Death Sucks, part 1

I know.  Such a profound title for a blog post.

In our nice, 21st century first-world existence, we try really hard to distance ourselves from death.  Other people kill the animals we eat so we don't have to.  Some municipal worker cleans the roadkill off the road for us.  Modern weapons make death very "efficient"...no more gruesome hand-to-hand combat.  We wonder if lethal injection is cruel and unusual.  Even fake death on TV tends to happen right as the camera moves away or changes from a close-up to a long shot.  When a person dies, we either preserve the body to make it look nice or don't show it at all. 

If you want to keep distancing yourself from death, you might want to stop reading now.

As a nice suburban girl whose work experience includes janitorial duties and teaching, I've encountered plenty of dirt and ignorance in my lifetime, but not much death.  Until two weeks ago. 

Obviously, death sucks emotionally.  The grief of losing a loved one is a deep wound.  No matter how our society tries to distance itself from the physical realities of death, we all must grapple with its emotional effects.  We feel the pain of death, even though we try really hard to never actually see death.

But now that I've seen death, I can tell you that death is an awful, ugly thing in a physical sense as well.  On October 13, so very quickly it became apparent that my son was dead.  Even though his life was short, fragile, tenuous; within hours it was obvious that that life was over.  Holding his cold, still, little body, I couldn't pretend that he was still with me.

One of the prayers that my deepest heart prayed, that I could never say aloud to anyone, was that death would come peacefully for my son.  God answered that prayer.  Arthur's passage from this life to eternal life was so calm I couldn't tell you at what moment it happened.  I praise God often for hearing that cry of my heart.  Even so, death still sucks.

Over the last two weeks, as I thought about death and my first close encounter with it, I thought of Adam and Eve.  At least I have a little context for death.  I've seen roadkill, war movies, rotting fruit, wilted flowers, a funeral.  I had something of an idea of what to expect.  But after Adam and Eve disobeyed God and sin entered the world, they must have been shocked and horrified.  First God killed animals to make clothes for Adam and Eve.  Can you imagine watching the animals who had lived peacefully and happily in the garden of Eden with you die a violent death when you'd never seen anything like that before in your life?  When something like that had never happened before in human history? 

Then some of the plants might have died.  Fruit and vegetables spoiled, and no trash truck appeared to take them away.  Other animals died, and no one was around to dispose of their bodies.  Adam and Eve's bodies started to age.  One of their sons murdered another one of their sons.  Who had to bury Abel?  What horror they must have felt, over and over again.  They had known a beautiful, perfect world, and now this ugliness called death had taken over.  They had no way to shield themselves from it.


Today, thousands of years later, death is still everywhere; but we have succeeded in saving our sensibilities from its awful, ugly realities.  Until a terrorist murders a journalist on camera.  Until we read vivid descriptions of what it means to die of Ebola or in a civil war.  Until I held my dead son in my arms.

As I've pondered death, I've come to the conclusion that distancing ourselves from the ugliness of death has done us a disservice.  It has left us unable to fully grasp the most referred-to object lesson contained in Scripture.

To be continued...