We woke at the thud, panicked.

My wife and I had been dozing in bed, squeezing the last seconds of sleep out of our pillows before the inevitable onslaught of little people. It’s something of a delicious defeat when you hear the door creak open and steps on the carpet. You know you’re trading something so precious to you (sleep) for someone so precious, who you just wish would be precious elsewhere. But then they’re all warm and soft and tousle-headed and snuggly and saying things like “daddy, can we have special cereal?” and poking their knees into your side and sitting on your face with a full diaper and sticking cold toes into your armpits.

This morning they didn’t get to do all those precious, horrible things to us because we woke up to the sound of something thwacking against our window. After shaking off the confusion (no, it’s not a child on the roof; they can’t reach the window), I recalled why I knew the sound. It was a bird. And from the sound, a pretty sizable one.

I said as much to my wife, as I tried to open my eyes but managed only a half-squint. She half-muttered sympathy, as if she cared deeply inside but couldn’t get past the early morning fog. I added that since it was a big bird, it probably got away a little dazed, no harm done. I tried to find her to give her a reassuring pat, but I was too drowsy and missed completely. I also couldn’t pry my eyelids open still; they ached a little, as if I hadn’t used them for a week instead of approximately six hours.

I’ve read that birds, reptiles, and some mammals have something called a nictitating membrane, a third eyelid that acts as a translucent shield when they are diving or flying. They can draw it horizontally across each eye to moisten and protect it. For instance, many birds use it when they are regurgitating food for their kids so they don’t get their eyes poked out by little beaks.

I think of things like this when I’m abruptly disturbed from sleep. Things like this, and demonic children’s songs that will not be exorcised for hours.

We turned over and buried ourselves in the blankets for three more minutes before the precious, horrible people came and got us.

Nadia was playing hopscotch out on the sidewalk later in the morning when she found the bird. Robins are always the first birds my children encounter and remember. It was easy for her to name the body she stumbled upon, one story below our window, and quite dead. We had a little flurry of don’t-touch-that’s and daddy-is-it-going-to-be-okay’s, and I managed to deposit it into a small terrarium for them to look at. Animals can die of diseases communicable to humans, but this one died upon impact, and it was still warm. So the kids and I examined it carefully.

It was larger than any bird I’d seen this close. The wings were tucked in beside its impossibly light body. Many of its bones were hollow, for ease of flight. The neck was at a weird angle, a wrong angle. The death in front of me was at a wrong angle. It always has been, but it just felt much more wrong suddenly, because it was also in front of my children. Blood speckled its beak, a dark decoration above the warm red tinges on its chest.

I realized that it was a young one, probably a teenager in robin years. Its feathers were perfect, straight and sleek, pinions just slightly larger and smaller on each side, forming beautiful strong wings. And the roses on the sides under the wings were just barely forming up into a speckled breast. It was about the size of an adult but without the experience, which is why it probably hit our window.

One eye was slightly open and looking like black jelly, like it would spill out of the socket as liquid if you tipped the bird over slightly. The other eye was closed. This teenage robin had eyelashes on the under-lid. It had whiskers. Its feet were curled and delicate.

It was too beautiful. It was too sad.

Nadia was watching me. She told me she was sorry that it died because she could see the sadness in my eyes; but I wasn’t really mourning after the bird. We touched its wings, feeling its perfect form beneath our fingers: the surreal softness, the preciousness of a young fleeting life snuffed out. Not a sparrow falls but that He sees it. God saw this.

Woodpeckers will close their nictitating membrane, then tighten it a millisecond before they hit the tree so that their eyeballs don’t fall out on impact. Perhaps we need similar shields.

Only a few days earlier we had discovered a young robin hopping around the pine tree down in the yard. We took pictures. The kids enjoyed watching it hop around. There was a hawk above, circling around, and I like to think we saved that little robin’s life. There was a little one then, alive and bouncing, and then a bigger one, dead and stiff.

