This essay is a Cover Story selection, a weekly feature highlighting the top picks from the editors of America Media.
“This is enough, O Lord! Take my life…” (1 Kgs 19:4)
My plan was not to read three books in a row about death. But I just did.
If I sound like I am obsessed with death, I’m not. I find that as we grow older, though, our relationship with death grows more intimate. People we know die. People we love die. Gradually we become the oldest people we know. At the same time, we are ever more aware of the human body’s fragility and encroaching mortality, especially ours.
People we admire die. I was casually acquainted with the author of the first book I read: Richard Gaillardetz. We shared a publisher and once spoke about how we each had four kids and had written a book about marriage. He was an acclaimed theologian and professor, and I often attended his talks at the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress. I was sad to learn of his diagnosis of stage four pancreatic cancer.
His last book, While I Breathe, I Hope, is subtitled “A Mystagogy of Dying.” Written as a series of reflections while Dr. Gaillardetz was dying, it was published posthumously. I expected this book to be deeply theological and carefully researched, as all his writing was. It is, but it is also a moving exploration of doubt and faith, poetry and poignancy, gratitude and letting go. The brutally physical and the tenderly spiritual walk hand-in-hand with him through his final months.
“I am walking toward death daily in the company of saints, past and present, heroic and ordinary,” Dr. Gaillardetz wrote. “It has been enough.” This last work is a fitting coda to a life well-lived and a death well-accepted.
I savored this book in small sacred bites, finding it touching and thought-provoking. It is honest and philosophical in the face of sadness and loss, although I suspect Dr. Gaillardetz underestimated his legacy. “Put bluntly, after suitable mourning, the world will go on after I die,” he wrote. It will—we know in our hearts that it will for all of us—but a world without his presence is poorer indeed, especially for his loved ones, but also for his readers.
With my heart full of Rick Gaillardetz’s sustaining scholarship and faith, I next read In My Time of Dying, by Sebastian Junger. Mr. Junger is a celebrated journalist who has reported from war zones. This book, however, is a personal and visceral account of a health crisis that should have killed him. I have always appreciated Mr. Junger’s writing, but this book interested me because although Mr. Junger calls himself an atheist, he describes his encounter with his long-deceased father while he himself lay near death. The book’s subtitle covers his reason for writing it: “How I Came Face-to-Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.” I navigated through this brief book in one sitting, even though it is heavy with medical research and the language of physics, neither of which I find easy to follow. It also offers a comprehensive bibliography. Mr. Junger describes in graphic detail how, through fate or luck or both, he survived a ruptured aneurysm in a pancreatic artery—again the pancreas—which required delicate emergency surgery and the transfusion of 10 units of blood.
The contrast of an investigative journalist delving into his near-death experience with a theologian leaning into an eternal afterlife made my brain spin in a good way. Mr. Junger felt himself hovering in a vision between a black pit on his left side and his dead physicist father on his right side. The darkness was pulling him. His father reassured him. “There’s nothing to be scared of,” his father said. “Don’t fight it. I’ll take care of you.”
When Mr. Junger awoke from surgery, he told the nurse caring for him how scary it was that he had almost died. “Instead of thinking of it as something scary, try thinking of it as something sacred,” she said. When he tried to find the nurse later to ask her about that advice, no one knew who she was. It was as though she never existed.
Mr. Junger’s story is not one of conversion but of the consciousness of mystery, of not knowing. He answers no questions but poses them with grace and the gradual acceptance that there are no scientific, concretely satisfying answers. And aren’t these the questions we faithful share, about the existence of the soul, of our beloved dead, of heaven, of God, of something sacred? Mr. Junger’s body heals, but his mind still wonders. His final word for his readers: Donate blood as often as you can. Your blood can save lives and make you part of something bigger.
The third book in my stack of death was Faith, Hope and Carnage, by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan, which is actually a book-length interview of the musician Mr. Cave, whose music I love, by the journalist Mr. O’Hagan. Mr. Cave begins by saying that he loathes interviews, and then bares his heart and soul to Mr. O’Hagan’s questions for nearly 300 pages. Mr. Cave doesn’t talk about death as much as he addresses grief, the pool that the still-living are immersed in after a death: Mr. Cave’s teenage son, Arthur, died from a fall from a cliff, so he comes from the experience that every parent dreads. He equates grief to an experience of God, that when you grieve, “you are taken to the very limits of suffering…. Everything seems so fragile and precious and heightened, and the world and the people in it seem so endangered, and yet so beautiful…. It actually feels like God and grief are somehow intertwined. It feels that, in grief, you draw closer to the veil that separates this world from the next.”
You might not expect such naked spirituality from a bad-boy singer and performer—his band is called Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds—but Mr. Cave speaks eloquently of how his lost son inhabits his songwriting and his imagination. His loss has led him to author “The Red Hand Files,” a sort of online advice column in which he answers questions from fans about just about everything: grief and creativity, music and inspiration, love and life.
As I read these three books, I felt that their authors, theologian and journalist and musician, wrote from both sides of the veil. One is taken in death, one escapes death, and one deals with the pain of a child’s death. All three offer crucial insights into our humanity, our mortality and our glimpse of eternity. We are all here now in this life, but we recognize death. We take this life for granted even as we know its end is both inevitable and random. When someone we love dies, they take a hunk of our heart to the other side of the veil. Yet we keep on living with a wounded heart. The pain of lost love can concentrate the joy of having had that love. Grief and death can sharpen our focus on life and love.
We all know what life is like. Some of us know what death is like. As these writers use their gifts to articulate their stories, they illuminate the truths we hold in common that sometimes hide in the corners of our souls. They lift the hem of the veil just a little. They give us hope and sorrow and everything in between. This reader is grateful.
