How to Die Properly

In turn of the century letter-writing—I can’t exactly point to where—I have read on “dying a good death”. In a general sense this means dying under favorable circumstances, and most of us would take the phrase to mean favorable material circumstances: living to a prosperous old age, free of disease or dysfunction, in the company of friends and family.

The Christianized version of this good death is not so much of an easy determination. The material world can often parallel the metaphysical, but not always. If the premature-seeming, violent deaths of God’s handpicked in scripture don’t come to mind, you may be reminded of Wormwood’s Patient in The Screwtape Letters. The Patient was killed during “the war,” yet he had stored up enough of his life under God’s graces to be considered a healthy death. Sometimes He allows men to live to their natural ends, others He would cut short. But again, those durations are evaluations based on a frame of reference calibrated to our human eyes, not our metaphysical senses.

This idea of filling up a storehouse with the work of the proper Christian life in this world is scattered throughout scripture in different ways, and it can be best thought of as a field that produces crops. The Christian is a field that allowed itself to be farmed—because this field, left to itself, would not accomplish much in the farmer’s eyes, but a field intentionally cultivated produces food for humans in countless ways of which the farmer only knows about. The field is privy to a kind of narrative of the food, but in its finiteness it can only apprehend fragments of it.

What other fields perceive is a mixed bag (here the analogy starts to come apart, I think): they either see an even smaller picture of what the field produces, or if they are insiders to the dying’s life they may see even more ways in which the produce has fed others. Consider how an author’s readers enjoy his works in different ways than the author does, or can. Completing a novel brings a manner of satisfaction to the author, while the readers, after reading it, derive a different satisfaction. The source is the same but the experience of pleasure is much different.

It’s not a stretch of ability for the dying to understand the basic idea of what he has done, but privileged insight into his works, enjoyed by those who know him, is one of the greatest blessings. It’s a curtain-peek at the a great swath of the scope of another life, seeing infested with the glow of divine fingerprints.

Photo by Rockin Robin.