Death

Awaiting the End

At the end of our lives the yearning for God innate in all of us is more and more revealed.

The Final Countdown

We like to have countdowns to special dates: Christmas, New Year’s, etc. But we can’t have a countdown to the date of our death.

Human Composting: The Ultimate Denial of the Soul

From time immemorial, people have buried the dead. Sometimes they even risked their lives to carry out this most basic duty. In times of persecution, for example, Christians put themselves in great danger to recover the bodies of martyrs so that they might receive the holy rites of Christian burial. The Old Testament recounts the … Read more

Keeping in Touch with Death

When my friend’s little brother died, his family performed rites that are rare nowadays. They brought the body of their boy back home. They dressed him and laid him out for a wake in their dining room. They built his coffin and carved his headstone. They dug his grave and buried him with their own … Read more

How Do I Want to Be Dead?

The July 9 New York Times Sunday Review contained a feature by Richard Conniff. Driven by his research on English moles, he visited the grave of Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows. What impressed Conniff, and inspired his op-ed, was that Grahame’s grave was in both “a graveyard and a wildlife refuge. … Read more

On the Death of a Brother-In-Law

My brother-in-law, Jerome Vertin, died in Chesapeake, Virginia, in hospice care at about five A.M. on February 25. My sister, his wife of sixty-three years, was with him when he died. She said that he seemed most peaceful in death. I thought: “This is the reality that marriage vows prepare a couple for, the ’till … Read more

When the Dead Go Home to God

When my mother-in-law died, following a long and unhappy illness, her passing was seen by all as a blessed and merciful release. Free at last—that was the universal refrain among family and friends. It was not just the burden of old age, whose cumulative debilities wore her down, but the ravages of Alzheimer’s, which left … Read more

Teaching Death to Nursing Students with Leo Tolstoy

 To make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. ~ T. S. Eliot We’ve come to the close of our annual month-long reminder of the obvious: We’re all going to die. It’s a truism that we learned as kids in Sunday school and CCD—the first of the four … Read more

Thoughts on Euthanasia Prompted by My Uncle’s Death

My French uncle, whom I always knew as “l’oncle Jean,” recently died. I was struck once again by the dignity and mercy of a Christian death, despite the accompanying pain and anguish. Unlike Brittany Maynard from Oregon who, suffering from terminal brain-cancer, euthanized herself, and unlike “Laura” from Belgium who, though physically healthy, intends to … Read more

Death in Kristin Lavransdatter

Those who have read Kristin Lavransdatter, the epic trilogy by Catholic convert and Norwegian Nobel Prize winner Sigrid Undset, have read it at least twice. This formidable tale of farming and holy pilgrimages and family in the shadow of white-peaked mountains hurtles the reader into all the pain and love and last rites of death—death, … Read more

The Witness of Heroism

“In my beginning is my end.”   ∼ T.S. Eliot In a passage often cited from the Pensees, which the author sets down in grim and graphic detail, Pascal summons the reader to reflect on the awful finality of death.   “The last act is bloody,” he tells us, “however fine the rest of the play. … Read more

What Do We Say to the Bereaved?

When U.S. photojournalist Jim Foley, following nearly two years of close captivity by the terrorist thugs of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), was finally and gruesomely decapitated—a video of his execution having been posted online—the bereaved family received the usual outpouring of sympathy and support from a civilized world outraged by this … Read more

The Gift of Purgatory

The room is air conditioned, and cold. Admittedly, the heat outside is uncomfortable, but the chill inside manages to be worse. Unnatural. Sterile. Like the air churning out of the vents, the atmosphere feels forced. Two greeters, with expressions and attitudes to match the manufactured climate, greet my parents and me as we enter. One … Read more

Life as Preparation for Death

Shortly before taking leave of this world, Sir Winston Churchill, who had lived a very long and illustrious life, was reportedly asked about the state of his soul: “I am perfectly ready,” he said, “to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” Only someone of … Read more

Search for the Secret of Life and Death

Editor’s note: The following column by Stratford Caldecott first appeared May 16, 2014 on his blog Beauty in Education. Why can’t we all live forever? It seems a terrible flaw in the fabric of the world—that death haunts us from the moment we are born, injecting a note of tragedy into everything. And yet how … Read more

When Those We Love Die

In thinking about the destiny of those who die, the course of their final trajectory beyond the grave, it is always unwise to make predictions about the precise place awaiting them on the other side.  How can anyone, in the absence of a sudden sunburst from above, possibly know?  Unless one were fully omniscient—which is … Read more

Easter Hope Amid the Horror of Death

As anyone with half-a-brain knows, success in the publishing world is measured by the number of books sold.  What many do not know, of course, is that there are only two categories that perennially produce best sellers.  Cookbooks and diet books.  How wonderfully self-cancelling they are, too.  While the one will tell you what to … Read more

The Importance of Stan Musial’s Funeral Mass

Stan Musial passed away on January 19, 2013 at 92 years of age.  His wife of nearly 72 years died the previous year.  Thousands of friends filed through the Cathedral Basilica in St. Louis during the six-hour public visitation.  The funeral Mass for the man who played 22 years in a Cardinal uniform was presided … Read more

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