Attending the funeral of a teen is a somber experience.  I can’t even begin to imagine what tempests the parents are facing.  After having given my condolences last night, I became reflective.  My thoughts went back to my teenage years.  First of all, there was that disturbing song, “Seasons in the Sun.”  The Terry Jacks rendition was popular during my teen years and it haunted me even then.  Perhaps more influential in my own life was Alice Cooper’s album Welcome to My Nightmare.  And the context.  I was a somewhat sickly child.  Raised in the Fundamentalist camp, I thought about dying quite a lot.  I became comfortable with the idea.  In seventh grade I missed a lot of school, having come down with the flu, then chicken pox, then a flu relapse.  And yet another bout.  Lying at home, feeling sick, having had pneumonia as a kid, I’d listen to Cooper repeatedly and read the Bible.

One of the lines from that concept album that stood out to me was one of the spoken interludes.  “I don’t want to see you die, but if that’s the way that God has planned you…”  God has planned you.  There was a fatalism there that in the context gave me a strange sort of hope.  I listened to it over and over again.  Our teenage years are when we’re just starting to get a sense of what our lives might be.  Most of the time our expectations don’t match reality, and sometimes reality is simply outside of our hands, such as a with an incurable disease.  Back to “Seasons in the Sun.”  I found myself without the words I felt I needed to console the parents.  I realize my view is the odd one out.

Early in my own life, I found myself of a philosophical bent.  I wanted to know what the meaning of life was.  I guess I was looking for instructions.  Probably my senior year in high school I discovered existentialism.  I identified with that school, especially after learning that Søren Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist.  That seemed to mean it was okay.  Existentialists believe “existence precedes essence”—we make our own meaning.  Life has been a lesson in that as I studied and worked in religion, which should be some consolation, for over half a century.  The skies are silent regarding the meaning we attribute to our lives.  The song on Welcome to My Nightmare continues, “You’ve only lived a minute of your life.”  And those words come back to me now.