The Human Experience of Death

A man whom I know (he is a Christian) has an odd hang-up: he is fascinated—almost paralyzed—by the sight of a hearse. It is not fear he experiences when he sees a hearse, nor is it glee. His feeling is ambiguous; but the mixture certainly includes perplexity, recoil, attraction, and bemusement.

As far as I know, the perplexity in his feeling about the hearse arises from some such questions as: Who came up with such a design for this vehicle? It is sleek, glittering, quiet, and comfortable. There is something peculiar about the way the long roof rises away and back from the tinted windshield—one isn’t sure whether the thing is a limousine or a truck. Or again, What do we mean by this luxury with which we surround a death: polished woods, simonized cars, pomp, hush, and slow processions through the streets, everyone—bystanders and mourners alike—tacitly agreeing without the help of sirens and flashing lights that here is something that requires utter precedence. “Stand away from death,” it seems to say, or “Here comes the lofty corpse.” The mourners themselves seem to take on a dreadful prerogative simply by virtue of their connection with the thing. Or again, the question arises, To whom is all this ceremony addressed? The dead person? us? the bystanders? the gods? Nobody is going to argue that a pick-up truck wouldn’t serve as well to convey the item from the chapel to the graveyard. What, precisely, are we telling ourselves by this spectacle? Or again, why this kind of spectacle? There are a thousand ways of marking death: some tribes dance and sing; others feast; others do almost nothing; we do this. Why?

And so on—an array of perplexing questions. But there is also a feeling of recoil. This is easy enough to appreciate—who of us doesn’t feel this in the face of death? But the why of this feeling of recoil is something else. Where does it come from? After all, death is surely the most common event in human experience, more common even than marriage or child-bearing, since plenty of people experience death without experiencing these other things. In fact, nobody in history (except Enoch and Elijah) has escaped it, not even the Son of Man. And nobody will, we know quite well (except, Christians believe, those who happen to be around when, at the end of human history, the Son of Man appears in his exaltation). So why should there be this shrinking away from the most common event of all?

For one thing, of course, we shrink from it because it represents the dead end (no pun intended) of any experience we can know anything about. It is the river across which there is one-way traffic only. Nobody comes back. When Hamlet was wondering to himself whether life was worth living (and he had various reasons for thinking that it wasn’t), he concluded that he’d better go on where he was rather than try out “the undiscovered country, from whose bourne/No traveller returns.” There is no interchange of news between our world and any other. When someone we know is obliged to make that journey, we are left desolate on the beach, as it were, with not so much as a plume of smoke from a receding ship to tell us which way the route lies. Even the Bible, which Christians believe gives us some word that pierces beyond the barrier, is strangely silent as to the experience of a person beyond death. Whatever the realm is like, it is under the lordship of a prince who himself once experienced the awful crossing. That is about all the Bible says. (St. Paul expresses his anticipation of being “with Christ,” and in another place speaks of people who have made the journey as being asleep. And St. John, of course, describes tremendous climactic events in the court of heaven, complete with visions of gold and crystal and jewels and music and light and pageantry; but no one can pretend to have much idea as to exactly what that “undiscovered country” is like.)

So that a Christian, even though his confidence in Christ reaches across the barrier that we call death, may well find in himself a very human response to the idea of his own or somebody else’s demise. Our experience of life is in terms of flesh and blood: we know ourselves this way (this is my hand; this is my nose here in the mirror; this is my stomach that aches) and we know everyone else this way (she has beautiful eyes; I love her smile; he has a loud voice). So that when this whole way of experiencing things comes to an end, and decay and rot take over and ruin everything we know of ourselves and people we love, naturally there is a recoil. We would be monsters if we treated the event lightly, no matter how lively our faith in death’s Conqueror.

It is this awareness, in part at least, that lies at the root of the horror that has always surrounded the idea of death in human imagination. The fascination of all ghost stories and tales of the macabre derives from this horror we feel in the presence of the thing that dissolves the flesh and leaves only grotesquery in its wake.

