November, for me, is a natural month to ponder the passage of time from birth to dying. Typically, October winds and rain in Canada’s Pacific Southwest leave many trees barren as they stand soldierly for All Saints’ Day on the 1st. And with the dying year our hearts grow perhaps more attuned to hold vigil for those who have passed. This year I have mourned the passing of four beloved souls. And we have been mourning the passing of our beloved Queen Elizabeth II. 
With November also comes my birthday, as well as Remembrance Day on the 11th, the War Remembrance Day that began in 1919 after World War I. In an earlier blog, “A Time for Remembering,” I’d pondered what the 11th day can continue to mean for us now. Today, I return to a comment I made in my September blog, “Omi’s Coming-of-Age Story,” in which I said the character Omi in Letters to Annie is “writing toward her own death.”
In September I wrote, “At age 63, Omi is definitely in ‘autumn’ when Annie is born but has this extensive season of grace into advanced winter to discover how she has responded to the extravagant gift of life. With each letter she writes she realizes more that she is writing toward her own death. She’s trying to say the things that matter to her while she still can, and say them in such a way that Annie might be able to hear her (at the time and maybe when she is gone).” Likewise, as I’d mentioned in my Author’s Note, while not a grandmother myself, in writing this book I wanted to take the time to say some of the things I’d wish to say, if I could, in the future.
Dare I return to this claim, my character Omi is “writing toward her own death,” and so challenge myself and my readers to consider our own? Is this a morbid or a prudent thought? Unhealthy or wholesome?
As I was writing Letters to Annie, putting myself in the place of the fictitious Omi-character (and of course we are all of the characters as we write, so I’m just as much “Annie” as I am the other characters who’ve found themselves into the book), I realized with increasing intensity the obvious point that Omi writes (lives) everything through the lens of the pressure of evaporating time. Don’t we all? Maybe we do, but when we forget we are the poorer for it, I think. How much precious time is misspent when we forget?
However, when we’re more aware of our decreasing means to do the many things we’d still love to do, the danger of morbid thinking is a real one. But as I worked with Omi’s growing consciousness that she was indeed writing toward her own death, doing what she could for her granddaughter Annie while she could, my experience felt not only prudent but became progressively fruitful.
Here’s how. The awareness that opportunity doesn’t come around the same way again heightens our sense of the preciousness of our days. Just as C. S. Lewis has said, “There are no ordinary people” (“The Weight of Glory”), we’d have to likewise add, “There are no ordinary days.” Each day is a unique gift, bringing not only its unique challenges but also its unique blessings. Let’s not waste the day on trivia. Let’s guard against toxic ideas, emotions, and actions. In other words, writing toward one’s own death, which is really living toward one’s own death, means we’re more prone to choosing wisely with the result that we’re better able to transform from being static people for whom seemingly little can change to becoming dynamic people who initiate change. We become increasingly present to the moment, and therefore living our lives to the fullest. The awareness of living toward one’s death (with the emphasis on living) acts like a magnifying glass revealing noteworthy details. Or like a crucible in which the various particulars of our lives undergo yet higher pressure, often painful at the time, but resulting in a new creation.
In writing Letters to Annie I was almost always contemplating Omi’s consciousness—and so my own—of aging and dying. Letter 33 is Omi’s last letter. If you knew you would get to write one last letter (or better yet, if you treated each letter you wrote, each text, each phone call, each visit, as if it could be your last), what would you like to write? 
Writing toward—living toward—one’s own death can provide life-giving lessons. And through the fairy tales that I addressed in Letters to Annie, lessons about death—and therefore how we should live—showed up in various ways. Here are a few:
The threat of death can lead to needed courage
to resist this last enemy. If we consider death to be unnatural, that is, contrary to how life is meant to be, and therefore the enemy to fight, then we welcome, for instance, the rising courage of Hansel and Gretel as they discover how to defeat the witch who would otherwise overcome them (see Letter 24). Similarly, in an ageist culture which rejects the value of the lives of elders, where, as I’m told, even people who are barely 40 are sometimes written off with “it’s because you’re old,” the animal quartet in “The Bremen Town-Musicians” is a marvelous testament to the chutzpah we need. The bravery they show in their senior years, defying potential despair, results in the joy of new beginnings (see Letter 29). All of us, young and old, need such boldness.
