Another Believer Passes

The call came yesterday -"She died at 11:00 am." It was 11:07. I had sat with her the afternoon before. We said Psalm 23 together. Then we sang "Jesus Loves Me." I assured her there was nothing to fear, "Yes," she said, "Jesus loves me." And then she repeated "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death ... comfort me." She was ready to go to be with Jesus.

Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, died shortly after the first of the year. He wrote an essay several years ago after being seriously ill. I quote the first three paragraphs of Born Towards Dying:

We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already underway. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. As children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and health, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word “good” should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.

Death is to be warded off by exercise, by healthy habits, by medical advances. What cannot be halted can be delayed, and what cannot forever be delayed can be denied. But all our progress and all our protest notwithstanding, the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent.

Death is the most everyday of everyday things. It is not simply that thousands of people die every day, that thousands will die this day, although that too is true. Death is the warp and woof of existence in the ordinary, the quotidian, the way things are. It is the horizon against which we get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and the next morning we awake to find the horizon has drawn closer. From the twelfth-century Enchiridion Leonis comes the nighttime prayer of children of all ages: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take.” Every going to sleep is a little death, a rehearsal for the real thing.

"Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."