I haven’t intended for this blog to take up death as one of its main subjects, but it is a topic I keep coming back to.  In part, I think this is because my profession has given me a kind of intimacy with death that I cherish – if that doesn’t sound too morbid.  I am of the same mind as Emily Dickinson who trusted in death’s “Civility.”  In my experiences (second-hand, obviously) with death, I have always found him to be profoundly generous and gentlemanly.

A few days ago, in fact, I got out of the shower, and was putting lotion on my face, and something about the moment, about the way the lotion smelled, the viscosity of it on my fingers, the look and shape of the motions I used to spread it on my face, these things brought my grandmother to me so strongly I almost reached for the phone to call her.  The sense of her presence was so real that I nearly said “hello” out loud and actually did have a little exchange of the pleasantries of love with her in my heart.  And I can’t help but think that it was one of the kindnesses of death that brought her to me, which is perhaps another way of saying it was the grace of God. 

And, maybe another part of the reason that I often find myself meditating on death is that I’m just of an age where dear ones are dying more often than my friends and family would have even a decade ago.  My father, of course.  My grandmother.  Some of the older folks in my congregation.  And some beloved friends, too. 

Right now, from something of a distance, I am watching two men I hold close to my heart die.  One, G, lives a few hours away from me and is succumbing quite quickly to ALS.  The other, J, is half the world away from me and is suffering – really suffering – from a cruelly aggressive form of lymphoma that has attacked him at an age that is entirely too young.  But there’s nothing any of us can do about that – for either of them.  And there is a unique frustration to not being able to “fix” what is broken for the ones you love. 

Both of these men are ordained and, in their own lives and work and ministries, I’m sure have come to know death as intimately as I have.  And it has been a real privilege to watch them live into these last weeks and months.  The attention they give to navigating the tension between valuing their lives and accepting their deaths.  The wisdom with which they tune in to the rhythms of dying just as they have been tuned in to the rhythms of life.  The generosity with which they include those who love them in their processes and their suffering.  The care they show to those they love who walk with them.  The searing honesty with which they present their experiences. 

I pray often that God shows me the way to live my daily life well.  And I pray that, when the time comes, I, like G and J, will be shown the way to die well, too.

In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the two main characters, Jane and Rochester contemplate their imminent departure from each other.  Rochester says to Jane, “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you–especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous [English] Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.”

What a magnificent image!  Its powerful truth knocks the wind out of me.  We are tied, one to another, by these heartstrings.  Me to my husband and children, my dear family and friends, each of them to their own friends, their own beloveds.  And if we could see with the eyes of God, what a network of heartstrings we would discover crisscrossing the globe! 

And beyond the globe, too.  Because, of course, Rochester gets one thing wrong.  When those heartstrings are true, when they are built on the strength of honest relationship and nothing-held-back love, they will never snap.  Neither distance nor time nor death can touch them.  And this is where the the Christian narrative is so compelling.  Because Jesus’ death and resurrection is the most powerful and profound proclamation that Love does, in fact, prevail.  That relationships don’t die even when our mortal bodies do.  That we are bound together – through time and space, through life and death – by our love for one another, which is always just a reflection of God’s overpowering love for us.  That the heartstrings hold true. 

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  – Romans 8:38-39