The Listening Ear

What’s The Purpose of Death Anyway?—The Good Death

Previous ages spoke about ars moriendi, the art of dying. If we desire to cultivate such an art, we can’t wait until death is imminent. Learning to die is the task of a lifetime. It is both gift to us and achievement by us.

Many years ago Bertha, an elderly member of my congregation, entered the hospital suffering from pneumonia. When antibiotics failed to stem the disease, the hospital staff inserted a ventilator tube down her throat. The time had come to assemble her family.

Once they inserted the tube, Bertha couldn’t talk. Nevertheless she remained alert and wrote messages on a pad of paper. Bertha started filling the pad with names, making a list of people she wanted to see. During the next several days, friends and relatives trickled into Bertha’s hospital room. She greeted each one with a smile, conveying final instructions, writing notes to say how much she loved them, facing the uneasy good-byes. When a visitor left, she crossed the name off her list.

Finally the last two grandchildren arrived and that evening her family surrounded her bed where she sat beaming in their presence. She greeted their tears with her own, but strove to console her children and grandchildren. Together her family prayed and sang a hymn.

The next morning when they offered the tablet to Bertha, she gently pushed it aside and that afternoon she slipped into a coma and died. After her death, Bertha’s family looked at the list she had written and discovered that only one name had not been crossed off. The name that remained was Jesus.

Bertha had prepared herself for her death. She accepted death in the hope that new life is still possible. She believed there is One who is working so that life will finally triumph over death.

Acknowledging our losses, listening to our pain, and looking for the opportunity that lies in life’s uncomfortable moments are ways to affirm a belief that life will spring forth in spite of the prunings of death. Living a good life, a complete existence, involves coming to terms with death in all the ways we encounter it. We learn how to live by learning how to die. We learn how to die by learning how to affirm life in the face of death.

That’s the kind of life and death I would seek—-one like my friend, Bertha. I think she had about as good a death as anyone could want.

What’s The Purpose of Death Anyway?—Serving Life

I began this series of posts by asserting that death is not simply an enemy, but that it can serve life. That means that it is part of the created order and that at least some kinds of suffering, and even death itself, is part of God’s original intention.

Once again, I need to digress just a bit. One assumption that I make is that what we learn from science and what we learn from the Scriptures are not in conflict, at least if we are doing good science and reading God’s revelation well.

When it comes to creation, faith reveals to us who the creator is—God—while science uncovers the processes that God employs to accomplish creation, at least as far as they can be discovered. For instance, science can’t even begin to describe what really existed before the ‘Big Bang’ when our entire universe exploded into existence.

It is abundantly clear to me that life forms have evolved over millions of years to produce the vast variety of life forms that have existed and that exist today. Often I find myself filled with awe when I contemplate the complexity of the natural world.

Yet here’s the thing: life can’t evolve without death. For natural selection to occur, some life forms have to life long enough to reproduce while others die before they are able to pass their genes on to the next generation. Evolution doesn’t work without death.

This is a crucial example of how death serves life. Death is what makes the evolution of a myriad of life forms, including sentient beings like ourselves, possible. Life as we know needs death to drive the proliferation of life forms that we find upon the earth.

Perhaps that fact is sobering. Yet I find it strangely comforting to think that in that last analysis, even death is God’s servant. It fits in with the ultimate purposes of God.

What’s The Purpose of Death Anyway?—Pain

I want to digress into a topic related to death and that is the topic of pain. We don’t like pain and often we seek to avoid the things that create pain for us. That’s the way pain is supposed to work.

Yet pain, like death, is meant to serve life. Some years ago I stumbled upon Paul Brand’s Pain: The Gift That Nobody Wants. It is an insightful book on the necessity of pain for life as we know it.

It requires little reflection to conclude that pain can serve a good purpose. When we hit our thumb with a hammer, that experience encourages us to be more careful the next time. When we injure ourselves, pain causes us to care for the injury rather than ignoring it.

Life without pain is actually a nightmare. Brand gives several examples. People who contract Hansen’s disease, commonly known as leprosy, gradually lose the ability to feel pain. The result is that they can injure themselves and not realize it. Injuries are made worse by repeated re-injury and lack of proper care.

Sometimes we are tempted to avoid pain that could serve life if only we would accepted it. People put off going to the dentist because they fear the pain that they associate with have a cavity filled. Their teeth get worse. Perhaps they lose them completely.

Or we may duck making an apology to someone we’ve offended because it is painful to say that we are sorry. We try to avoid the consequences of what we have done. The result is that we miss out on an opportunity to restore our relationship with that person.

The irony is that when we avoid authentic, life-serving pain, we inevitably create more pain for ourselves and others. We need to be able to embrace a certain amount of pain for our own good and for the good of others.

