When I was 16, a good friend of my older brother was killed in a car accident. The vehicle he was driving had slid into a parked truck on a country road. Apparently, there was barely a mark on him but he had hit his head in the wrong spot and, just like that, his life was extinguished. He was 18.
I remember my mother answering the phone call that conveyed that news and hearing her burst into tears. For about a year afterwards, whenever the phone rang in our house, I felt a surge of anxiety. Death had come near, and I found it profoundly shocking. Years later, and with a decades-old religious faith, I am only partially cured of the discomfort at the thought of death.
My guess is that I am not alone. But we don’t like to talk about this or even think about it.
Catherine Mayer, in her book Amortality: the Pleasures and Perils of Living Agelessly, writes about the way that death, especially in the developed world, has been pushed to the distant corners of our lives. “If we’re lucky we may be in the middle of our lives before we see death up close and then it’s usually medicalised,” she wrote. “Polite societies don’t dwell on death; we’re expected to dab our eyes and get on with the business of living.” In doing so, I wonder if we are missing something vital in understanding an important rhythm to life.
We are intensely focused on avoiding our demise. Ageing is no longer thought of as the natural cycle of a life but a scourge to be avoided at all costs. Our energies are committed to health and wellbeing outcomes that will sustain our vitality and youthfulness well beyond what would once have been thought reasonable. There is much that is commendable in that drive to better health and longevity. But ultimately, even if we “can’t stop for death”, he will eventually “kindly stop for us”, to mangle Emily Dickinson’s poem. No matter how much we put it off, the bell will toll for each of us. How do we process that eternal human dilemma? Pretending it won’t happen or is no big deal might not be the best option.
As our society has become more secular, our attitude to death and to funerals has changed accordingly. Civil celebrants are more popular than religious ministers when we tie the knot, and the same is true when the final curtain comes down on our lives, with more than half (58%) of the population preferring to have a non-religious celebrant conduct their funeral.
And the mood has shifted for funerals as well. Three in five Australians say they would opt for relaxed and reflective over serious and solemn, while 27% believe that a fun and jubilant or celebratory funeral is the way to go.
But a study out of the UK suggests there is a level of illiteracy and incapacity in the secular funeral sector to properly understand, treat and attend to grief. And even very secular funerals frequently reach for language and concepts that entail spiritual hopes and comfort in the face of death’s cold finality.
I remain deeply moved by and drawn to the traditional Christian funeral service, which feels substantial in ways that other versions don’t. It’s a service that draws on centuries of carefully constructed language capturing the central markers of the Christian story, that never feel more compelling than when faced with the coffin of someone you love and whose children are watching on.
There is a gravity and a seriousness and a heft in all this that aptly reflects the end of a human life and the corresponding sense of what a gift that life always is. As a coffin is lowered into the ground or headed for cremation, the following, still familiar words are intoned, echoing an age-old acknowledgement of our creatureliness: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
Secondly, even at this point of an emphatic ending there is a palpable sense of a beginning. Opening the service the minister will likely repeat words from John’s gospel about resurrection. Other prayers will speak of consolation, of the promise of a time when tears will be wiped away, of a place with many rooms prepared for the departed, of a people who grieve but not without hope. Therefore, there is a reason for joy, regardless of the circumstances.
The believer is encouraged to approach death not with any sense of celebration – death being the great enemy of humanity – but with the acknowledgement that it is part of the pain of living in a broken world. Equally, it’s not something to fear. This is because even a very short human life is situated within a larger story that is far from over. There are more chapters to be written, even as death calls, as it inevitably does for us all.
Simon Smart is executive director of the Centre for Public Christianity and author of The End of Men?
