In last Saturday’s newspaper a writer confessed that as a 61 year old adult she found death something hard to grasp, and then added, “So goodness only knows how a child can grapple with the concept.” She then quoted a line from some lyrics of Jackson Browne’s song, ‘For a Dancer’:
“I don’t know what happens when people die, can’t seem to grasp it as hard as I try.”
Well, I guess that writer is in good company. Death could be compared to a punctuation mark in a sentence of writing – and for many people today that punctuation mark is a huge question mark. Perhaps more sadly many folk will never get beyond death being the big question mark in life. I have some sympathy for them. Death is something foreign in God’s good creation. God is the God of life and He made His human creatures for life. In fact the Bible very realistically calls ‘death’ the ‘last enemy’.
I have far more difficulty with people who are convinced that death is not a question mark but rather a full stop. A workmate once said to me, “John, we’re no different to a dog or a cat. We die… and then it’s all over rover!” Death is the full stop at the end of our life. End of story. That’s it.
Well, Christians think differently. It’s neither a question mark nor is it a full stop. It’s rather more like a comma. That came home to me vividly when I once made an early morning call to someone in a nursing home. I happened to call just as a staff shift-change occurred. Noticing everyone at the nurse’s station engaged in intense discussions I asked the lady in charge, “What’s got into everyone with all the intense discussions going on?” She replied, “Well, we had a rather interesting experience in the early hours of this morning. Two of our elderly ladies died – one at each end of our complex here. And the difference was so stark that my staff have not stopped talking about it all morning. One of the ladies spent her last breath screaming obscenities at heaven because she was being robbed of some years of life that she felt she still deserved. The staff had trouble quietening her but eventually she ran out of puff and with one last expletive she died. At the other end of the building we had a lady who had some of her family stay by her bedside singing some of her favourite gospel songs and hymns. She joined in with the singing as long as she was able and in the middle of one of the songs she died very peacefully. The staff even commented on the appearance of these two ladies in death. The face of one contorted in rage, the other serene and at peace.
One of those ladies saw death as a full stop – the bitter end of all her hopes and dreams! The other lady saw death as a comma, a pause after which life goes on in a different place and in a different way. Christians know death is not the end. The apostle Paul once put it very succinctly. He said, “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain!” When Stephen, the first Christian martyr, died he spoke these words, “I see heaven opened and (Jesus) standing at the right hand of God.” As he died he said, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”
I recall the death of a 95-year old man in palliative care. He was one of those parishioners who feel that they must raise their hands in church when they sing a song of praise to God. It was the middle of winter and bitterly cold. The man’s granddaughter had been rostered by the family to keep granddad company in the early hours of that morning. She later gave me this account of his passing. “Pop was very weak and it didn’t seem like he would be with us much longer. But he suddenly rallied, raised himself on his pillow and I could see his eyes staring into the distance with a smile on his face. And then suddenly he raised his hands – just the way he always did when singing in church. A nurse just happened to come into the room and worried about the cold she tucked his hands under the blanket. But they didn’t stay there. The nurse’s back was hardly turned when he again raised his hands in praise. And then just a moment later he fell back and died. His granddaughter said to me, “I don’t need to ask you who my grandfather saw in those last moments of his earthly life.
For that man death was not a question mark. And it certainly wasn’t a full stop. Of him it was true what the apostle Paul said on another occasion: “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.”
John Westendorp