ON DEATH, DYING AND LIVING.
November 4 2020
Eighty years ago, in 1940, when I was twelve years old, I saw my first dead person: my maternal grandfather. He had lived all his life in Kornhorn, in the West Quarter of the Groningen Province, having been a farmer there – as were his ancestors – and, apart from the occasional visit to STAD (The City of Groningen), never traveled anywhere. Prior to his burial, his body lay in the annex of the church where he had been an elder. A large sheet of glass covered his coffin, where he lay fully dressed in pure black, including his favorite dressy cap. When I saw him, a large fly had managed to penetrate the enclosed box, which later was placed on a horse-drawn wagon, and we all followed on foot to the nearby cemetery.
Since then I have witnessed my father dying in 1977 at his home. I can vividly recall this. To be with death in the same room can be an uplifting experience. Just hours before, he had called us and said, “I hear singing and choirs: is the radio on?” Our answer did not register with him anymore. He kissed my mother and also his youngest son whom he had not kissed since he was a child. A tear fell from his eye – there really had been an age-gap, and it had pained my father greatly that the son who had been named after him, had left the faith of the fathers – and he fell into the sleep out of which he only will awake on the Day of the Lord.
It still took about five hours before he actually breathed his last. His lung intake became more and more difficult, its gurgling started to sound like a perking coffee pot, becoming louder and louder and then softer and softer, and his gasps of breath had longer and longer intervals, until it stopped altogether.
Dying at home does involve certain duties normally assumed by others. Shortly after he died, I took his dentures and fitted them into his mouth. My mother and I kept a towel tightly around his face to make sure that it would keep form when the rigor mortis, the stiffening of the body, would set in.
Yet another task awaited us: the preparing of the body. My sister in law, a nurse and I did this together. To me it felt as if his body wasn’t my father anymore. It seemed just a lump of sodden flesh. When we turned him over, took off his bedclothes and washed him, I suddenly realized that I had never seen my father naked in his life. We dressed him in his Sunday suit. Slowly his features relaxed: his face became younger.
To die at home and to be buried from there gave all of us time to take leave. My mother would go and sit with my father in the quietness of the night, and so became a little more used to him not being alive anymore, not calling for her to help him. His children – there were nine of us – and grandchildren would see him in his own bedroom, serenely, as if praying, with hands folded as in prayer, perfectly natural, yet dead.
Closer to home.
Now death has come closer to home: my wife, my companion, my spouse for 67 years and a long-time friend of my own family many years before that, died recently.
Our history goes back 88 years. I seem to remember the first time we met, far back in 1932. I can well picture the occasion. Her father, a ‘dominee’, a minister of the gospel, had accepted the call to our church, a large congregation, worshipping in a very plain building, with three enormous balconies, a large auditorium, seating more than a thousand, and filled to capacity twice on Sundays. It also had an impressive pipe organ.
On that first Sunday, when he had preached his inaugural sermon, the entire church council was invited to the official ‘pastorie’, the 4 storey dwelling next to the church for coffee and cigars. My parents too were among the guests. We children were let loose to play, and went ‘hide and go seek’. Diny, the minister’s daughter, my later wife, and I hid under an iron bed. I can vividly recall this episode.
Two dreams.
In my life I have two recurring dreams involving my wife. Up until recently, I had a dream where I was cycling past Diny’s house, just some 300 meters from where I lived, just to get a glimpse of her. You see at one time she ended our courtship and there I was feeling rejected and miserable.
In the other dream I was just married, and desperately wondered how I, totally unexperienced and never having worked before, would ever be able to adequately provide for a family.
That too turned out well.
DYING AND LIVING
I know, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death”, says 1 Corinthians 15: 26. Death has been my companion these past weeks. A farmer-member of our church, killed himself in the same week our family buried my wife, their mother and Oma.
I have been reading Bonhoeffer lately, a man who, in a German prison, was waiting to have his death sentence carried out for conspiring against Hitler. For years he lived with death. He wrote, “Life really begins when it ends here …..God says, they are at peace…His presence does not end even in death…..our death is in reality only a transition to the fullness of God’s love.”
Bonhoeffer has become my favorite theologian. He is so contemporary because he intimately experienced the End of his Days. In one of his sermons he said, “The hour of death is determined for each of us, and it will find us no matter where we turn, yet consent to death liberates us to live fully and wholeheartedly”.
In an Easter sermon he declared, “The heart of Easter proclamation is: God is the death of death; God lives, and thus Christ lives as well; death had no hold over Him against the overriding power of God.”
For Bonhoeffer the hope of the resurrection is the central axis of Christian faith. God is present in life and in death. Resurrection is the pledge of his reality. Yet a belief in resurrection is not the solution to the problem of death.
“The last enemy to be destroyed is death”. Death remains an enemy, even though God is the death of death.
On death, dying and living.
“Blessed are those who have lived before they die”.
Jesus did not come to establish religion: he came to teach us how to live. That ‘living’ centers on all of creation, all animals, all trees, water and air. John 10: 10 spells it out: Jesus said, “I came that they might have life and have it abundantly.” That means ‘LIFE’ in the fullness of creation. We cannot understand God without the world, and the world without God. What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one.
Our society today is “the way of death”, death of species, death of trees. Life means total life, living in harmony with all creation.
I take comfort from Psalm 116, “Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his faithful”. Being ‘faithful’ includes loving creation. Blessed are those who have lived in ‘love’, love for God and love for the world God made.