Death is shocking. Covid-19 has added a new layer of cruelty to death.
Every day we see and read about Covid-19 restrictions at funerals. Most times it happens someone else, a person we don’t know.
Two weeks ago a friend, whom I have known for over 20 years, died. She was a lady to her fingertips. She had the grace, fortitude and wisdom to put up with me. That tells you something about the woman she was.
She was 85 and when I first got to know her she was younger than I am now. And that is something that has caused me to pause and think, to think about life and death.
I am fit and healthy thank God but over the last five weeks I was a patient in three hospitals, had surgery and a number of tests.
Anyone who is a regular reader of this column will know that I am a hospital chaplain.
For myriad reasons I have been thinking these last weeks about life and death and all that happens in between. It’s four years since I began my current job as a hospital chaplain. It has been the privilege of a lifetime to journey with people who are ill. It has been a life-enhancing and indeed a life-changing experience. I imagine it is inevitable that it has reorientated or changed the focus on how I see this life of ours.
A 98-year-old man said to me that our perception of the world depends on the glasses we wear. A wise comment. A little child sees the world totally different from my 98-year-old friend. I’m seeing life now differently from when I was in my 20s or 30s.
My own recent health issues gave me a new insight into my job.
No matter how kind and caring we are, we can never fully appreciate or understand what’s going on in another person’s mind, soul and body. But one thing is certain, the kinder, the more helpful, the more understanding we are to people, especially the sick and dying, the more we are making their journey less unbearable.
Then the big question: what’s life all about? It’s a discussion I often have with a friend of mine. He is a man who has a great sense of humour and certainly can make me laugh even in dark moments. When I ask him what life is about he smiles and says: ‘We live and then we die’. It’s not really an answer but it does throw a certain perspective on this great mystery.
When we think of all the things we get excited about, the issues we worry over, the times we spend preparing ourselves, the energy involved in collecting. And then we die.
The English Conservative politician Enoch Powell said that all politics ends in failure. Might one add that life ends in failure?
One of the church’s great theologians, Thomas Aquinas, on his deathbed said that all he had written was mere straw.
Is belief in God pie in the sky, a clever scam to massage our fear about dying and death?
Dare I admit it, but I spend my life doubting, doubting about everything but as I write this column I am going to say I believe in resurrection and I’ll quickly say that I don’t believe that my mother and father have been annihilated. Nor do I believe that my friend, whose funeral Mass I celebrated two weeks ago, is annihilated.
I’ll leave it at that for now.
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