There is something more terrible than death.
In a world that frequently esteems romantic love leading to marriage as the mark of a fulfilled life, Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Mermaid” story surprises and often disappoints. She does not marry the prince. She dies. What kind of a happy ending is that?! But while Andersen does not deny the beauty of romantic love in marriage, neither does he elevate it to the mark of becoming a living soul. Quite the opposite. In this fairy tale, the quest for becoming a living soul is the ultimate one, greater than the one for romantic love. The real kicker is this: for those characters who are fixated on lesser things, it’s clear that there is something more terrible than death (see Letter 11).
The other side of death
is Life Everlasting. Ah, so death is not the end. “Death, thou shalt die”—as John Donne ends his famous sonnet, “Death, be not proud.” But the passage to the Other Side, the journey through the valley of the shadow of death, can be so very difficult, so very frightening, we know.
In Letter 13, Annie burying Omi in autumn leaves they’d raked became a metaphor for me that led to Omi contemplating one of my favourite passages in Narnia: the story of King Caspian’s death and what happens next in The Silver Chair. What is supposed to be a joyous reunion with his long-lost Continue reading
The second Monday in October, or the Sunday preceding it, is the day we try to get together with family and friends to celebrate with turkey and all the trimmings. For our American family and friends, the last Thursday in November is the great day. And autumn brings the biblical Feast of Tabernacles, Sukkot. 
Gratitude for the music heightens my sense of hearing.
The best fairy tales teach us that we live in community, and that we are offered countless gifts to help us on our way. Good magic happens through community.
(This beautiful venue came about through the artistic talent and amazing organization of one dear staff member and her kindly helpers.) Students, colleagues, family, and friends filled the gently lit room overlooking the lake. Family and friends from as far away as California tuned in online. A graduate drove up from Washington State, bringing a bouquet of flowers. 
This Advent, in the midst of my end-of-semester professor’s grading of student papers (all so interesting and worthy), in the aftermath of torrential rains that have recently hammered and flooded parts of my province of British Columbia with a vengeance unimagined by most of us, and just in the midst of a very hurting and divided world, well, I pause to consider a marvellous event that happened last Advent. A space for gratitude. Our Advent miracle. With my wonderful colleagues, Drs. Sara L. Pearson and Laura N. Van Dyke, I co-edited and published a book that saw the light of day this month one year ago! In the midst of many things, the Covid crisis being one of them, this book came to birth in December 2020: The Inklings and Culture: A Harvest of Scholarship from the Inklings Institute of Canada. Twenty-seven chapters from contributors.
Amen to that. This book, like all good things, took time. If you tend to impatience, like me, then you’ll know all about that jerking at the tether when things don’t happen according to your preferred schedule. The proper unfolding of events in the twin tether of time and space is not quite our favourite idea. But then, oh, glorious, just when you think something is maybe not going to come about at all (because you’re still struggling with impatience, among other rotten things), the miracle happens. The job is done! And you truly know that the energies invested which you thought were yours solo (lone ranger problem), but were mightily infused with the heavenly source of all energy, and then, ta-da! the perfect opening of doors followed—all this birthed the miracle. In hindsight, it happened faster than you could have guessed. (Meanwhile, the naysayers have all vanished, which is what they should have done in the first place—there’s my impatience again. But let’s remember too: naysayers have their place: they can make you stronger and when that happens you get to prove them wrong. Double-bonus. But don’t get too proud about it. Maybe you can’t quite or shouldn’t say, “I told you so.” But you might whisper, “I’m glad I didn’t listen to you, not very much anyway.”) So YAY, the job is done! Big WOW. And you got to have a part in it—how amazing is that! You end up shaking your head, wondering how you got invited into the grand dance. I love how Madeleine L’Engle once said that every book has its own angel, its own perfect time for appearance. (At the moment, I don’t recall whether I heard it in one of her live lectures or read it.)