Nevertheless, not all pain serves life. There is no reason for a person who is dying of cancer to have to endure any pain that can be reduced or eliminated by medication. Our faith proclaims that God is able to bring good out of the most painful of circumstances. That doesn’t mean, though, that all pain is positive in itself.

One final thought: When I was young and I heard the Biblical promise that the day would come, “when there will be no more pain,” I used to think I could easily imagine what that would be like. Over the years I have come to realize I have no idea what it would be to live such an existence. Pain is such a part of my experience of life that I have no concept of what it might be to live without pain. I can only hope for that and look forward to that when I am raised up from the dead to new life in Christ.

What’s The Purpose of Death Anyway?—Denial

We did a rather unusual thing tonight. We reminded ourselves that we are mortal, that we will die. Lines of people, senior citizens and toddlers, confirmation students and their parents, people of all ages came to the front of the church to receive a smear of black ashes on their forehead. And we all heard those solemn words, “Remember, you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

This Ash Wednesday ritual goes entirely against the grain of much of our human lives. Many years ago Ernest Becker wrote about this in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial Of Death. Becker’s thesis is that much of what we humans do in life is motivated by the our efforts to deny the fact that we are mortal, that we will all succumb to the grave.

Humans are strange creatures, capable of producing such beauty, such works of art and invention s of science. Yet, we must all deal with the nastier aspects of being an creature, an animal that will die, a being that deep down knows that it will die.

Becker contends that much of the impetus to produce something that will last and to gain as much mastery over out world as we can is the result of our efforts to deny that we will die. The denial of death is what drives us to try to achieve many things in life, things that have meaning and that we hope will last longer than we will.

Such denial is almost necessary, for if we started thinking every moment about death, contemplating our eventual demise every minute, we most likely would become paralyzed by depression and despair. No one can live like that.

At the same time, it is important that we allow the realization of death to rise to the surface of our consciousness every once in a while. Such honesty with ourselves can lead us to savor the good things we encounter in life and can keep us from frittering away or lives in useless pursuits. It and also drive us to seek life beyond what we can produce on our own. We didn’t create ourselves and if there is any hope for more than the 70 or 80 years that we might endure if we are lucky, it must be found in something, or better yet, someone beyond us.

What’s The Purpose of Death Anyway?-Reflections

 

“Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying.Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day.

Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now.There are only so many tomorrows

.”~Michael Landon

 

Death does serve a good purpose for us as much as we might not like to admit it. It might even have several important purposes if we think about it. One purpose death serves for human beings is that it reminds us of how precious life is.

Often it is the case that a brush with death—either our own death or the death of another—is necessary before we recognize what a gift life is. The threat of death can make us savor life, consider carefully how we want to spend the time we have to live, and want to protect life, both our own and others.

There is no denying that death has dark side to it, sometimes a very dark side. The struggle against death is very much like a fight against in unbeatable foe. We won’t survive this struggle in the end.

This is one of the ways that death can serve life. I believe it exists for that purpose—to serve life. It is more than a punishment for whatever we may have done wrong as individuals or as a species. Death is a necessary part of the created order and as such it serves God especially when it serves life.

What’s The Purpose Of Death Anyway?—More Discoveries

When we are born, we know nothing about death. Its only later that we disover that things die. Finally we realize that we will die, too, although much of our lives are lived denying the fact of our death.

When I was about ten, I went swimming at the local pool late one afternoon. There weren’t too many kids at the pool, so the lifeguards allowed some of the boys to start a game of water polo. They turn two long wooden benches upside down so that the upturned legs served as an improvised goal. They put the benches on opposites sides of the deep end and the game began.

Soon everyone including the pool staff were engrossed in the match. All at once girl’s shriek interrupted the game. “There’s a body at the bottom of the pool,” she gasped, “I just stepped on it.”

At first, everyone thought she had to be joking or mistaken, but a lifeguard dove in near her and soon they were dragging boy named Dennis from the water. I knew him. He was my best friends Richard’s older brother.

I saw the lifeguards start trying to resuscitate him. One of the staff told everyone leave the pool. I didn’t have to be told twice. I was frightened.

Yet I didn’t go directly home. I lingered near the pool for a while and soon I saw Richard riding his bicycle home. He held one hand tightly against side of his face, trying in vain to keep anyone from seeing his tears. I didn’t call out to him or approach him. I didn’t have any idea what to say or do.

Later I made my way to Dennis and Richard’s home. I remember hearing the cries of lament of their mother, Dorothy. A well-intentioned, but completely clueless neighbor reminded Dorothy that she had three other boys left including a baby who was only a few months old. “You have to think about them. You still have them,” she said.

At the moment that meant nothing to the mother. She wanted Dennis, the son who had died.

Once again I saw the deep wounds that grief and death can inflict. I also discovered that ignoring the grief of others or trying to talk them out of it were totally inadequate ways to respond. People don’t need to have us say much at all. They just need us to be present with them to help share their pain.