The Good Death – March 2024
The Good Death—March 2024
“A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” Mark Twain
Have you spent time considering how you want to die? Society is obsessed with avoiding the topic but had you grown up in Rome in the first century, a conversation about mortality would have been commonplace because the Stoics believed a good death was requisite to a good life. Besides the Stoics, scandalous rumors were circling then about a murdered Galilean preacher who had talked about death, even death on a cross, as a pathway to enduring life.
The good death is about more than how we handle our final moments on earth. To me, it includes wringing all the lifeblood from our beings so that we leave this life having given everything we had to offer. It is my observation that “good deaths” are rare. Lesser versions of the final chapter of life exhibit grouchiness over grace, fear over faith, and clutching tight rather than letting go. The way we die represents the final lesson learned and the last subject taught. It is a signature on the story of our lives so we should be motivated to get it right.
Pastor and theologian, Eugene Peterson lived his final years fully with his wife, hosting friends and visitors at their Montana home while sharing his wisdom in books that continue to benefit others. My 92-year-old friend, David, inspires me as he blesses clients with his counseling practice even while enduring physical challenges with grace. As a man of faith, he describes this season of life as a transition into his next assignment, easy to say but hard to live. It is his fearlessness more than his words that fills me with hope that a good death may be attainable.
A first-century conversation about the good death should have included Jesus because the subject was always top of mind for him. His perspective was that death offered the path to true life, and he said that those unwilling to lose their lives had no chance to find it. When he relented to his death on the cross, his actions supported words he had already spoken. Jesus advocated daily deaths to prepare us for the final, good death that we aspire to.
Life tends to teach us what is required and I have been trying to learn how to die to my relevance, importance, and status in my new role at work. Egotistical founders like me resist surrendering positions of status so at times, I have found the transition challenging. It was similarly hard as a father to learn how to forego unsolicited advice to my adult children, even when I knew it would help them. More chances to learn to die. No wonder Jesus found it necessary to talk about death so frequently since we resist it so consistently.
So what does a good death look like to me? The picture is one of an old man filled with gratitude, mixed with tired contentedness, like a runner finishing a marathon or a boxer at the end of a 15-round fight. I will know I have wrung out every drop that my body and brain had to give. The world will seem slightly better to me for my participation in it yet there will also be a keen awareness that much of what I sought to do remains undone. These truths together will cause me to smile. There will be no need for final words with my friends on this last day because love will already have been expressed and forgiveness already granted. Amidst the laughter and tears with my family, I will tell my wife what a privilege it has been to love and be loved by her. My family will hug and bless me for the next leg of the journey. I will turn from them to embrace the Father. The embrace will reflect a deeper encounter with love than I had known, although glimpses of this love sustained me to this point. I fully expect to be overwhelmed by this experience and swept up in bliss.
I am enjoying this season of life in a way that is difficult to describe. Knowing that my days are numbered doesn’t inhibit my joy but enhances it. Noticing everything, being thankful always, and leaving everything I have to give on the field all make up the essence of the good death to me. To paraphrase Peter Pan, the full experience of dying is “an awfully big adventure.”