God saw this.

What is it about seeing that is comforting? Wouldn’t catching the sparrow be more comforting? Wouldn’t solving the problem, ending the great horror – death – wouldn’t this be a more lasting comfort? You see me, God. You see my children. But if you were to let them fall…

Sharks close their third eyelid when they attack. This way they can see their victims without getting blood in their eyes.

Kai got out of the house when he was only one year old. We noticed when it was too quiet. He had slipped out the screen door moments after I arrived home from work, and neither Linnea nor I had seen him. I locked the door. It was five minutes before we noticed he was gone, and in those five minutes he was down the outer stairs of the apartment building and toddling along the street.

The terror in my heart: I was running down the sidewalk in my dress slacks, socks, and undershirt, desperately looking for my son, expecting to see him lying in the street, expecting to be one of those parents we pray for, expecting to live with the knowledge that we didn’t see him, we didn’t see him, and then it was too late to see him…

He liked stairs, so he had kept to the house side of the sidewalk, and a kind and observant couple had pulled over and were with him four houses down when I ran up. The man was on the phone with the police, and I heard him say, “Oh never mind, it’s okay. The father’s here.” I thanked them, breathless, and held my son, and held him walking back, and held him up the stairs, and held him for another hour until he didn’t want to be held anymore, promising him I would see him, always, I would see him.

God saw this. How can I say it differently, to ease the pain? God sees… me?

If we mourn this way, how must God mourn at all He sees, at all the flickering lights snuffed out, the bruised reeds broken, the sheep silent before the shearer? Death is nothing new to Him, and in fact, He knows it as an old friend, an old foe, better than us all.

Today, this day, my children are alive and real, perfect in form and surreally soft. They are the preciousness of young life, fleeting, and my God sees them. Lest you think me morbid, think on why this is precious, why as a parent, as a child, as a human I am determined to cherish this thing we call life, why I must defend it for those I love, why death is such an aberration and a destiny and a defeated foe. The thought of death is morbid, maybe, but so is the thought of life without the thought of death. For now, we need both. And God sees us, in both.

God sees us.

Peregrine falcons see too, because as they dive at over 200 miles per hour, they blink their nictitating membranes repeatedly to clear away the debris and clean each eye.

In the midst of holding onto my family’s break-neck life, I find that I am unable to bring myself to accept such a thing as death, and yet… I know that it’s what I must do, for we will all encounter it, sooner or later. This dark thing I wish to dismiss by forgetting, or fighting, or examining on the operating table of a small terrarium: Death will come for us all.  I know, in my spirit, it is good – a gift given so that our difficult, fallen lives will not last forever, but it will never lose its dread, even when it has lost its sting. And perhaps I will embrace it as a friend when more years have passed beneath my feet, or perhaps I will embrace my Savior, and He will carry me through it into the place where it cannot enter.

And my heart holds its breath for all the times I must try to prepare my children for that moment – the one I feel certain I will never be fully prepared for, the one that God sees. I know I am actually only trying to prepare myself. I know it is not up to me, and I wish I could take more comfort in that. Perhaps someday I will. Every day is another reminder that I am not in control, and death is the great Out-of-My-Control.

But I know this. Each day that I walk in the sight of God, He will train my eyes, and my sight can be strengthened by seeing life and knowing it itself is but a shadow of the life to come.

Nadia, my little avian maven, knows that birds need nests. So she settles herself in a patch of fragrant clover and picks flowers as a pillow for the bird. She is kneeling in her pink flowered dress, a lily ringed with gingham, examining the ground and plucking appropriate stems carefully, precisely, preparing for burial. Perhaps, preparing for flight.

And I blink back a tear.

The man or woman who faces the reality, the inevitability, and the unpredictability of his or her own death enhances the quality of their life, for that person tends to make better choices about how to live. They use their mortality as a measuring stick to keep from wasting time or energy on things that truly do not matter to them.

