Donald Schell on Death

I would commend to you the recent article by Rev'd Donald Schell published on the Daily Episcopalian Blog. Donald is reflecting on the death of his father and how a good grief leads us to experience a certain finality in death:

One morning after my dad’s death, Ellen said that she was grateful that psalms said so plainly that death was death. It matched her experience of seeing my dad laid out on the floor after the paramedics had stopped CPR. He was gone. There was his body, but the life we’d known in that body, the man we’d loved was gone. ...

It’s not some irreducible, barely glimpsed idealized essence of my dad that escaped and flew free from the fires of the crematorium. He’s gone, what remains is ash, is dead as a doornail. And the whole of him, the hands I marveled at as a kid when he played Rachmaninoff’s B minor prelude, the face that looked so much like mine and which, in the pictures I’ve got still teaches me to smile, the courageous heart that managed to squeeze almost eighty-seven years of living from a terrifying beginning as a preemie in 1921 and scarlet fever a few years later, the whole of that good man was, is, and will be held in God’s love. I don’t know what it means or looks like but I trust it - God’s initiative, God’s creative embrace that won’t let one vibration of one atom that was him out of the old/new whole of God’s making. ...

The darkness, the abandonment, the devastation and decay and knowledge that we’re all just in remission and each of us alone faces a ‘moment of terror’ and ‘eternal dark’ must sink in, take hold, and be bitterly true. We’re none of us going to make out of this alive. None of us and nothing in us is any match for death. Nothing except the love of God. (source)

Amen, brother. We must consume it and taste its bitterness. I'm so deeply grateful for all the patients whom I helped die when I was a chaplain. I learned so much from them. There is so much wisdom in death--it's sad so few of us are willing to "go there."

I'm reminded of words from the Hagakure: "Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily." I've heard the Dalai Lama say pretty much the same thing, as does much of the Western spiritual canon. God knows the world gives us plenty of fodder for such meditations!

-t