GIVING DEATH ITS DUE : Christianity's eschatological hope.

This past year felt full of death. One of our godchildren, a twelve-year-old girl, died after eight days in the intensive care unit. She had been in an automobile accident. I was with her parents when they got the news that she was unlikely to survive, and was with her and her family when she died. About a month later my mother died. She had been in poor health for some time, but we didn't expect her to die so soon. Her death would have been even more difficult for us if my wife and I hadn't had a wonderful visit with my parents only a few months before. There were other deaths as well, but these two were especially difficult. With our goddaughter there was the sorrow of a young life ended, and the knowledge that the lives of her parents and brother were now tragically changed forever. My sorrow over my mother's death involved my father's sorrow, of course, as well as my own knowledge that I won't see her again, not before my own death anyway; and I found myself, as I am sure everyone does, thinking of all those things I wanted to ask her about her girlhood, her grandparents, her uncle, the town she lived in and what it was like when she was growing up there...

One thing I noticed during this time was how infuriating the language surrounding death can be. The young girl's family were members of our parish, and we are a small enough community so that almost everyone knew them. It may be peculiarly American, but when people discussed her death I often heard the question, "When do you think the family will get over it?" Remembering my own little sister's death and its effect on my family, thinking of my mother's death, I said, "Never. They may learn eventually to live with it, but they will not get over it." It is not as if grief were a kind of disease which passes. Certainly it has its stages, and some days are harder than others; but it is not a medical phenomenon, or a type of mental illness, or something that is best dealt with therapeutically. The Albanian people who make up a good part of our parish understood this in their bones; many of the Americans seemed not to.

But this is only the latest of the ways in which we avoid death and what it means...or rather, the way we try to impute a meaning to death. There is this medical/therapeutic way. There is a New Age way: "Death is really just a part of life." Not really; as Wittgenstein said, death is not lived through. And there is the nauseating way of sentimental Christian cliches: "God must have needed her there..."

A woman phoned our church recently, desperate because a family friend was dying of cancer, a woman with a young daughter. The caller wanted prayers but she also wanted to talk. "I'm scared of death," she said. "I also have a daughter and I don't know what would happen to her if I died. I'm scared to think of being in that box under the earth forever." Her fear was more honest than the ways we try to avoid the subject or make it pretty.

The fact is that we don't know what death will be like, and we have no way of knowing. We know it separates us from people we loved and people who loved us. As Christians we profess a belief that the relationship in some way truly continues, but we know that we will no longer enjoy their company in the only way we knew it, the way we loved. Hard as it is to say in a culture that wants to make everything rational and pleasant, even as it finds new ways to kill inconvenient people, death is an enemy and we are not meant to be reconciled to it. Christianity, continuing a tradition found in the Old Testament, associates it with sin: "Sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned" (Romans 5:12). Jesus weeps at the death of Lazarus, and he begs his father to let the cup of suffering pass him by, if it is at all possible. Instead of telling us that death is all right, just a part of life, Christianity claims that we go through death to resurrection from the dead--in the words of the exultant Orthodox Easter, "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life."

It is almost embarrassingly primitive, because we must insist that the way the world is is not the way it was meant to be; at the same time, it will be the way God meant it to be, in God's time. This is beyond anything we can demonstrate, except in the way we live. We are to be witnesses to a time that has not come to fruition. When the church loses its belief in the eschatological vision of the New Testament, or when theologians deal with this as if it were peripheral to more important questions, we move far from the heart of our faith, and from our hope for those who have died, and for ourselves. This hope is illuminated in the words of Colossians 3:4, "When Christ, who is our life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory."