ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Available for over a year

I wonder how many conversations have been started in the past few days by a comment on the Today programme by Professor Karol Sikora that ideally he would like to die in his sleep. This followed a discussion about how it has been recently proven that a healthy diet and lifestyle alone cannot be guaranteed to protect us from contracting cancer. We don't talk about death very much, possibly because, unlike childhood, school, erotic attraction and food, we haven't ever experienced it personally. Having nothing to say about it by way of empirical insight, we consign it to a mental pending file which is opened only in emergencies. Not so Norah, a friend of mine then in her early fifties who underwent a mastectomy. Before the operation she said to the surgeon that if he discovered that there were secondaries, she would prefer to die with dignity soon rather than endure a regime of therapies which would only offer her a few more months of life with more discomfort than pleasure. The surgeon expressed surprise. He was not used to hearing someone speak so frankly about her death. I wish another friend of mine, Jason – who is an oncologist – could have had Norah as his patient. The last time I spoke to him he was exasperated at how to tell a terminally ill man in his 90's, who expected the hospital to prevent him from dying, that medicine could do no more. What is it about death, my death, your death, that makes us so afraid of the topic that at this moment you might feel like turning down the volume? Sometimes Western societies seem on a fast track to denial. Funeral services which acknowledge grief are replaced by memorial services which remember the good times. Does that mean that grief is now also taboo? Rather than say that so and so died, we are more likely to say that so and so 'passed' or 'passed on'. Fair enough, but passed on to where? This is not the moment when I am going to say that Christianity has all the answers, because in honesty neither Christianity nor Judaism has much to say about the afterlife. Rather I'm drawn to a conversation I had over 30 years ago. An elderly man asked me to visit him. He wanted me to take his funeral, and more than that he had decided what I should preach on. It was to be 1st Corinthians 13, St Paul's great hymn to love, but it wasn't verses about love he wanted. It was the phrase: now I know partially, but then I will know completely, just as I am known. Whether or not I'll die in the night, I hope I die with that beautifully mysterious prospect in my mind – that in death we pass from a world of incompleteness to a place of total fulfilment.