Downsizing to Death

LIFE LESSONS

This article grew from a talk Dr. Ryken gave to the Joint Heirs adult community.

Last week before class Jeff Peltz came to me beaming as though he were offering me the deal of a lifetime. It turned out to be a request to share a devotional with the Joint Heirs Adult Community. I was totally taken aback and asked what I should talk about. The joint wisdom of Jeff and my wife was that I should talk about my current experience, so that is what I did. Through the years, the word downsizing has been for me a lifeless, ho-hum word holding absolutely no existential terror. Well, that was then and now is now. As 18th-century English author Samuel Johnson said, "Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

Mary and I are in the process of downsizing in preparation for a move to Windsor Park Manor early in the month. It has had the effect of concentrating our minds wonderfully.

I will say something about what the process is like, a bit of human wisdom that I have acquired as the process has unfolded, and a spiritual principle that we all need to embrace.

For me, the process of downsizing and reaching the end of my public years has been a series of little deaths. This began already as I wrapped up my fulltime teaching career and was aware day by day that I would never teach this or that work of literature again, and never show an accompanying slide show again. In the past three months, virtually every morning as I have gone to school to work in my shared office, I have removed from my storage room at home three slide carousels, or three teaching notebooks, or ten files from my file cabinets, and pitched them into a dumpster outside of Blanchard Hall. This past week my file cabinets and home desk of 45 years were hauled off by Junk King.

Junk King has become one of the heroes in my life. Through the years, when I have seen trucks with the words "Got Junk?" on the side, it has struck me as totally crass. I have also experienced it is an invasion of my privacy: it is no one's business to know if I have junk. But when I saw a red truck with the words "Junk King," and the image of a crown, I thought to myself, "This invites."

Each discard has been a little death—the termination of something of great value in itself but that has no further use for anyone. The most traumatic event to date was to learn that [a] I needed to have a radon mitigation system installed and [b] much worse, that a membrane needed to be placed over my entire crawl space floor and as part of that I needed to totally empty my crawl space. At first, I could not even imagine that such a thing could be done. Then I invoked Harvey Chrouser's motto that "life is ninety percent attitude." Faced with my crawl space crisis, I adjusted my attitude, emptied my crawl space, and have been unable to use half of my garage ever since because it contains what I removed from my crawl space.

The human wisdom that I carry away from my accumulations and their discard is not that I was wrong to accumulate what I did, including my teaching and research materials, but that I should have monitored how much of everything I was accumulating. I have uncovered much that I did not know I owned. It was self-defeating not to keep tabs on what I owned.

So, my human wisdom that I offer to you, as I march to my metaphoric gallows, is the encouragement to make downsizing a state of mind over the long haul and not just a state of panic at the end. The writer of Ecclesiastes tells us, "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might" (9:10). I am glad that I did that. Still: for the past two weeks I have taught Henry David Thoreau's book Walden to my home school class. At one point, Thoreau expresses his scorn for people's accumulation of possessions by exclaiming, "We no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven." Perhaps I can offer the paradigm of downsizing as a perpetual process.

The spiritual principle I have seen reinforced in recent years is the need for acceptance. Primarily for me at this stage of life it is acceptance of the temporality of human existence. Through the years I have quoted the following sentence in my classes, gleaned from a book titled The Restoration of Meaning to Contemporary Life: "There is something profoundly disquieting in the temporality of our existence." For poets, that statement is true.

I could compile a small anthology of poems that lament and protest and express anxiety about the passing of time and human mutability.

I submit that the temporality of existence should not be profoundly disquieting to a Christian. The world's most famous poem on the subject of time is the one found in Ecclesiastes 3, on the theme that there is a time for every matter under heaven. The poem is a catalog of opposites, and the pair that is closest to the experience of downsizing is the statement that there is "a time to keep, and a time to cast away."

I believe that the unstated theme of this poem on a time for everything is acceptance or resignation. We live in a time- bound world. Instead of raging against it, we need to accept it as God's provision for human life.

In addition to accepting time, we need to accept death when it comes. It is probably 35 years ago that the adult Sunday school class at Bethel Presbyterian Church devoted a quarter to the subject of aging and death. One Sunday a hospital chaplain spoke, and he devoted one of his modules to outlining the stages of dying. The last stage is acceptance, and as a kind of side comment the speaker said that this moment of acceptance "can be a beautiful experience." That observation made in passing has stayed with me through the years. I have pondered what would make the acceptance of one's death a beautiful experience.

When my mother died and my sister and I pondered her comments about what she wanted at her funeral, we found that she not only shared her thoughts but, as was characteristic of her, also some of the thought process that she went through. Again it was a specific statement that has stood out for me, as follows: "I asked myself, What is the most important thing in life? The forgiveness of sins." When I asked the funeral director what he thought about importing that verbatim into the obituary, he said that he thought it was great.

It is indeed great to trust in Jesus as our Savior from sin, and preeminently as we face our death.

About the Author | Leland Ryken

College Church member Leland Ryken has served as an elder and an elementary Bible school teacher in Kids’ Harbor. He also has served as professor of English at Wheaton College for over 50 years.