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…