O Death where is your sting?!

Maybe it’s a strange subject for a new year post, but I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately.

Then again, maybe it isn’t. New beginnings are only possible because of old endings. A year ends and another begins. Things come and go. People come and go. One generation passes and another is born. It's the most natural thing.

My thinking about death is presumably entirely natural behaviour for all sorts of reasons, including: I’m no spring chicken and another year passes; there are always people in the public eye dying, notably Queen Elizabeth II last year and just recently Pele and Pope Benedict; friends and acquaintances die, including two people relatively unexpectedly just this week.

A couple of months ago a colleague at work read out a statistic from an online article about cancer. One in two people in the UK will suffer from cancer, it claimed. She found the numbers surprising. We discussed the potential reasons for the increase, but my concluding remark was quippish: Two in two people die.

All of which has served to remind me of a book I read some years ago: Our Greatest Gift, by Henri Nouwen. It’s a thoughtful, nudging kind of work which has stayed with me, characteristic of Nouwen’s style. When I read it some years ago, I was much taken with his idea of ‘befriending’ one’s own death. It’s a simple premise: how can we prepare for our own death, embrace it even, rather than act as if death is abnormal or unexpected? Nouwen writes:

People are dying. . . not just the few I know, but countless people everywhere, every day, every hour. Dying is the most general human event, something we all have to do. But do we do it well? Is our death more than an unavoidable fate that we simply wished would not be there, or can it somehow become an act of fulfilment, perhaps more human than any other act.

Now Nouwen is writing as a person of faith, with an expectation that death is not the end. For Christians the quality of life beyond the grave is presumed to be incomparably better than it is this side. That’s no small part of the piece. If you have faith that leaving this life is the doorway to a better one, then this challenge to befriend one’s death appears more within reach.

But I can see Nouwen’s challenge as pertinent for all readers. His concern is not only that we face the certainty of our own impending death with honesty and openness, but that in so doing we help our loved ones prepare too. If one never acknowledges or speaks of death, if one doesn’t express feelings about it, or discuss it at all with loved ones, in what state does that leave those loved ones when it occurs?

Two matters seem pressing as we think about new beginnings: firstly to consider death, to make an assessment of one’s own mortality and what lies beyond it; and secondly to consider what we leave our loved ones with as we go, however far off that event may be. What might we do now to ensure peace and comfort for our closest at such time as our life ends?

I can’t unpack the whole book here (I recommend you read it for yourself), but I do believe that befriending our death while we live could have a hugely beneficial effect on our living, and on our loving those around us. That's really the point: not to morbidly obsess with death, but to live life with a freedom from the spectre of the unspoken.

Far from being a morbid subject (as I imagine some might accuse), this can be a life-giving conversation (no pun intended). Nouwen again:

Is death something so terrible and absurd that we are better off not thinking or talking about it? Is death such an undesirable part of our existence that we are better off acting as if it were not real. . . Or is it possible to befriend our dying and death gradually and live towards it with open eyes and open arms, trusting that there is nothing to fear?

Or as the Bible puts it Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? (1 Corinthians 15:55)