In the first seven years at my parish, I have commended to God the souls of over 40 people. The first ten came in such rapid succession that I looked at the aging congregation and realized I needed to deepen my understanding of dying, death, and grief, both biologically and spiritually speaking. After seeking out several possibilities of continuing education, I became a certified death doula and conscious dying educator. One of the greatest gifts that came from that training has been a reformed vocabulary for matters of finitude. How we speak of death is a witness to how we think about it, especially in theological terms.
Rachel Mann’s recent article in The Christian Century speaks to how death-phobic Western culture contaminates our understanding of dying and death such that we employ euphemisms to hide the fact of our mortality. In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker wrote about our compulsion to set up “immortality projects” to deny death. Stephen Jenkinson may have been alluding to Becker’s idea as he wrote about the Western obsession with success in medical interventions with terminal illness. He argues in Die Wise that the “medical-industrial complex” identifies death as a failure and will go to great lengths to avoid it. Often these so-called heroic measures fail a dying person’s need to attend to dying in a loving and conscious manner. Furthermore, this denies the patient’s family and community valuable time to love that person into death. The medical establishment is so busy helping people not die that it ends up sentencing the terminally ill to not live. This fails everyone.
The denial continues even after our family and friends have died and we have laid their bodies to rest. We use words and phrases, such as passed, as Mann pointed out, to mask the stark reality of their absence among us. The word lost is one such euphemism that shows up as a symptom of our phobia. A careful look on the use of this word ought to make Christ-followers take notice of how we too are contaminated by Western culture’s failure to see the Divine when death and grief are present.
“I lost my mom ten years ago.” “We lost four members of our church this spring.” My question is simple: Have we really lost anyone when they die? My answer is unequivocal: No. When I hear people say, “We lost so and so,” I want to offer encouragement with the reminder from the Eucharistic Prayer: “Life is changed, not ended.” (BCP, p. 382) When we shift our attention from loss to change, we see an opportunity to understand death differently. This, in turn, allows us to experience the healing gifts of grief that follow the sober recognition of the thin veil that separates us from our loved ones.
When someone dies, the body ceases its metabolic processes. Persons of myriad faiths assert that the spirit moves from the body into another phase of living: an afterlife, rebirth, or something else beyond this life.As Christ-followers, we believe that God receives the spirit or soul “into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light” (BCP, p. 499). Mom isn’t lost at all; she is with God. Our friends in Christ find “rest from their labors.” We have one life, and it is lived in various phases: before birth, as Psalm 139:13-16 tells us, this life, when we praise God and serve the Divine’s reconciling dream, and after bodily death, when we rest under the shadow of the Almighty’s wing “in light perpetual.” In every case, Christ-followers believe that nothing can separate us from the love of God. If we believe this, then we do not lose friends and family when they die; we release them to dwell in the fullness of that love.
Ironically, our usage of the word lost to speak of one who has died forgets its deep etymological beginnings. Lost comes from the Indo-European root lau, which means gain or reward. It comes to us in English via the Germanic guerdon, which has the same meaning, but also adds to it the notion of profit. A closer look at how lost evolves reveals that in Latin, lost comes from luere — to release from debt, and in Greek, it comes from lýein — to untie and set free. The English derivation arrives at lost, as in perish or destroy, by way of analogy. “The knight’s reward for his betrayal was the sword,” for example. How far this word has travelled from its origins of reward to its antonym lost, the isolated, cut off meaning of it we use today!
Would that Christ-followers might engage lost’s deep time beginnings. Our theology certainly speaks to reward and being set free. In my observation of and companionship through many seasons of grief, those who use the word lost are those who have an uncomfortable relationship with grief. I’ve learned that when we use the word lost to describe the condition of our dead ones we are, in fact, speaking to our own condition. We are lost without the presence of that beloved. We have lost our moorings in their absence. Lost speaks to our grief. Using it to describe what has happened to our dead pushes away grief. We are as grief-phobic as we are death-phobic. The use of the word lost when death comes puts our focus on the one who rests, not on our aching hearts. Is this the best way to remember our dead? Are we letting them rest? Praising them instead, which is what grief really is, provides the living and the dead with greater honoring.
In The Smell of Rain on Dust Martín Prechtel writes, “Grief is praise of those we have lost. … If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love. We are not praising the life we have been given in order to love. If we do not praise whom we miss, we are ourselves in some way dead. So, grief and praise make us alive.” The Divine demands a sacrifice of our love. Loving the dead by remembering them, no matter how our heart aches at first, is such a sacrifice. This is what heals that person-shaped hole. This is what softens us to the grief afoot in others’ lives. This is what brings more and more healing into the world.
Grief rewards us with richer life. Mann pointed out that resurrection is predicated on death. For a religion whose center is a death that brings abundant and eternal life, Christ-followers require greater faith that indeed nothing separates us from God’s love, neither grief nor death. Is this not our hope after all? To live with confidence as all of creation — living and dead alike — awaits the completion of God’s purpose for the world. Perhaps remembering that we share with our beloved dead in this waiting for the time when we will all be raised up in the fullness of our being to dwell with Christ in reconciled communion can offer us a sense of closeness with them. Engaging our religious imagination just a little allows us to see that we can continue to share communion with them as we look forward to the resurrection.
What might we say in place of “lost”? As much as it aches, we might say in the wake of a beloved’s death: “This person lives in my heart.” We could make a theological declaration, right there in the middle of a mundane conversation with “He has gone to glory” or “She is enjoying the fullness of God’s presence.” There is always the matter-of-fact phrase: “They died.” One might even be bold in faith and proclaim, “I await with them the coming of Christ.” Do we talk like this? Some of us do. In South I regularly hear among African American friends, “He has gone on to glory. We had his homegoing last March.” “Homegoing” — what a gentle, praise and grief-filled word to capture the rite of passage from this phase of living to the next. Let alternatives to death-and grief-denying language come from the heart.
“Do not fear,” we read time again in the Bible. It’s time we become better followers and witnesses to that commandment. Our dead are never lost. Quite the opposite: they have arrived in their spiritual home. There is much to gain from finding the gifts in grieving those whom we love but see no longer.
