Yesterday a friend heard that her father had died. She hurried home and booked a flight to be with her family. Death was expected, the timing and the manner were not. Isn’t that always the way? Everyone dies, we know that but still, we are so often unprepared when the moment arrives. Yet my friend had hope, “He has gone to be with the Lord.” Hope for the one who passed, comfort for the ones who remain. Death is not an absolute end.

But it is an end. It is the end of relationships, it is the end of life in this dimension, it is death after all. Death is an enemy but I wonder if it isn’t also a gift. What some see as a dead end others see as a door.

But in secular lands death remains for many a taboo topic. People do not want to face death. But we must. You will not die well if you deny the notion that you will die at all. There is an art to dying and we have lost it. As Susan Hill observes:

A friend told me her husband kept asking medics what would happen to him, where he would go after death and how, what would it be like; questions repeated to each new doctor or nurse, who all pretended not to hear, or left quickly, with embarrassment and maybe: ‘You’ll be fine…’ Finally, a clergyman came: ‘You will go to God.’ ‘Yes, but how? What does that mean? Will I see things, will I know I’m there?’ No replies, just formal prayers — but he didn’t want those, he wanted a human conversation, the most important of his life.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-dying-need-real-conversation-not-false-cheeriness

People wonder ‘is there a better way to die?’ and people think yes there is. As Christians we have plenty of questions too. So where do we start?

We need to face the fact that life, no matter how we long we live, is short. And we’re not owed anything longer.

Earlier this year just before the pandemic really kicked into gear I had the privilege of visiting a friend of mine not long before he died. He was dying, all transplant options were gone, it was, as everyone knew, just a matter of time. In that, he was no different than any of us just that he knew the amount of time left for him was very short indeed. Yet he wasn’t bitter and he wasn’t afraid. Death wasn’t, for him, an enemy at all, it was a gift he was looking forward to welcoming. Life, at least life with his rare illness, had become a painful burden that he was tired of bearing. He wanted to live but he didn’t want to live sick and as there was no hope of a cure, he was ready to die.

That even death can be seen as a gift, is a lesson that Todd Billings points to:

On hard days and easier days, amid joy and pain, I’ve come to embrace mortality reminders as strange but good gifts. They can ground me as a mortal before God. We live in hope that the frailty and decay of our bodies will not be the final measure of our lives. We live in hope that the central drama of the universe is not our own life story. Instead, living as small creatures, we can rejoice in the wonder and drama of God’s love in Christ.

Our present life will end when, like Job, we as creatures are stripped of family and fortune and worldly future. But even in light of this mortal end—indeed, especially in light of it—we can join the apostle Paul in being “convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39).

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/october/good-news-tomorrow-we-die-end-of-christian-life.html

The hope of this future infused a present and transformed it. It was quite something. My friend was younger than me and for a few months after his death, I really wrestled with the mystery of life, of death, of questions of that were and are too big for me. His death made me face my own. We all know we’re going to die one day but now in, what I hope is only near the middle of my life, I breathed in the knowledge that I will die. That knowledge wasn’t morbid but renewing. Life is a gift, a miraculous gift and I believe the way for more of this is through Christ. The way to life is through death.

As Tim Counts writes,

The beauty in Christian death is that death is when we begin to really live, with the One we were made to live with, our Savior. Not to mention saved family and friends who will meet us there. In Jesus, it is not death to die.

This is why King David can sing, “in your presence, there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11). It’s like arriving home to the family you love after a long trip–only a billion times better.

https://ftc.co/resource-library/blog-entries/autumn-and-the-beauty-of-death-for-the-christian/