The Ultimate Transition of My Friend Jason

         My friend Jason Akers passed away last Sunday.  His wife Christine asked me to speak at his memorial service. I tried to memorialize him in a respectful, heartfelt way.  It was very hard to talk because of my profound sense of loss, but I managed to get through it.  Since learning of his death, I've kind of been in a somber mood.  This loss has been an affirmation of my knowledge of how fragile my existence is and of the importance of living in the moment.  So here is my funeral talk.

Jason and I were friends.  I was very open about my life and he was open about his.  As such, we would sometimes discuss very personal matters.  Because I opened up to him and he to me, I came to have a sense of who he was and what was important to him.  I felt privileged that he trusted me enough to share his inner thoughts and feelings.  Whenever he would open up with me, I felt I was on sacred ground.  I came to really understand this man, my friend.

As he pondered his mortality and impending death, we would sometimes talk about his life on a macro scale.  In other words, we talked about what he felt he had accomplished and hadn’t accomplished, and what he had become and what he hadn’t become.  He lamented to me that he felt that there was so much he hadn’t accomplished and hadn’t become, and that he was trying not to be bitter about being deprived of the balance of a lifetime to accomplish and become.

I would like to share with you this solemn day what I saw that he had accomplished and what he had become.  And even though ultimately his life was cut even shorter than he expected, I would propose that he leaves a legacy of accomplishment and becoming.  Accomplishing in life does not necessarily equate to becoming.  A person can be very accomplished in their work or career, or even in responsibilities in their church congregations, without becoming a good individual with good values and character.  Jason would say that he didn’t accomplish much. I choose to focus on what he became, and I only wish (and I’m sure he would agree) that he had been given more time to become even more.

The first becoming I would like to share is how he became a good and caring man.  It would be a great understatement to say that His upbringing was challenging.  He would sometimes share with me how his family of origin was full of dysfunction and abuse and it would have been easy for him, and understandable for him, frankly, to live in that dysfunctional world for the rest of his life.  Instead, he made the choice to escape it and to try to have a meaningful life.  He used his upbringing as a bad example, as something not to allow himself or his family to become.  Sometimes, that can be a huge motivation for us and it certainly appeared to be a great incentive for good in him.  He became a caring man.  I marvel at how he was able to become so caring.   I knew he was a caring man because he cared for me, and I will always hold that caring in my heart.

The second becoming I am witness to is how he overcame challenges and adversity.  He was blessed with a dogged determination, or even, a stubbornness of spirit.  Perhaps his family would occasionally see a stubborn father or husband, but that same tenacity was useful in stoically sticking with changes he wanted to make in himself.  Once Jason put his mind to do something, it was eventually going to happen if it were in his control.  He obviously had many challenges and adversity, especially near the end of his life.  But for me, his determination was something to behold.  I have learned more about determination from his example than I have learned from just about any other person.

The third becoming would be how important his family came to be for him.  Having had such a challenging childhood, with an absence of family role models other than a kindly grandmother, he could have believed that life’s cards were stacked against him and given up.  But being the fighter that he was, he determined to give his children what he had not received.  Did he always do the right thing in his child rearing?  Nobody always makes the right decisions in the excruciatingly difficult job of raising children, except for God.  But he tried the best that he could.  His intention was be the best father possible.  He would tell me how deeply he cared for Aaron and Linnet and Mallory.  Christine was his childhood sweetheart and the key to a more normal family life than what he had experienced.  She was and is very important to him. And now that he is in heaven, I must think that he deeply misses them all.

The fourth becoming I would like to touch on was his great, insatiable thirst for knowledge.  He always seemed to be reading something.  He never seemed to get enough.  He loved to learn and anybody who talked with Jason for any length of time would soon understand that he was well-read.  He could wax eloquent on any number of subjects and not superficially.  He was always open to new ideas, new concepts, new ways of looking at things.  Even in the last difficult time of his life, he seemed hungry to know about what was happening to him.  It is a humble person who realizes that he or she does not know it all and wants to become better informed, and Jason personified that humility.  I have to believe that part of Christine’s attraction to Jason was that desire to learn more and use that knowledge to benefit himself, his family, and others.

Living each day to the fullest would be the next becoming I perceived.  This was something that became important to Jason in the last few years of his life.  He came to appreciate being alive and being completely aware of those around him.  He grieved over not having been more awake and cognizant of each day.  Especially at the very end, when he knew that his time here on earth was drawing to a close, he sincerely wanted to enjoy each day and to experience life as fully as his failing body would allow.  His pain would sometimes get the best of him, but that determination and positivity would kick in.  No wonder that he went to Disneyland last Friday.  That alone speaks volumes.

Lastly, the becoming that might be the most important was his embrace of the Gospel plan.  Even though he was quick to downplay his knowledge of Gospel doctrine and scriptures, he knew that what he had been taught was true and eternally important.  He believed in the power of prayer.  He knew that Heavenly Father lived, that Jesus was His Son, and that the Savior had performed the Atonement, and Jason was determined to live Gospel principles the best way he could.  He took pride in belonging to the Church, and dearly wanted his children to be blessed by its teachings.

