The last enemy to be destroyed is death by Philippa Linton



Little drops of hope in a vase ... image from Pixabay

I have lost several precious people over the last few years. 

What a strange expression that is.  ‘I have lost someone …’ as if you’ve mislaid them somehow.  Even now I can find it hard to say that someone I loved has died.  It sounds so stark and blunt.  I never thought, before I was hit by the juggernaut of bereavement, that I would be coy about the language of death.  And yet I still can be.

My birth mother, with whom I was reunited in 1997, died in August 2010.  I am so grateful for the years I had knowing her, and sad that we didn't have longer.

My housemate of 22 years died of cancer in April 2012.  I sat vigil by her bedside, with her family and friends, and saw her the day before she died.

My beloved adoptive father, who was my father in every sense of the word, died in January 2014 after four agonising years of vascular dementia.  I sat with my father’s body a couple of hours after he died, together with my mother and my eldest sister, and that is too sacred and powerful an experience for me to put into words.  All I can say is: Death has a presence.  Not necessarily a horrible presence, but a presence of icy solemnity and majesty which swallowed words, except for my adoptive mother’s anointed prayer which fell beautifully into the silence.

A dear friend and colleague died in December 2014 at the age of 44.  Cancer again.  She was beautiful, inside and out, and I still miss her dearly.  There is nothing fair about death.  It is not fair that someone so young and lovely should die when she still had so much living – and loving – to do.

Then there’s my first love from long ago, who killed himself in August 2002.  I hadn’t seen him for at least two decades, so this tragedy affected me less than it would have done had I still been in touch with him, but now and then I remember him with love and sorrow ... and ponder how weird it is that I’ve outlived him.  

Death is no respecter of anyone.  It levels us all.  It’s the utter finality of death that is so difficult.  There’s no softening the blow.  That unique, special person is never, ever, coming back.

The mind can play extraordinary tricks on you when a loved one dies.  For a week after my housemate’s death, my sense of unreality and denial was so strong that if she’d walked in through our front door, I would not have blinked.

And then there was the silence.  The silence in the house after she died was indescribable.

For my father, who lived a long and fulfilling life serving the God he loved, and who was 89 when he died, death came as a mercy – even, one might say, as a friend.  But when babies and children die … when loved ones are snuffed out cruelly in accidents, or murdered … then death feels like an utter outrage, a violent tearing in the fabric of the universe.  One of the most dissonant, jolting experiences of my life was seeing my housemate’s coffin at her funeral.  I could almost have risen from the pew and shouted, 'No, this is all wrong!  That’s my friend in there!'   That was the first time I truly felt death to be an enemy.

 
The Bible doesn’t sugar-coat this.  Jesus himself cried when he saw death, when he wept by Lazarus' tomb – the one who said he was the resurrection and the life, the one who was going to raise his friend Lazarus, the one who would himself conquer death.  HE wept.  This is what makes the Incarnation so extraordinary, so radical: Jesus is 100% divine but also 100% human, feeling everything we feel, including our pain and despair at the cruel blows that death can deal.  

1 Corinthians 15:26 says:  ‘ The last enemy to be destroyed is death.’

This powerful hope, made possible by the Resurrection, sustains me.  I still fear death and the process of dying, since I’m only human. The risen Christ understands that fear, since he went through it himself.  It is raw faith, and nothing else, that enables me to acknowledge that death is a defeated enemy.

John Donne’s magnificent sonnet ‘Death, be not proud’ (Holy Sonnet 10) says it all:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die.