Bifocal vision marks the end of a youthful era. What has this possibly to do with hope? I suppose leaving one’s youth behind can be a kind of good? (Let’s try to count the ways in which loss also leads to gain.)
Stephen was the first person who invited me to give a keynote address. It was for Oxford, at C. S. Lewis’s Magdalen College, no less. What?! Me?! Oh, what a marvelous time it was, that Oxford conference by the George MacDonald Society in 2014. (You can read a lot of what we thought and said in the book, Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald and the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy.)
I have another reason for associating Stephen with bifocal vision. Every time I teach George MacDonald, which is a fair bit, I refer my students to Stephen’s comment on this Victorian author. MacDonald, Stephen said, had “bifocal” vision, meaning that he saw two worlds at once, the temporal and the eternal (“The Two Worlds of George MacDonald”).
So when I walk darkening wintry streets, I want to remember that the weather will change. Stephen’s comment to us that one night also helps me to remember. Frost for a time but not forever. The Great Thaw is coming. The White Witch’s reign is temporary; Aslan will return. And as I walk along I need to see what’s right in front of me as clearly as possible; but I also need to have the long view of life everlasting. The short and the long view—bifocal vision—enables hope.
A few evenings ago my immediate family circle celebrated the beginning of Sukkot, the biblical Feast of Tabernacles or Shelters. As we made our preparations, I contemplated again the first time we did so some years ago. I recalled so vividly the wondrous moment when I put my head back and gazed up through the mini-forest of cut bamboo branches decorating our backyard deck: up through the swaying green fronds into the deep blue autumn sky before sunset, and came awake with this startling thought. “So, this is Sukkot,” I pondered. “So this is why the Israelites were to build booths to dwell in for a week. They were to begin to understand this amazing fact: that the God of the universe had come to tabernacle with them, to dwell with them.” And somehow in that split second the cosmos opened in my heart, even more profoundly in that instant than each lovely Christmas year after year. This God, yes, this God has come to tabernacle with us, with me, now, always. Christmas in October—Christmas always.
Maybe the Lord Jesus really was born during the Feast of Tabernacles. Makes sense. That the God who came to dwell with us would be as precise with His calendar as in all other things. But whether we think of His birth especially on December 25th or in the autumn, let’s focus on the miracle itself: He has come to tabernacle with us, to be with us. No matter what, He is with us in all things, blessing us in the midst of trials, working through all things so that we can enjoy Him forever.
A line from Laura Ingalls Wilder rings true: “I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things in life which are the real ones after all.” And I wonder, in this season of approaching harvest, which sweet, simple, splendid harvest fruits might we notice? Enjoy? Sure, we count what we have lost, and must, but what might we have also gained?
Meanwhile, as we’ve been wisely told, take one day at a time, one moment at a time. And count the joys, keep counting the joys, as we go.
With this basket full of autumn joys, I’m thinking more about how MacDonald’s Princess Daylight, who in spite of the evil spell that was put on her, is “dancing to her own music.” In the end, evil is overcome, as it always is. But here’s the thing: how important it was for Daylight in the long meanwhile of suffering to dance to her own music as much as she could. No, she wasn’t always dancing, but as much as she could dance she did—perseveringly, repeatedly, joyfully. Some days she was just plain too worn and decrepit to dance, and the only thing to do was sleep and, more than that, especially when sleep didn’t come, wait.
This autumn I could pray for a double portion of courage and faith. That’d suit me fine to get it. But right now maybe I’ll just ask for an outbreak of sanity in my own heart, in this hour, on this day. Start where I am. Maybe that’s how to get ready to receive more courage, more faith. And when I can, which is most likely oftener than I suppose, I’ll dance to my own music, celebrating all things bright and beautiful.
Monika Hilder 