The very valley I feared most became the mountaintop from which I peered into the glory of God.
When we fail to address death, theologian J. I. Packer says, “we part company with the Bible, with historic Christianity, and with a basic principle of right living, namely, that only when you know how to die can you know how to live.”
It is something of a modern dilemma that we have to develop this theology of death in the first place. It may even seem morose to contemplate death if you might otherwise get away with ignoring it for a while longer.
Previous generations, of course, did not have a choice as to whether they would consider death. It screamed into their worlds every time a child was born without modern medicine bolstering his or her odds of survival. It had a seat at every dinner table, when the main course wasn’t an item picked up at a grocery store, but one brought to the feast through the death of a backyard farm animal. Churchgoers for centuries walked by adjacent cemeteries on their way to the front door on Sundays. The sight would have prepared them to worship while they still had breath in their lungs and, as they left, to live the rest of their days with the end in sight.
Aging and dying, like births, didn’t occur in faraway nursing homes and hospitals. It was all right there in the room, in the church, in the city. There was no avoiding death and all its unpleasant accessories.
Today, we are often able to choose the vantage point from which we witness a loved one’s death, if the decision isn’t made for us. For decades, more and more people have chosen to keep it at arm’s length.
In the year 2000, nearly half of deaths occurred in hospitals, with some of the more gruesome tasks of end-of-life caregiving shared by trained nurses and staff. But, even before the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to bring death to all our doorsteps, that trend was beginning to be reversed. In 2019, for the first time since tracking began in the 1970s, more people died at home than in hospitals.
Few people have the opportunity to be told when and how they might die. Those who do know are the product of modern medicine and dreaded-yet-helpful terminal diagnoses. A growing industry formed around end-of-life care now enables loved ones to end their days in their homes, if they wish.
Surveys have shown that nearly 80 percent of people would prefer to take their final breaths at home. Of the 20 percent who don’t, many cited concerns that they would be a burden to their family.
But perhaps we are beginning to notice that our cultural obsession with avoiding death doesn’t serve us well. Maybe one of the lessons of a pandemic that left people dying alone in hospital rooms with their families on FaceTime is that we never, ever want to do that again. That walking with people through their hardest, final days is worth doing—or at least being able to do.
Even if you emerged from the coronavirus pandemic without seeing death up close, your eyes were surely opened to its ever-presence. Death is not just the endpoint of life; it is woven throughout. It is a thousand commas strewn across our days reminding us that we, that those we love, that the world we inhabit, are all in a process of dying.
Death is a hawk dangling limp from a chain link fence that stood between him and his prey. It is the grass you have watered and coddled all summer withering when you go out of town. It is leftovers languishing in the back of the fridge. It is a sudden gust of wind causing a tree branch to fall on the new car. It is technology wearing out and skin sagging beneath the weight of time. As Tish Harrison Warren writes in Prayer in the Night:
I fill up my life with a thousand other things to avoid noticing the shadow of death. But I can’t shake it. I bump up against it in big and small ways each day. Sleep, sickness, weariness, and nighttime itself are ordinary and unbidden ashes on our foreheads. They say to us: remember that you are going to die. And these daily tokens of mortality are then transformed, by God’s mercy, into tools for good works.
Somehow, this is good news. Because, as John Lennon quipped and Sandra McCracken has movingly sung, “If it’s not okay, then it’s not the end.”6 If death is still around, still seeming to reign, then we are still living between the already and the not-yet, suspended here.
Seeing the end from the beginning—remembering the end in the middle—and considering death more fully helps us put the gut-wrenching present into context. This is not the end.
The fact that death is common to man is, in some ways, part of God’s common grace. Had God not numbered their days by removing them from the garden’s tree of life, Adam and Eve would have lived forever in a sin-soaked state. Those of us who have witnessed the whole-person impact of a prolonged sickness wouldn’t wish for our loved ones to remain that way. There comes a point in their suffering, rather, where the end of it feels less like cruelty and more like kindness, like relief.
His grace is also in this: none of us is the first to face death and loss. We are not alone in experiencing its coming, in weeping over it. And the sweetest communion we will know in this shadowy vale is that of a suffering Savior. He not only tasted death for us, He weeps with us as we face it. When we fall into the pit of despair opened by these earthly losses, He does not call down to us from the safe ledge, as though we could pull ourselves out. He crawls into the pit with us. He holds us there.
Scripture is not silent about death either. It rears its head in Genesis 3 and doesn’t surrender until Revelation 21. Though death does not have the final word—though we know that one day God will put death to death—we live beneath its shadow for now.
Death Is a Doorway
For what it’s worth, I am an unlikely person to be lecturing anyone about being comfortable with discussions of death and sickness. When we were younger, I was the one who had to leave the room when the needles came out while my sister, Alli, stayed to hold Mom’s hand. I was the one who, for years, didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to do the fire drill of “What if?” until I really had to.
This was especially true during the years I was pregnant with each of our children, and grieving pregnancy losses in between. It was as if my body couldn’t bear to carry life and death at the same time, so strong was my aversion to Mom’s spiraling diagnosis during those years. I wonder now if I missed out, if life would have been a little richer had I walked with my eyes and heart a little more open, a little less scared.
This denial, if you want to call it that, is not something I easily shed. As the cancer my mom arm-wrestled for two decades took its toll, it became harder and harder for me to look at her. Over her last six or so years, as countless treatments wiped her hair away and bid it to never fully return, I have only a scant collection of pictures of her holding my children, all three of whom arrived during that time period. Many of them are subconsciously cropped to exclude the top of her bald or wispy-haired head. On some deep level, I knew that the lack of hair was linked to the story of her impending death—to treatment after treatment that, one by one, represented fewer options between her and its full arrival.
It wasn’t until the end that I looked at her again, truly looked at her. There was no ignoring it now. Death was here. This was not a drill.
The thing I had feared the most—the great enemy, death— was still in many ways just that. I knew it was taking her from us. But as I faced it, however reluctantly, I was surprised to find another truth in its depths: death was also becoming her great deliverance. And she seemed all the more radiant as it drew near. In some unexpected yet familiar way, the dreaded dead end became, as we blinked before it, the Red Sea Road to all we had hoped would come true. It is in this odd way that the day of my mom’s death surprised me. I had nearly forgotten, until it came, that it would also be a day of dawning glory.
This is the way of the Christian life. This is the way, as The Jesus Storybook Bible says, everything sad comes untrue. Somehow the blackest day in all of human history—the day of Christ’s death—came to be called Good Friday.
Somehow, the day of my mom’s death can be terrible and good at the same time too. Like the making of a new thing. Like the making of all things new. The very valley I feared most became the mountaintop from which I peered into the glory of God.
Adapted from We Shall All Be Changed by Whitney K. Pipkin (© 2024). Published by Moody Publishers. Used by permission.
Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/Carolyn Ann Ryan