For, in a sense, death is the ultimate horror (cf. “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death”). It is a tearing asunder of something that ought not to be torn asunder: it is the tearing apart of body and spirit, and this is not what a human being is made for. When body and spirit are together, we have a person. When they are not together, we have, not a person, but a corpse and a ghost, and neither of these things arouses anything but horror in us. Suddenly we are confronted with a thing. It appears in every respect exactly as the person we knew, but it is not he. But it is he—or at least it is certainly every molecule we ever knew of him. But, our imagination insists, it is not he. And so it goes, back and forth. This that is left of him, but that is not he, is still much more important to us than that bookcase over there.

People who are accustomed to thinking about death in large and triumphant terms—who believe, that is, in the One who “destroyed him that hath the power of death,” and who say “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”—these people are sometimes baffled to discover that, when they are suddenly pushed face to face with death, they find grief and confusion and sickness of soul, feelings they might expect from others who have no confidence in death’s Destroyer. In a way, these people (Christians, in a word) have a double difficulty: on the one hand they experience all the usual human feelings in the face of death, but on the other they may be nagged by the idea that they ought not to give way like this, and that they ought to be experiencing joy and victory—that they ought to be living witnesses to their claim that death has no more terror for them.

Why is this? Here they are, weeping at graves like the rest of humanity, trying for dear life to hold on to their sanity when their world has been blasted by a death. Are they hypocrites? Do they just say those things about victory, and not mean them?

Probably any Christian who has thought about it, and certainly anyone who has grappled with death, has faced these questions. Where is my faith now? Where is the victory I’m supposed to know? The Scriptures tell me about a blessed hope, and about the death of death, and about glory and joy and exultation, and here I am nearly mad with grief and desolation. Is the whole thing a farce? Where, indeed, is my God?

And there it is. That is the question. For it is the question that was asked by the Lord when he finally came up against the ultimate horror. He who knew exactly what he was doing and who he was and what was at stake, whose obedience to his Father was perfect, was almost crushed in that hour. And in his extremity he called out to what seemed a deaf heaven, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Of all inappropriate times for God to withdraw his presence and help, this was the most inappropriate. Here was his own Son, at the crux of history and eternity, gasping under the assault of death itself, and the gates of heaven were shut, hidden behind the black clouds that swirl over Golgotha. What an appalling betrayal! How is one to make any sense of it all?

We can make sense of it only by seizing hold of the paradox that in some sense (it is a mystery) God, who is above creation and human experience, really did subject himself to the conditions of that creation and experience. It was not a masquerade. It was not a charade. There was nothing bogus about the Incarnation. The Son of God referred to himself as the Son of Man with good reason. For he was the archetypal Man: he was Man as man was meant to be—the second Adam, that is. Hence his human experience was real. When, “for us men and for our salvation [he] came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man,” he was not pretending. He was an authentic man, not a visiting god disguised as a man, who could fly away from the limitations of human experience at any point he chose. If the Incarnation means anything at all, it means that the God whom we worship has participated radically in our experience, and by that participation has raised our human experience to glory.

Hence, his experience of death, like his experience of everything else, was real. It was a human experience of death. While he was God, he was also wholly man (it is a mystery), and as that man, he had to encounter experience as we do. Hunger, fatigue, loneliness, pleasure, irritation, temptation, pain, and finally death—these things weren’t shadows on the wall for him. He really was hungry and tired and lonely and irritated. And he really did suffer horrible pain. And He knew horror and fear when Death came stalking toward him. For that is what the human experience of death is. Death is the final outrage to our humanity (note that it was death that entered via sin in Eden—death, the ultimate insult to God’s chief handiwork).

And so, even though Jesus knew that he was appointed to conquer death, and that eventually everything would be delivered into his hands, his experience at the time of his death was wholly real. It was not as though he could say, “Right, for the next three days we will go through the motions of being overcome by death. I will, as it were, suffer and ‘die,’ but I know quite well that triumph is a mere moment away, when my mother and my friends will come upon an empty grave, and when I will have wrecked forever the sovereignty of death.” Presumably he knew all this. But we must not for a moment suppose that his bloody sweat in Gethsemane was merely a good performance by a superb actor. That Man there was in an agony of fear and horror—so much so that he finally asked to be let off. He who knew his name was Messiah and Immanuel quailed. But there followed immediately that epochal “Nevertheless.”

