Coping when all is loss

The new normal of this pandemic is challenging one of the most basic and distinctive aspects of our humanity, namely the need to share our grief and mourn alongside family and friends.

Surely one of the cruellest aspects of this present crisis is that those who die usually do so isolated from loved ones and that funerals are of necessity sparsely attended, socially distanced formalities. I think particularly of children, experiencing the sudden death of a beloved grandparent whom they haven’t been allowed to see for months. Death, it seems, has never been so sad.

At the same time, however, there is an unexpected aspect of all this for western societies in particular. Most people in our part of the world have until now chosen not to talk too much about death and have even tried to pretend it’s never going to happen. Despite recent welcome advances in end-of-life care and professional support for those who grieve, death has largely remained a taboo subject.

But no more. Suddenly we can’t avoid hearing of it and indeed facing it at every turn. The daily government briefings and news bulletins about people’s personal experience of loss confront us again and again with our own mortality.

Surprisingly even Christians can struggle with the vocabulary of death. As life expectancy has risen this century with improved lifestyles and medical care, most people are staying active into old age. It seems that even those who believe in the One who died tragically young, have imagined that death is not something they need to think about.

This contrasts strongly with how believers have written and talked about death throughout most of the past two millennia, during which short lives were far from uncommon and death was a very present reality. Benedict in his rule counsels his followers ‘to keep death always before their eyes’.

Christianity has much to say about death and dying – it talks of our sin bringing spiritual death to our souls; Christ calls us to take up our cross each day and die to self; and, even on Easter Day, Christians proclaim mysteriously that (in the words of Gregory of Nazianzus), ‘we have been crucified with Christ, buried with him and now are waking with him from the sleep of death’.

Surely if there is any group who should be able to offer insights into death and dying, loss and grief, then it should be those who believe in Jesus, who said he was the resurrection and the life.

Every death diminishes us all. And every death breaks God’s heart. When Lazarus died, John in his gospel tells us that ‘Jesus wept’ – the Greek literally says ‘he groaned angrily with sorrow’ – such was the impact of just one death on the Godhead.

Our Christian faith assures us that we are never alone in our grief but that God shares our sorrow and, as the psalmist puts it, God catches and bottles all our tears and it is all recorded in God’s book of remembrance (Psalm 56:8).

God encourages us to mourn and to remember, and God is committed to being with us and bringing us through. God says this to us most profoundly and clearly in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. It is the only honest response we can give to a world reeling from the devastation brought by this virus.

Christianity is brutally honest about death. It is a messy and painful affair. Yet in the very thick of it, we can nevertheless be certain that death does not have the last word. The cross turned its cruel full stop into a comma; a painful pause before a new beginning. Again, borrowing words from the Psalms, ‘weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning’ (Psalm 30:5).