Two Thoughts on Death

From our ferry on the channel crossing at dusk on our way to the NL…

We lost Thomas’ wonderful mom this week. She passed away after a brief battle with swift, aggressive cancer. We were able to get to the Netherlands in time to say goodbye and to have a last day with her. We grieve her deeply. She was a person whose gentleness, whose deep faith and warmth made a circle of love around her that sheltered other people. She drew them, us, into belonging in her home and life. You always hear about the rocky relationships between mothers and daughters-in-law, but I wouldn’t know a thing about it, because all I knew from her was a friendship, trust, and affection that dignified me as her son’s wife and made me her true companion.

I began writing this as an Instagram post, to let my readers know I’m taking a break for a bit as we process everything, but I found that I wanted to say two things that have been tumbling together in my mind over the past few days and they wouldn’t fit the IG word limit.

First.

Death is an outrage. It’s a travesty, a cosmic violence, a violation of our deepest being. It’s so profoundly unnatural, and to hate it, to weep, to grieve the theft of years of companionship and love is absolutely the right response. Jesus wept at the tomb of his friend and we weep at the gravesides of those we love and this speaks to our bone deep knowledge that we are crafted and created for life that burgeons and love that knows no parting and joy without limit or fear to taint its brilliance. 

But you can grieve deeply and trust God at the same time because grief does not equal fear. And when Jesus’ wept at Lazarus’ tomb, when we weep here, it isn’t in a hopeless dread or passive despair. We grieve in profound, fierce hope, because death has been defeated.

Second thought. Listen again and hear it well.

Death is defeated. It no longer has the last word or the final say. It cannot touch our real ending, our true identity. Oh death, where is your victory? Where is your sting?

One of the deep beliefs that shaped my mother-in-law’s life was her hope in the resurrection, her looking toward the return of Christ. It’s something she spoke often about, something that was real for her, real like dinner cooking on the stove, or grandbabies being cuddled, so that when this disease came upon her, even cancer, in its huge pain and ugliness and terror, it was transformed by her faith into a space where the unfailing life and healing, the coming of Christ to wipe every tear from our eyes was felt as present and real by everyone she encountered.

She held fast to Christ and she was surrounded in her final hours by all of us children who had been sustained and shaped by her hope, by Psalms read aloud in comfort, by prayer, by songs of worship sung by her family in sorrow but surety and that was her legacy. I have lived out this week the actual reality of those words of Paul that can seem so impossibly idealistic: ‘we do not grieve as those who have no hope’. But it’s true. We grieve as those who grip hope as the hand of Christ, the Spirit of life suffusing our bodies, and that is a wonder that irradiates the darkness of this broken world, the grief of this present loss. Such hope means tears and laughter. Affection and tenderness woven with sorrow. Such hope means determined, fierce trust in the unbroken brightness of love as it invades the darkness with a light that even death cannot comprehend. 

On our drive down to the NL, Thomas and Lilian and I listened over and over again to two songs, a Dutch song called ‘Alles for Hem’, and Andrew Peterson’s ‘Is He Worthy?’. We basked in the strength brought by both because they were songs celebrating the ultimate truths, the final things we’ll know when Christ returns one day - tears wiped away, death finally banished, all the ‘sad things coming untrue’ as Sam Gamgee says. They were songs focused on the words of Revelation, in which the lamb who was slain is finally honoured above all. 

The Lamb who was slain. Jesus, the Word through whom the universe came into being, wept on his way to offering his own holy self to death. Wept because death is awful. But it was his own offering, that gift of God’s own precious, tender, holy lamb that brought Lazarus back to life a few minutes after those holy tears were shed, and that assures our victory.

Death is defeated because God came and bore it with us and because like the holy warrior he is, he beat it. He overcame the shadow realms of sin and death and hell. He is the victor and his victory means life reconnected to his own boundless, loving existence. It’s funny how the things you think you believe somewhere in the background of your life suddenly blaze out as the only truth by which you can survive this dark world in hope. But the truth is real, the love is real, the deathless hope is true.

And that precious lamb, as we sang over and over, is so worthy of blessing and glory and honour and power, and Susette, my precious mother-in-law, is singing those words without pain or sorrow or suffering now because the deathless one died and was raised. We live, even in the broken place, in the starlight shimmer, the unshakeable radiance of that reality. She knows it in full and we glimpsed it in her even as she died.

I’ll leave you with the song we sang on our way to keep vigil with her in death, with words that shimmer even now in my daily thought. May they impart the same hope and surety that they did to us: