How Seeing Death Changed Me

Death. Is there anything more strange and terrifying? We fight against it with cutting-edge medicine, science, and technology and yet it always wins. Always. Yet for something that is inevitable, we spend most of our lives ignoring it and then, when it does happen, trying to make it as clean and clinical as possible.

My first experiences with death outside of the clinical confines of medical facilities or the tidy professionalism of funeral homes came when I was a young pastor in my late 20s. I visited a church member who had been fighting cancer for years, and his battle was nearing the end. I had visited him in the hospital many times during his treatments, but now he was home, and the end was nearing. I was struck by the warmth and familiarity of his home, and he passed his final days in a place that was comfortable and comforting. As a young minister who was relatively unacquainted with death, I did my best to be a source of comfort and encouragement even though the contrast between my life experience and the experience of my parishioner could hardly have been greater.

My second experience was again with a church member. I was a bit further along in my tenure as a pastor and had a few more funerals under my belt. But, leading a funeral service is very different than being there with a family in the moments that immediately surround death. Shortly after my family had returned home from a weekend away, I received a call saying that this parishioner had passed away. He and his wife lived just down the street from us, so I walked across…