People die like they live. Of course, some diseases and some treatments can change personalities, but barring that, people seem to face death like they face life.
On the Saturday before Easter, I anxiously made my way to the apparent deathbed of Art, a beloved, 90-year-old brother in Christ. He has lived with great thanksgiving in the midst of decaying health for a very long time. This, following decades as a middle school administrator, clearly showed him to be made of special stuff.
Following the late-night shuttling now so common in the jigsaw of medical care, I eventually found him in a different and remote rehab hospital. As I turned from the rather depressing hallway into his room, Art was alone, lying askew on the bed, uncovered, his breathing strained.
Art smiled. His eyes, now heavy, still twinkled. "Thank you so much for coming," he sighed. I kissed his forehead as I whispered how glad I was to be with him. I said, "Art, it seems like this is pretty close to the end, time for your passing into the very presence of the Lord."
His response? "You're doing a great job."
I gasped. He smiled.
"Art, I appreciate your words, but if there was ever a moment with you that is not about me, this is it." We went on to talk about his death, about his deep readiness to finish this chapter and to step into the next. No hurry, but also no clinging, no whining, no self-pity. We prayed and trusted.
Now, I am fairly sure that, over the decades I have known Art, I have never had a conversation in which he didn't express thanksgiving about someone or something. It was the way he had always lived. Now it was the way he was dying.
If our living is an act of denial, or a disguised effort at desperate avoidance, or a display of greedy consumption, or a lifestyle of manic busyness, or a daily fight for control, we may well come to our dying with far less than Art did. Standing by Art in that barren hospital room, I was taught again that the way to face dying is by living.
Moses understood this acutely, both for himself and for the people of Israel. "Choose life," were Moses' plain and final words. Nothing was more important or more urgent. He had observed in his own life and in the lives of Israel and of Egypt that people commonly choose death, even when we call it life. God's Ten Best Ways to Live had been Moses' practice for years and years.
In his death, they were the words of life.
Tom's Choice
Tom had been a successful financial investor. His family was vital to him, and his faith in God expressed itself in vigorous honesty, candid faith and doubt, and tangible action. His home was elegant and comfortable. He drove a red-and-black Mini Cooper. He would be the first to admit his life was wrapped in privilege and opportunity.
Along the way, Tom was drawn to Africa. For no good reason except the grace of God, Tom chose to let his heart be renewed and redefined by people he came to know and love in Africa who, in the midst of war, imprisonment, poverty, and disease, showed him by faith how to choose life. These trips became central in Tom's life. He never felt more alive than when he was in the midst of this dying.
Then Tom was diagnosed with cancer. What had been other peoples' dying was now his. And the gift of his good-dying over the next four months was that his good-living had prepared him. He passed too quickly for us who did not want him to go. His farewells were understated, authentic, self-deprecating, hopeful.
From his years of international service, Tom's family had all come to understand and see his living, and their own, in different terms. African friends of Tom's phoned and wept over the loss of a man they had loved and who loved them, from soil Tom could have easily avoided. Except, God had used these friends to teach him to choose life.
What could be more fitting then, but that Tom's family would decide that the body of this elegant, accomplished, wealthy disciple, would be wrapped in a simple, but brilliantly colored Congolese cloth. Tom had learned to live in the midst of death. So in death he was wrapped in life.
What more could one hope for? Do we want to die the way we are living? Are we helping others choose to live as a way to die?
Mark Labberton is pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, California.
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