People can love one another deeply and still neglect their relationships. We can genuinely care about someone while repeatedly allowing everything else in our lives to take precedence over them.
But there is an uncomfortable truth in that distinction.
The sincerity of our affection does not compensate for the absence of its expression.
We may know how much someone means to us. But do they?
And more importantly, have we given them the opportunity to experience it?
In Psalm 90, we encounter a remarkable petition:
Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
The psalm does not ask G-d to grant us more days. It asks for the wisdom to recognize the significance of the days we have.
There is a difference.
We tend to organize our lives around the assumption of continuity. Tomorrow will come. Next week will come. There will be another birthday, another holiday, another opportunity to sit across from someone we love and ask them how they are doing.
And most of the time, that assumption proves correct.
Which is precisely what makes it so dangerous.
Every time we postpone something and discover that we can still do it later, we reinforce the belief that postponement carries no meaningful cost.
But relationships are not static things waiting patiently for our attention.
They are living experiences, shaped by what we do and what we fail to do.
A visit postponed is not necessarily a visit preserved for another day.
Sometimes it is simply a visit that never happens.
And even when there is another opportunity, something has already been lost. A conversation that might have occurred. A moment of companionship. An ordinary afternoon that could have become part of someone's cherished memories.
We rarely consider these losses because they leave no visible evidence.
There is no empty chair at a funeral for the afternoon we never spent together. No memorial for the conversation we never had. No ceremony acknowledging the years in which someone waited for us to make time.
Yet these absences are real.
Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time for every purpose under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. But nowhere does it promise that we will recognize the appropriate time while we are living through it.
And I wonder whether one of the great failures of human judgment is our tendency to confuse what is urgent with what is important.
The things demanding our attention today are not necessarily the things that will matter most when we look back upon our lives.
A work obligation may be urgent. A bill may be urgent. A broken appliance may be urgent.
The people we love often aren't.
They may be patient. Understanding. Accommodating. They tell us not to worry. They understand that we're busy.
And because they love us, they make it easy for us to keep choosing everything else.
Until one day, they no longer can.
I am not suggesting that we abandon our responsibilities or that love requires constant availability. There are legitimate demands upon our time, and relationships must allow room for the practical realities of life.
Nor am I suggesting that every estranged relationship ought to be restored. Sometimes distance is necessary, and sometimes it is the consequence of choices that cannot simply be overlooked.
But for those people we genuinely love, whose presence enriches our lives and whose absence we would mourn, we ought to examine the difference between the time we believe we cannot spare and the time we would somehow find if we learned they were dying.
Because that difference tells us something about our priorities.
And perhaps something about our capacity for self-deception.
There is another dimension to this that deserves consideration.
When someone dies, we gather to honor them.
We tell stories about their kindness, their humor, their generosity. We speak of the ways they influenced our lives. We describe qualities we admired, lessons they taught us, and memories we will treasure.
These gatherings can be profoundly meaningful.
But I cannot help wondering how many of those beautiful words are being spoken for the first time.
How many people leave this world without ever knowing the extent to which they mattered to those around them?
How many spend their final years feeling forgotten, only to become the center of everyone's attention once they are no longer here to experience it?
A funeral may honor a person's memory.
But it cannot give them the companionship they needed while they were alive.
It cannot deliver the affection we withheld, the gratitude we never expressed, or the ordinary pleasure of being remembered on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday.
And there is something profoundly tragic about saving our most generous expressions of love for an audience that no longer includes the person to whom they belong.
The Hebrew Scriptures repeatedly insist that our obligations to one another are not merely matters of sentiment.
They require action.
Love is not presented simply as something we feel, but as something that must find expression in how we conduct ourselves.
And perhaps this is one of the most practical ways to understand that obligation.
Not everyone needs our money. Not everyone needs our advice. Not everyone needs us to solve their problems.
Sometimes what they need is simply the reassurance that their existence matters enough for us to interrupt our own.
A visit. A conversation. A few hours without watching the clock.
Not because something terrible has happened. But because nothing terrible has happened yet.
Because they are alive.
Because we are alive.
Because for this brief moment in the history of the world, we have the extraordinary privilege of occupying it together.
We cannot eliminate the grief of losing someone we love. We cannot guarantee that there will be no regrets, no unfinished conversations, no words we wish we had spoken.
Death will always leave us confronting things we cannot change.
But we can stop creating unnecessary regrets while we still have the opportunity to do otherwise.
We can recognize that the people we love are not permanent fixtures in the landscape of our lives.
Their presence is temporary.
As is ours.
And the fact that we do not know when that presence will end ought to make it more precious, not easier to take for granted.
So perhaps the next time we find ourselves saying that we simply cannot make the time to see someone we love, we should consider what would happen if we received a telephone call tomorrow telling us that they had only a few days left.
Would we find the time then?
Would the obligations that seem so immovable today suddenly become negotiable?
Would we discover that our schedules were not quite as inflexible as we believed?
If so, perhaps we should make some of those arrangements now.
Not out of fear. Not out of guilt. But out of the recognition that love deserves to be experienced by the living.
We should not have to lose someone before we begin treating their presence as irreplaceable.
And if we can find the time to say goodbye, surely we can find some time to say hello.
Amen.