A Question of Death & Life A Catholic Perspective
by Fr Neil McNicholas
All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society
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CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY publishers to the holy see
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Contents An Invitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Denial of Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Death: A Friendly Companion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Talking about Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 A Continuum of Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Suicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Funerals: Planning and Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Funerals: Symbols and Practical Points . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
All rights reserved. Published 2017. Earlier editions published under the title A Catholic Approach to Dying, by The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society, 40-46 Harleyford Road, London SE11 5AY Tel: 020 7640 0042 Fax: 020 7640 0046. Š 2017 The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society.
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ISBN 978 1 78469 188 2
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An Invitation As Christians we typically celebrate major life events with sacramental rites and the Catholic Church requires that specific periods of time are spent in preparation for those celebrations. Such programmes can be, as in the case of pre-baptismal instruction for parents, a matter of three or four weekly meetings or, as in the case of ordination, as long as six years – fulltime. However, when it comes to that major life event called death, typically we don’t do anything to prepare for it – at least not in a meaningful practical sense, though hopefully the practise of our faith provides a spiritual preparation even though we don’t always think about it in those terms. This booklet invites us to look at our attitudes towards death and to see if we can become a little more comfortable with the prospect of our death as a reality, and then to consider how that might affect, in a positive way, how we live our life – especially as people of faith. And as people of faith – specifically the Catholic faith, we also need to give some thought to practical considerations at the end of life and after death. Again, our ability to do this will depend on how well we have come to terms with the fact that one day we will die.
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In terms of my “qualifications” for writing a booklet of this sort, in 1975 I entered the Portland (Oregon) novitiate of the Society of Jesus to begin some eighteen months testing my experience of a vocation to the priesthood. In my second year as a novice, I was sent to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle – which had pioneered the then very new process of bone marrow transplantation as a treatment for leukaemia – to assist in the area of patient and family support and counselling. By way of preparing for the very real prospect of working with patients and their families for whom the procedure would not be successful, I began looking for books dealing with death, dying, bereavement and grief, only to discover (this was 1976) that very little was available. Thankfully that is no longer the case, but it’s still not a subject that people are typically falling over themselves to read about. Over the years I have given a number of seminars on the subject of death and dying – mostly in parish situations – and that was also the subject of a college course I took, and a component of the university degree that I studied for in the early 1980s. Ironically I had only just completed my degree when I was diagnosed with testicular cancer and found myself contemplating the subject of death from a very different perspective. In 1992 the CTS published the text of my seminars in the first version of this booklet, but this second edition is slightly different incorporating the
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pastoral experience gained since then. It’s also a little more reader-friendly than the seminar presentation. The original booklet was entitled Death: A Friendly Companion, a phrase borrowed from one of Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s books, and after you have finished reading this I hope you will be better able to see and accept death in that light.
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The Denial of Death Let’s begin with a story I’ve come across in more than one source, but here I’ll tell it the way it is told in Harriet Sarnoff Schiff’s book The Bereaved Parent: There is an old Syrian legend that tells of a beautiful youth, the son of the sultan, who dashed into his father’s palace in Damascus crying that he had to leave immediately for Baghdad. When the sultan asked the lad why he was in such haste the boy replied, “I just saw Death standing in the palace garden, and when he saw me, he stretched out his arms as if to threaten me. I must lose no time in escaping him.” Agreeing, the sultan gave the boy his swiftest horse. When he left, the ruler angrily stalked into his garden and demanded to know of Death how he dared to intimidate the son of the sultan. Death listened, astonished, and answered, “I assure you I did not threaten your son. I only threw up my arms in surprise at seeing him here because I have a rendezvous with him tonight in Baghdad.” The moral of the story is clear – no matter how we may try there is no escaping death. Indeed, from the moment we are born there is nothing more certain than the fact that
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one day we will die. The question then arises as to why, whether psychologically or emotionally, we try to avoid the reality of death? Putting it more bluntly: why are we afraid to die? Why are we afraid of death? None of us is immortal Part of the answer lies in our unconscious expectation of immortality – that part of our psyche that keeps kidding us into believing that we will live for ever. Woody Allen once famously said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve it by not dying!” The fear we experience is a very natural fear of the unknown. If we change jobs, or move house, or emigrate, or marry, there is an understandable tension in leaving behind the familiar, the comfortable, and launching out into the unknown. However, no matter how radical the decision or the commitment, there are all sorts of resources we can turn to and places we can go for advice and help. Even if we decide to go live and work on the other side of the world, we can always go and visit first to see whether we like it or not before we make a final decision. Not so with death. Death is the ultimate unknown – no one has been there and come back to tell us about it…no one, that is, except Jesus but even what he said, as recorded in Scripture, tends to be expressed through allegory and other literary forms so that we still can’t be entirely sure what to expect. All we have are ideas and concepts as in the
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Art Garfunkel song “Bright Eyes” (from the soundtrack of the film Watership Down). If you can possibly play the song as you read the lyrics you will find that it’s a beautiful piece of music to use as a reflection: Is it a kind of dream, floating out on the tide, following the river of death downstream… Oh is it a dream? There’s a fog along the horizon, a strange glow in the sky, and nobody seems to know where you go and what does it mean… Oh is it a dream? Bright eyes – burning like fire. Bright eyes – how can you close and fail? How can the light that burned so brightly suddenly burn so pale? Bright eyes. Is it a kind of shadow, reaching into the night, wandering over the hills unseen… Oh is it a dream? There’s a high wind in the trees, a cold sound in the air, and nobody ever knows when you go and where do you start… Oh into the dark.
