In Good Company The Sacred Time of Death

Oct 6, 2016

My grandfather's brother was an atheist. Not a smug, proselytizing sort – just an unbeliever.

When he was in the end stages of cancer, heavily medicated, he would spend his few lucid moments visiting with family and then be wheeled off to his room to rest.

In his drug-affected reverie, he often spoke aloud quite clearly, saying things like:

"Really, Lord? …Then it was all true? …I am sorry…. I never knew."

This happened several times over the course of his last days and many people heard it.

My cousins –devout evangelicals who'd been praying hard all their lives for their dad to come to the Lord – are unshaken in their conviction that my great uncle had a road to Emmaus experience in the privacy of his own conscience days before he passed away.

A dear friend began to take her faith seriously only after the sorrow of a failed marriage that left her estranged from her children.

A gentle soul who came to profound friendship with God in middle age, she knew she was forgiven for her sins, but nonetheless carried the ache of missing her children as a permanent personal purgatory.

What joy and peace were hers in the final months of her life when the kids who wouldn't approach her for years one by one made the sad good-bye pilgrimage! Both she and they were able to enjoy a short time of "things as they ought to be!" The necessary words were said on all sides, the pain in their hearts was mended.

My grandmother died in my and my siblings' arms moments after we conditionally baptized her. There's a longer story to tell, but I believe she clung to life until she received the baptism she'd been promised in a series of discussions a priest friend of mine and I had with her when it became obvious she was failing.

The brother of a friend lived a life of dissipation and promiscuity. On the last day of his life, not only he, but also his homosexual partner, went to Confession.

Through these and a couple of other close encounters with death, I have become convinced that not only is approaching death a period of great emotional importance for families and individuals, but it is literally sacred time.

I believe the Lord in his mercy actively works in the soul into the last moments, drawing it to himself, even in cases like my great-uncle's, where the person is objectively beyond the reach of human interaction.

What would have become of all these people and their survivors if shortly after their difficult diagnoses they'd been given shots or pills to hasten the inevitable?

Allowing doctors to kill puts medicine at cross-purposes with itself and puts an unfair burden on medical professionals. Permitting regulators to decide the value of the lives of others is inconsistent with individual liberty and further undermines the principle of self-government. When to kill us is not a decision we want in the hands of either doctors or governments. Most seriously ill people are not suicidal, they're depressed, and are not to be taken advantage of. Elderly and handicapped persons should be accepted as they are, not made to feel they are wasting our resources. Accepting suicide as a good will further coarsen a society already losing its belief in the value of individual persons. Pain can be well-controlled. Interspersed with pain can be beautiful moments of relational healing as well.  

These are the things I want to say to voters in Colorado, where an assisted suicide measure is on the ballot in November, and to members of the DC City Council about to take up one of the most aggressive assisted-suicide measures ever to be proposed (aggressive because it doesn't require depression screening or even pretend to offer the most vulnerable among us any protection against bullying or manipulation from greedy heirs or hostile guardians. Call it a death penalty for depression. Find out more here.)  It's the case against assisted suicide we can make in the public square, where arguments from faith aren't always the most effective. Who knows what an unbeliever would make of the incidents I've just described?

It strikes me, though, that maybe we Christians need to do a better job evangelizing our own, telling the stories we all know of grace at work in the sacred time, helping people be less fearful of death, more respectful of it, and more convicted that end of life decisions matter.

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