So you and I are left with this great legacy of this good man.  Funerals are not for those who’ve passed on but for those who remain.  What shall do we with his life?  Or perhaps more importantly, what shall we become because of Jason Akers?  Shall we not be more good and caring?  Shall we not overcome adversity and challenge with dogged determination as he did?  Shall we not hold our families close to us and put them as the highest priority in our lives?  Shall we not hunger and thirst after knowledge?  Shall we not live each day as if it were our last—because it might be?  Jason’s untimely death reminds us of that fact.  And finally, shall we not seek truth and determine what God’s plan is for us?

Let us hold close and sacred his memory and allow those memories to influence us to be better people—better parents, better children, better citizens, better disciples of God.  What will be said by others at our funerals of our becoming when we pass through the veil and embrace Jason? 

   

Why Not Just Sit Down With One Another?

Whether or not one wants to admit it, religion has been involved in much of the world’s wars and bloodshed through the millennia.  To be fair, the leadership of certain belief systems have often sought for personal power in their fervor, or they considered another groups’ theology to be evil or heretical and have incited their believers to take up arms to assert their beliefs.  Regardless, history is littered with corpses of religious men and women. 

As examples, the Crusades was an effort by the Christians to drive the Muslims out of Jerusalem and other lands.  The Spanish Inquisition saw the Catholic Church put believers of Islam and Judaism on trail to be executed.  In the early days of the Reformation in Europe, Catholics killed or burned at the stake hundreds of thousands who wanted that reformation.  I am keenly aware of the persecution and murders of believers of my Church’s doctrines in the 19^th Century by those who felt threatened by our presence in their lands.  The worldwide terrorism in the 21^st Century has theological underpinnings---between militant Islam and Jews and Christians.

The inability of people of different faiths to sit down with one another to discuss shared beliefs and experiences has been very frustrating to me.  As people of faith, we seem unable to make a transition from fear and suspicion to shared humanity and peace.  I don't know that such a transition can take place on a global scale, although I am proud to say that my Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, really makes an effort to reach out to other religions to establish commonalities, especially in shared humanitarian efforts.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

I want to share an experience that I had recently with some friends of another faith.  My wife and I are Christian and the other couple are Muslim.  She and my wife got to know one another and became friends while attending graduate school together to obtain Master’s Degrees in Mathematics.  The four of us have spent time together in each others’ homes, sharing our lives, eating food, and talking about the commonalities of our different faith systems in an effort to increase our understanding.  But in my estimation, our recent visit to their home took our relationship to a whole new level.

Our friends have two adult children, a daughter and a son.  They have loved both of their children but as they talked about their son that day, they talked about him in almost reverential tones because of how seriously he has taken their religion and its beliefs.  They reported that he always has wanted to do what was good, and would study the Quran to understand its teachings in order to be a better Muslim, even waking up at 5:00 am to study it of his own free will. They talked about how sensitive he has been toward them, toward his sister, and toward anybody around him.  Sadly, the son was involved in a serious automobile accident toward the end of 2010 and was hospitalized for three months.  Unexpectedly, the son then contracted pneumonia and soon thereafter passed away, at the too young age of 20.

We have shared our grief and pain with them through the years about our son who has been addicted to drugs for much of his life.  We have talked about our frustrations, our parenting errors, our discouragement and sadness, and during our discussion that day, how we have come to learn to turn him and his life over to God.   As I sat listening to our friends discuss their grieving process over the loss of their son, I was struck by the commonality of emotions that parents feel over their children.  I was also struck by the thought of how this life is a great laboratory established by a loving God to help Christians, Muslims, and all of His children to learn what we need to learn and experience what we need to experience.   

I shared my tender feelings with them about how I believed there was purpose for them, our friends, and for us, to have these sons.  They shared with us their heartache and sadness, but also shared their faith in a life after this life, free of pain and suffering.  We shared our faith in a post-mortal existence as well.  His mom even shared with us how a few hours before he died, he apologized to her.  Based upon a previous conversation she had with him , her belief was that he had been given a choice as to whether to live or not, and that he had chosen to move on to the next world.  Upon hearing that, I felt a spiritual witness that what she had just recounted was exactly what had happened, and I felt very close to her. 

I didn’t matter in these moments of shared pain and grief that our theologies were quite different.  It didn’t matter that our concepts of deity are different and that our belief systems dictate different ways to worship.  It didn’t matter that they are from Iran and we are from the United States.  It didn’t matter that they eat halal food and that we don’t drink coffee or tea.  It didn’t matter that she wears a scarf on her head and my wife doesn’t.  None of those differences mattered!  We have been and were united in spirit in those wonderful moments together because we were willing to be vulnerable and open with one another.  I felt that we shared an incredibly intense, spiritual experience even though we supposedly were so different.  I love these two people with all of my heart and I pray to my God who I know is their God also, to give them strength and understanding as they deal with their heavy burden.  As we departed, they expressed their love and appreciation for us and we for them.  I only wish that believers of all religions would allow themselves to be secure yet vulnerable in their beliefs and to just sit down with one another.