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Facing up to the fear of death A man fears death because he fears the unknown. All that man can know is life, and death – it appears to him – is the opposite of life and as such remains dark and impenetrable. And so man shrinks from it in horror as from a fearful and obscene thing. But this is to be oblivious of the fact that Christ has come and said, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” Several other things Christ has said about death are all in terms of life, a terminology we can easily fathom. He has given us to understand that death is not the finish of life. It is the first split second of a new brighter life (Reflections by James Turro) The third century bishop and martyr, St Cyprian, once said in a sermon: We leave this world in the chains of necessity, rather than in willing obedience. We want to be honoured with the rewards of heaven by the God to whom we come against our will. Why then do we pray and ask that the kingdom of heaven should come, if captivity on earth delights us? Rather let us be ready for all that God’s will may bring, with an undivided heart, firm faith and rugged strength. Let us shut out any fear of death, and keep our mind on the immortality that follows death. Let us show that this is what we believe.
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Far removed from death One of the ways in which we tend to deal with our fear of death is by avoiding the subject at all costs. As we’ll see, we have turned this avoidance into quite an art. At one time such avoidance wouldn’t have been so easy. Infant mortality was high and people died at a much higher rate as a result of poor health care, poor working conditions and the effects of illnesses and diseases for which we now have treatments and cures. When people died, more often than not they died at home and someone in the neighbourhood would come round to lay out the body and prepare it for burial, and the funeral would leave from the house. In many respects death was very much a fact of life whereas nowadays it has become far more institutionalised, and as a result we are more sheltered from the reality of death. Many people now die in hospitals and nursing homes, and the funeral business now provides all the necessary services immediately following death with the body, in most cases, taken to a chapel of rest. I was absolutely amazed to hear a student in one of my university classes in America say that never in her twenty-one years had she been into a cemetery – but that’s how removed from death we have become. Ways we deal with death To cushion ourselves still further, we have devised an unbelievable number of euphemisms by way of what we
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might call ‘denial vocabulary’. Asked to write down all the words they can think of, people typically manage about ten or twelve (e.g. deceased, departed, passed away, expired). My own efforts produced around fifty! (See the appendix at the back of the booklet.) There can be few, if any, other words in the English language that have provoked such a prolific and creative exercise in avoidance. One of the strangest ways in which we deal with, or rather don’t deal with, the reality of death is by allowing ourselves to be entertained by it – and not just entertained as in sitting and watching but, as in the case of cartoons, laughing uproariously at them and at the horrendous things that happen to the characters. I have to admit that one of my favourites is the Road Runner. How many times in each story do we watch the coyote get flattened by rocks, blown up, knocked down, and go whistling down from cliffs to kick up a tiny cloud of dust on the canyon floor hundreds of feet below? But, of course, no lasting injuries result and no one ever actually dies. We laugh, I’m sure, because the storyline is funny, but also because the characters constantly cheat death and bounce right back again, and that appeals to our sense of immortality. Whilst our social conscience is beginning to react to the excessive portrayal of violence, death also features quite prominently in many of the films and TV programmes that we watch – not to mention computer games. Why are we comfortable with death in this context? Well, first
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of all, because most of it is fiction and therefore it isn’t really happening, but also perhaps because death usually happens to the “bad guys” – and they deserve it. But let a “good guy” die and that really hits home. There’s also a lot of death on TV news broadcasts, but, because we watch so much make-believe death on TV, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that on the news we are watching actual death, and seeing real blood and real dead bodies. It might also seem unreal, or at least nonthreatening, because usually it is happening somewhere else to someone else. It’s only when horrific things such as accidents, disasters, murders or acts of terrorism happen in our own communities that the reality hits home precisely because it’s on our doorstep. Our relationship with death Ask yourself: who dies? Our most immediate answers are likely to be “old people”, “sick people”, “the terminally ill”, in other words people we expect to die – and it’s generally always other people. Did I answer, “I will die”? It’s because we’re not comfortable with that answer that we react the way we do when, as we’ve just mentioned, death hits close to home. Death suddenly becomes threatening because whatever the situation, it could just as easily have involved me. Our answer also reflects something we mentioned earlier – our mistaken concept that we are immortal. Even if we manage to think about how things
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will be after our death, in our mind’s eye we’re still there, we are a spectator, we are still around. One of Tom Stoppard’s characters gets into a very funny piece of mental rambling on this subject – this is just an excerpt: Did you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it? I mean, you think of it like being alive in a box. You keep forgetting to take into account that you’re dead – which should make all the difference shouldn’t it? I mean, you’d never know you were in a box, it would be just like being asleep in a box – not that I’d like to sleep in a box mind you, not without any air. You’d wake up dead for a start and then where would you be? (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead) Life expectancy versus life expectation Why can’t life be forty or twenty or even ten years? Why do we feel threatened when people die at a younger age? The answer is probably, as we said above, that we expect people to die when they are old and, of course, statistically most people in the western world do reach at least the “three score and ten” of the psalm. However it’s precisely that expectation that causes us to react the way we do when a person dies at a much younger age. The lack of quantity (of years) tends to overshadow the aspect of quality (of life) – something we’ll return to later. We can’t afford to
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allow ourselves to become complacent and, depending on how old we are, to expect that we’ll have a whole lifetime ahead of us. Statistically that might be a possibility, even a probability, but there are no written guarantees and nowhere to ask for our money back if it doesn’t happen! Scripture You may want to reflect on these passages of Scripture: John 11:21-27 John 14:1-4 1 Corinthians 15:51-55 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 (Note that in this passage it doesn’t say “don’t grieve” but “don’t grieve like the other people who have no hope”.)
Revelation 21:1-4 Revelation 22:3-5
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