Life's Journey ... with Death

I'm tucking in my 7 year old and I can see on his face that something is wrong. I ask him what he is thinking about. The corners of his mouth start pushing down even though he is tying to hold back his sadness. When he gets tired the emotions tend to defeat his efforts at holding them back. After some questioning and encouragement the tears start to fall as he tells me he is scared that his grandma will die soon. His grandma just moved to our city and he is loving having her around. I want to push the emotions away so that he won't feel sad and can get a good night's sleep. I offer some feeble attempts: we need to enjoy the time we have with her here, she is doing really well and will probably live a long time, we don't have to be afraid of death, etc. Then I pause and get real. I say, “I understand. Death is scary. It is hard to love people so much knowing that they will die.” I explain to him that when I was a kid sometimes I would see my mom holding a photograph of her mother who died when my mom was sixteen and she would be crying. I used to get really scared that my mom would die and since it was the days before cell phones if she was ever late coming home from work I would be a wreck. So I get it.

This isn't the first time my son has had these kinds of questions and thoughts. He has two clergy for parents and so funerals are a common topic in our house, plus he goes to mainline churches which typically have a higher average age so he has known many beloved church members that have died. All of this paired with his deep thinking and intuitive nature means he has had some hard questions in his less than a decade of life. I so desperately want to say all the right things because I believe that our early understandings and perceptions about death have a big impact on our lives. I remember interviewing a candidate for ministry when I was on the District Committee on Ministry and he said that when he was young and afraid of scary things his mother said “you don't have to be afraid of death because Jesus is with us and we will be with God and it will be fine.” This brought him a lot of clarity and comfort and it informed his theology into adulthood. I want to be that mom that says the right thing that will give my child confidence, strength, faith and hope. But I also want to be honest and let him feel what he is feeling without shame or dismissal.

So I think over my own history with death. I remember funerals of great grandparents and grand parents. I remember when I was very young and the next door neighbor's son died in a motorcycle accident. Everyone was gathered together on her porch with tear stained cheeks and long faces and all the neighborhood kids were playing together with occasional questions and moments of sadness. It felt heavy and big.

I remember when I was in high school and got home from taking the ACT exam and my mom told me that my cousin died in a car accident along with her father and half sister. I remember how deep the tears felt, how weird it was when I went to work at the Dairy Queen some hours later and cars were still driving by … as if nothing had changed. I remember everybody packing up the cars and making a caravan to be with my aunt and cousins and prepare for the funeral.

Years later in seminary I did CPE or Clinical Pastoral Education, what is essentially a full time, twelve week internship as a hospital chaplain. My classmates talked about their first deaths on the hospital floor and I tried to mentally prepare myself. When it was my turn for overnights sometimes the pager would go off but it was mostly for spouses and loved ones overcome with emotions. Weeks into the program and I was one of the few that hadn't been with someone during or immediately after the last breath. It would be strange to say I wanted to and honestly I didn't, but I did think it was an important experience to have in order to be prepared for church ministry. Then one night I was awakened by the beeping pager as I slept in the hospital apartment bed. I threw on the clothes I had laid out, pulled my hair back and walked over to the floor that called. I got the information sheet with the stats: 89 year old male and asked if there were any family. There was none. I went to the room and waited outside while the doctor and nurses chatted over resuscitation efforts. They talked about a show they had watched, made casual conversation and got quiet when they saw me as they left. I walked in and here it was, death. It was not the heartfelt moment of movies or memories. It was a body that was no longer breathing. Some rerun of a crime show was on the tv, the lights of the room felt too bright and yet also too cold. I touched his frigid hand, prayed and silently sat there in case he wanted a presence on whatever journey he was on. Eventually I left, checked for family again and finding none went back to bed. There was no drama, no grand farewell and yet all these years later I can picture it with clear detail.

In church ministry I witnessed death many times. In fact, there was a summer when I was privileged to be next to several women as they took their last breaths and that was part of a re-prioritizing I went through which resulted in me leaving pastoral ministry to be a stay at home mom for a time. Then there was the time I sat next to my friend and looked into her eyes as they lost focus and her body stopped. Each of these moments plus many more have made an impact on me in deep and profound ways.

Still I am human and the anxiety, fear and harsh reality of death creeps in even when I try to shut it out. Last Lent I found myself thinking about death more than I wanted to. The Parkland, Florida school shooting filled me with sadness, despair, grief, rage, guilt and anxiety and as I walked the Lenten journey I let myself bring to surface all kinds of worries and troubles. So I decided to attend an adult forum at church about death. We read Tom Long's What Happens When We Die and it was great. I actually took a class in seminary called Death and Dying and we read some great books including Stanley Hauerwas' God, Medicine and Suffering but Tom Long's book was so concise, direct and honest plus it hit me at the right time so I put it up there with my top book recommendations. Even so, I would say what helped me the most during that class was the conversation. I loved hearing the older members of the class share their thoughts about death and through their strength, honesty and hope I found the clarity and peace I was looking for.

Of course that doesn't mean I don't have those nights when uncertainty, anxiety and fear creep in, but my abiding hope and faith get me to the sunrise. So maybe that is what I will share with my son. The fear, anxiety, sadness are all human and important to be honest about and express. He will have his own experiences and journey and hopefully he will teach me the wisdom and insights he gains along the way. What I can offer him is a place to process, a listening ear and a faith and hope to bring him peace and rest for a new day.