Any person who has learned to hold his mortality close to his heart knows that today could very well be the last day of his life. The aged and very ill, those who are facing a short road to the end, are forced to accept this because it is in their face, but I believe that it would behoove all of us to use the overhanging shadow of our mortality to better our lives.

I am not special or different from any other citizen of this earth. I am not gifted with the ability to see into my future and know exactly how many days I have to accomplish all that I would like. Like everyone else, I have squandered precious moments, hours, and days that have added up to many, many years because I couldn’t accept the one great truth about my existence–that today could be the last day of my life.

I have lived my life in the same way as the majority of humans running around our planet. I have scurried from one life event to another. I have committed myself to actions that deep down I honestly didn’t want to do, but that I felt obligated to perform because that’s what society, family, or friends expected of me: go to school, college, grad school, work a job, date, marry, buy a house, have children, the list went on and on.

I was guilty of compounding the issue by idling away precious hours on blatant time wasters–just how many reruns of the same episode of my favorite television show could I watch? How many times could I meet the same people at the same bar and rehash the same tired issues?

I never questioned whether the choices I made were the wisest, most fulfilling use of my time because I was sure that I had all the time in the world. I believed that there would always be time to do everything that I wished, that there would always be a tomorrow.

Along the way, life gave me many hints and opportunities to help me lose my sense of immortality.

I ignored them.

When, at sixteen, a freak accident cost a fellow high school student his life, it caused barely a blip in my consciousness. Years later, when my beloved grandfather passed and my best friend’s mother died, I felt sadness but still I made no changes. Mortality did not factor into my life even though I read daily news stories about young people dying from illness or accident or homicide.

Those events made me pause briefly and feel grateful for my continued good health, but they went no deeper than that. Death happened to other people–it wasn’t something that I needed to worry about. I was young and healthy and completely caught up in living my life–caught up in the challenges and petty grievances and soap operas that seem to consume us all. I was caught up with making a living, forging friendships, making a home, caught up in love and work and fun and disappointment and the games that people play with one another. I was immersed in the whole menu of human emotions and activities that ruled my life.

My first serious wake-up call happened on a morning exactly like any other morning. There was no reason to suspect that my life was about to change. I was sitting ten feet away from my roommate who was cleaning his shotgun across the room, something I had done many times before. I was relaxed, paying no attention to him, reading the paper and eating my breakfast. One moment all was quiet and peaceful, in the next moment a blast blew out the wall right beside my head. I dropped the bowl of cereal and looked at my roommate, stunned.

At first I didn’t realize just how close the shotgun pellets had come to ending my life. I turned to look at the wall and not six inches away from where I sat I could see pinpoints of daylight. The lead pellets from the shotgun shell had punctured the wall and blown a piece of the siding off the house. Six inches more to the right and my head would have been pulp.

People’s lives are cut short every day. They end without any warning, without any apology for robbing them of the time to finally get on to the serious business of living, to become the people they have the potential to be. I was one of the lucky ones. The universe took pity on me and offered me a chance to get with the program.

I carried a heightened sense of my mortality around with me for the better part of a year after that experience, but it was too hard to hang on to, too difficult to keep at the forefront of my mind. It wasn’t long before I was immersed in the soap opera of my life again.

Several more years passed before I got a second chance. The life I had so carefully built imploded, forcing me to take a serious look at the choices I had made and how I was living.

I had married for all the wrong reasons, and none of the right ones. The effort and work that it took to maintain that marriage for almost fifteen years took its toll on my health, mental as well as physical.

I worked at a job that gave me no pleasure, not even a sense of satisfaction from accomplishing something that held meaning. Worse, I worked for someone for whom I had lost all respect. I approached each work day filled with tension and I’m sure that my attitude had a negative effect on my coworkers.

I don’t like to make mistakes – no one does. It’s hard to admit to them. For me, the worst part was that I didn’t know how I had created such a mess. All along that journey I thought that I was making good choices, but with my life in tatters, I was forced to look at the train wreck I had left in my wake and do some serious self-evaluation.