The point of all this is that Jesus’ knowledge of what was ultimately at stake did not cancel the human reality of his experience of things. When he approached the grave of Lazarus, for example, what made him weep? Surely he knew what he would do. In five minutes the man would be there before them, alive and well. Why weep about something (death) that had no real power? Would it not have been more appropriate, considering his position as Messiah, for Jesus to have smiled knowingly and said a few things to Lazarus’s friends about rejoicing in hope? Didn’t he have a responsibility here to show that the joy of the Lord is one’s strength in all situations? Surely his weeping wouldn’t enhance his witness.

And yet he wept. Who knows the source of those tears? But whatever they were about, they weren’t crocodile tears. Jesus was not a humbug. Presumably, at that moment, his experience of the death of Lazarus was real. He had lost a friend, and this is an experience that makes human beings weep. The defeat of this friend by death appeared as an outrage and a grotesquery to Jesus, and he wept.

Jesus’ response to this situation, and to his own experience of death, points up something that seems to me to be important about our (Christians’) responses to human experience. We may feel, because we see Something Else behind experience (the hand of God, that is, behind suffering or loss or death—or pleasure, for that matter), that we are not to allow those experiences their full weight, since they are “only” means to an end. That is, we feel that we have here on this earth no continuing city, and that therefore our experiences here are minimally important. “What does it matter in the light of eternity?” we sometimes say, in a brave show of spirituality. And this is a question we do well to ask ourselves when our attention and affection get siphoned off to trivialities, when we lose a sense of proportion about things that are patently fleeting. But this perspective on things can lead us rather subtly into a frame of mind that eventually disavows the validity of human experience, and sees Christian experience as something having to do only with the spirit and eternity.

If we slip into this kind of thinking, we are doing something that is natural to the devout mind. Naturally eternity seems more important than time, and heaven than earth, and spirit than flesh. But this is not quite true, or at least no Christian can take quite this view; for if it is true, then God was engaged in trivialities in such acts as the Creation, and the Incarnation, and the Resurrection. For all these mighty acts have to do with time and the concrete. Other religions seek an escape from time and the flesh into a realm of pure eternal spirit. Christianity does not. Because of the Incarnation, it has time and the flesh right at the heart of its vision of things.

This is not to say, as popular modern Protestantism seems to be saying, that Christianity has nothing at all to do with “pie in the sky by and by,” and that it’s no use talking about airy-fairy things when our cities and universities are burning up with unrest, and so on. For any serious Christian knows that those “airy-fairy” things are precisely what give meaning to this life here: that our life exists in the context of the eternal, and that when we fail to see this, we become idolaters and are reduced to the sort of thing that destroyed Sodom and Babylon and Corinth and Rome.

So that a Christian’s understanding of his human experience is not, on the one hand, the notion that human experience is just some vexatious procession of unreal events to be gotten through as quickly as possible so that we may get on to the “real” things (heaven); nor is it, on the other hand, the idolatrous view that this is all there is to it, and that events have no meaning at all beyond themselves. Rather, a Christian believes (again, because of the Incarnation) in the enormous significance of common human experience (eating, drinking, work, sexuality, suffering, death), and sees it all as the arena in which the process of his salvation occurs. And he understands this process of salvation, not as changing him into an angel or a pure spirit, but as making him into exactly the kind of being God had in mind when he made man (Adam)—a being characterized by flesh and blood, and choosing to worship and obey the Lord God through all the motions and experiences of human life. St. Paul calls it being transformed into the image of Christ, who was, of course, the Second Adam—the one figure in history, that is, who demonstrated what it means to be perfectly human.

And that Man, by his human life, attested to the reality and validity of our human experience. Hunger was real for him, and loneliness and suffering and death, and he never pretended that the long view—what he knew was ultimately true—canceled the reality of the present experience. Hence he wept at Lazarus’s grave, and recoiled at the horror of his own death. And hence we, who follow him, need feel no guilt or confusion if, despite our faith in ultimate Joy, we experience death as awful.

Thomas Howard teaches English at St. Bernard’s School in New York. He holds the B.A. degree from Wheaton College and the M.A. from the University of Illinois, and is currently a candidate for the Ph.D. at New York University. He is the Author of the book “Christ the Tiger.”

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