Thoughts of Death and Dying

I have two friends with the same name.

Let’s call one Church Ron and the other Neighbor Ron.

Church Ron and Neighbor Ron are from the same generation. They are about the same age, both in their 70s. Both of them are quiet, intellectual men. Both are avid readers. Each is profound when he speaks, each in his own unique way. Both were raised in the church. Church Ron is a devout believer in Jesus. Neighbor Ron falls more in the “spiritual but not religious” category.

Recently Church Ron gave me a book, The Undertaking by poet Thomas Lynch. I was familiar with the author’s name but had never read anything by him. Thomas Lynch, it turns out, is also the local mortician in his town. But he prefers the term undertaker.

The Undertaking is not a book of poetry but is rather a collection of essays. The unifying theme is, of course, death. But not in a morbid sort of way. The book is about life, as well. And relationships. Families and generations. Marriage and divorce. Raising children and having neighbors. It’s about God and faith, but from the perspective of a nominal Catholic. God is ambiguous, and so is life. Sometimes an afterlife–or its possibility–is acknowledged. Other times the dead are just gone.

But they are not gone all at once, Lynch admits. In his work as an undertaker, and in his own experience of the deaths of family and friends, he acknowledges that there is a space between when a person dies and when we let them go.

On the other hand, Lynch complains, we are all losing touch with our dead. We are losing our appreciation for their bodies. We have sealed ourselves off from the very fact of death. Dying people are embarrassing to us, and dead bodies are a nuisance we tend to cremate. We don’t really know what to do about death anymore. Lynch forgives us for this, to some extent, because he knows this is all very hard. But he does think we should be better connected to our dead.

I thought a lot about this book the other day as I was preparing to do yard work. Neighbor Ron and I live next to an old cemetery, and I was trying to borrow Neighbor Ron’s riding mower to go cut the grass. This cemetery is a prime example of Lynch’s complaint that we have lost the ability to connect with our dead. No one uses this cemetery anymore. My dog and I play in it like it’s a park. Many of the graves are a century or more old. Some are missing their headstones. It’s the graves of much earlier generations, and the folks who oversee our island’s primary and active cemetery do next to nothing to maintain it. It gets mowed once a year, for Memorial Day. Perhaps once more in the fall.

So Neighbor Ron and I have begun taking care of the cemetery. He’s cared for it longer than I have, and I’ve been doing my part to catch up. In attempting to do my part, I texted Neighbor Ron asking to borrow his mower. The text in return read, “I don’t have a riding lawn mower. But I’d be happy to come help if you need.” I had texted Church Ron instead of Neighbor Ron. (Maybe I need to call them Church Ron and Neighbor Ron in my phone.) I thanked Church Ron for his offer and said I might take him up on it. But the next day was Monday and I was wanting some quiet. So I texted the correct Ron and worked out the details. The next morning I grabbed the mower and went to work.

And as I drove around the cemetery on the mower, rattling and bumping along, I thought–with some shame, I’ll admit–how little I care about graves. About how we had cremated my folks. About how un-sacred, though still interesting, cemeteries have been to me.

I also thought about how much I fear death.

As a preacher, I know these aren’t the emotions that I’m supposed to have. “I believe in the resurrection of the body,” says the Creed. So do I. “We do not mourn as those who have no hope,” says the apostle Paul. Amen. I know I’m supposed to care a great deal about the bodies of the dead. I’m also supposed to be fearless in the face of my own mortality. But whenever I have been around a dead body–and I have been around dead bodies a lot–the person, to me, is just no longer there. The body without the soul is a thing. I believe God will raise it up, of course. We are not entirely who we are aside from our bodies. But without the soul, the body is a thing. I’ve just never been able to get past this sense.

On the other hand, I frequently think about my own death with a jump. I don’t think I fear going to hell. What I fear is falling into an inky black nothing. That’s not what I believe is going to happen, of course. “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” But the feeling of falling off a cliff into nothing still makes me jump. Sometimes when I picture my own death, my heart leaps into my throat.

But maybe it doesn’t matter if I don’t have all my emotions worked-out about death. Death is both a regular part of life and an enemy. It’s the doorway to hope, but it’s also the end of all that we know. Death is darkness and blur. But as believers in Jesus we do not believe we face death alone. There is a hand that is holding us, whether we feel it or we don’t. There is One whom we believe has gone before us, and who now holds the keys of both death and the grave. “From dust you are made, and to dust you will return,” the Bible tells us. But we trust that new things can be made from the dust.