I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t like what I found. I took a good look at myself in the mirror and asked, “Is this who I want to be for the rest of my life? What if I die tomorrow?”

Asking myself those two questions was my turning point. I would not spend one more day of my life going forward thinking that sometime in the future, I would change and fix everything. The time had come: I had to change then, that very moment, or risk losing the opportunity, for there was no guarantee I would live to see another day.

I made the leap and took mortality as my advisor.

Those are no longer just words to me, they have become an integral part of who I am. I took the inevitability of my death deep within me and held it up as the yardstick by which I now measure my life. It was a liberating, exhilarating, and life-altering action. I made major changes to the way I live that gave me a sense of freedom and power unlike any I had previously experienced. I started listening to, trusting, and following, my intuition.

I left an unhappy marriage that, as it turned out, neither of us were suited for, thereby freeing both of us. I quit an unsatisfying job that drained me in many ways because it wasn’t a good fit for me. Those two moves created a vacuum in my life which allowed far more interesting, and suitable, situations to step in and fill the voids.

By reminding myself that I could die today, I stopped putting energy into anything that didn’t feel right. I put aside any task or commitment that didn’t resonate deep within me–that included activities that I had once pursued so I would be accepted by people whose opinions I realized were no longer important to me. Finally, because my time here is limited, I stopped putting energy into those people as well. My time has become too precious to waste on anything that does not fulfill me.

To some this may sound selfish, and I agree, it is. I do not however, see anything wrong with this type of selfishness because it means that I am one hundred percent sincere in everything I do, and that I give my best effort to whatever I do. There are no more half-measures in my life. I give my all to my work, to the people I love, to my commitments, and to my responsibilities. In return, I am filled with a deep satisfaction and happiness, and the knowledge that I am living my life well.

It took reaching a miserable, rocky bottom to motivate me to make the drastic changes to my life that I wish I had made years earlier. My fears prevented me from taking any action. I feared what others would think of me. I feared being unemployed. I feared being alone. I feared making more mistakes. I feared the unknown that changes would bring.

Once I took my own mortality as my guide, I found that there was nothing left to fear. I could survive losing a job, or a spouse, or making mistakes. With my mortality as a measuring stick, all of my fears disappeared, for what could be more serious, more final, than the loss of my life? All other losses pale beside that, and that knowledge can give a man the courage to reach for the stars.

Live each day as if it is the only one you have. Embrace your mortality and experience how precious each action, event, and relationship becomes. It is the path to not only reaching your fullest potential, but more important, it is the path to deep and lasting happiness.

A retired wildlife photographer, Noble Lee now farms and writes in the bluff country along the Upper Mississippi River.

“The Sinning Forelock” reports the astounding story of Phineas Gage, who survived what should have been a fatal work accident, only receiving a serious wound to the frontal lobes of his brain. Although this accident took place in 1848, Gage remains a mysterious a record in the history of medicine. What is more interesting and what is related to the outlook of The Fountain is that a change-or deterioration, to be more precise-in the personality of Gage occurred after the accident; a man who had been an honest individual with an exemplary character, became irritable and rude. Such changes were clues to scientists that helped to determine what roles the different parts of the brain played.

The Journalists and Writers Foundation, Istanbul, added another link to its successful chain of international organizations. Having first started with domestic nationwide events in Turkey, the foundation has taken giant steps to become the organizers for conferences covering the entire globe. “From Terrorism to Global Ethic: Religions and Peace” was the title of the last meeting of Dialogue Eurasia Platform, which operates under the J&W Foundation. As the meeting was organized together with the Institute of Oriental Studies at Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Moscow was chosen as the venue for an interfaith and dialogue meeting that took place June 7-8. Mehmet Yilmaz reports on this event for us.

We wish you all our readers a blissful and beneficial experience in the Blessed Three Months, which are just around the corner.