Death does indeed come to us all

9 September 2022

The Queen of England has gone to meet her king. The Queen is dead. Long live the King.

This is not a tribute to the Queen, as fine a modern monarch as she undoubtedly was, but an observation on the obvious. The best cared for person in the United Kingdom managed to live a long time. 96 is a respectable innings, as we Brits might say. But in the end, death took her wicket and will just as surely one day take yours. There will no doubt be crowds gathering at various royal homes & palaces. Young people will be there recording their emotions on Instagram and yet somehow living with the belief that what happened to the Queen will somehow not happen to them. Most people live constantly denying the reality of death and some very rich people are desperately searching for ways to avoid it, after all how can something so common happen to people so special? But it will.

As Tim Scocca one day realized.

Maybe the year 1900 sounds far away, to you. It comes closer. My father was born in 1940. Right now, I am 47 years old. Everyone who was 47 years old when my father was born is now dead. All of them. That entire group of middle-aged people, who made up the adult world when my father was a child, is gone.
Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going to Die

And although it seems that death is not a biological necessity it remains universal and so everyone, Christians included, must answer the question, ‘why must we die?‘ We live amongst shadows, we are fireflies, we are here today, gone tomorrow.

So we must learn not only how to live but how to die. And most likely the two are tied up together. But there the Christian speaks a true word, we can learn from the one who is life and yet who died and yet who lived again. Looking there we find hope not just for more life, but in understanding death, to see it not just as a defeat but as door. To see not just as an end but as a new beginning.

Watch this interview from John Wyatt, author of Dying Well – first half is coronavirus but then it moves at 34 minutes to the general topic of death and dying.