What I Think About When I think About Death
Answering the Question Barbie-Land Barbies Can Forget
By 10 p.m., my husband and I had said goodnight to one another. We lay silently, waiting for our bodies to soften into sleep. The air filter (my preferred method of white noise) hummed quietly. Some day we will not be lying in this bed together, I thought. There will be an end to even this. Time quieted for a moment, and I was aware of eternity just beyond my grasp. An eternity in which, at some point, Death would separate us for a time. When that time comes, Death will keep us from all forms of direct messaging, video-chats, and phone calls. And whichever marital conflict we were never able to resolve will become obsolete, irresolvable, irrelevant—because won’t Death come and scrub away our obvious tethering?
When we married almost twenty-seven years ago, I would randomly be overcome by the terror of him dying (young) and the ways in which it could happen–a freak car accident, cancer. “I’m not going to die,” he’d say while I cried. That I did not recognize his invincibility seemed to annoy him at times. (Reader, he was like many twenty-five-year-old males who haven’t brushed shoulders with Death).
But of course he was going to die–sometime. I was inconsolable.
I grew out of those Death-inspired panic attacks, maybe because I was forced to confront the reality, rather than the abstraction, of Death so many times during our marriage. Death disrupted my relationship with grandparents who lived long enough to stay married for seventy-one years. Death tragically interrupted the life of my 36-year-old brother, my father-in-law, and a close family friend—all who passed suddenly and before their “time.” Death crept up and stole unborn children I carried inside me.
Last summer at the box office, Barbie asked her friends on the dance floor, “D’you guys ever think about dying?” Barbie-Land Barbies could blow off the question and keep dancing. But here, earth-side, we don’t have the luxury. Whether we think about Death is not in question. But what we think when we think about Death is worth paying attention to.
My Christian faith tells me that the people I’ve “lost” are not truly lost, but separated from their bodies for now, inaccessible to me by phone, text, and email.1 I think of them existing on the other side of an impenetrable and unforgiving veil. Despite all pop-culture references to heaven, remarkably little detail actually comes from Christian scriptures. I have more questions than answers about what happens when we die. Other than that we will be with Christ, which will be magnificent, we are very sketchy on the details.
Perhaps surprisingly, the passage of Scripture that comforts me most about Death is Paul’s exhortation to the Colossian Christians.
Paul offers the Colossians not a description of Heaven but a treatise on the cosmic Christ. Through Christ, Christians have been “rescued” from the “dominion of darkness” (dominion of Death) and transferred into the Kingdom of the Son. Here, King Jesus transcends all the things we can and cannot see. The Son was before Death; he will exist when Death ceases to be. He is the firstborn from the dead by his resurrection (and we, consequently, will follow).
And, another mind-boggling claim: in the Son, “all things hold together.”2
This marvelous Son, second person of the Trinity, transcends the life-and-death divide and reconciles all things—both the seen with the unseen, the “sleeping” with the living, the things in heaven with the things on earth—to himself.3
Think of it this way: Christ the gravitational center pulls all people, created things, and relationships toward himself. When we’re tethered to Christ we are tethered to those beyond the grave.
I once had a dream in which my dead big brother apologized for the ways he had failed me. In the dream, Henry gave me a handwritten card made from construction paper, red for love. I awoke, my eyes wet with tears, and the real presence of Christ–not Henry’s presence–hung thick in the air around me.
I know. You might be thinking that Henry communicated with me from beyond the grave, and that would be a popular interpretation although not a Christian one. I am left to conclude only that it was Christ who somehow held—and holds—us together, reconciling us while Henry is in heaven and I am here on the earth, in the way only Christ can and in the way only Christ wills.4
Now, when I think about Death, I think about how everyone I love and long for holds together in Christ as I am held together with them in Christ. I will not lie and tell you Death has lots its sting in a right-now, this-world way. (To my dismay, I’ve been to an unreasonable number of too-cheerful Christian funerals.) But, I’ve been offered a salve in the form of an agonizingly beautiful hope that reunion and reconciliation will be completely realized one day.
*Which is probably why I wrote a book of letters to my brother when he died. It felt like the only way to approximate speaking with him. A totally once-sided conversation, of course.
Col 1:17
The New Testament uses the language of “sleeping” to describe the dead in Christ, whose bodies will one day “wake” in resurrected life.
Col 1:19-20 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.