When Is the Last Time You Thought of the Fact That You Will Die?
An Unpleasant Topic
When is the last time you thought of the fact that you will die? When did you last have a conversation with someone on the subject of death? Have you ever seen anyone die? Ever had someone die in your home? When did you last walk through a cemetery or attend a funeral? Have you read any book, watched any movie, even listened to any sermon that deals with the problem of death? I’m not talking about death by violence or death by accident or death by rare and virulent disease. I’m talking about death as a basic human experience—as basic as birth, eating, and sleeping.
Death is a fundamental human experience, uniting all humans across time and space, race and class. But in our time and place, death isn’t something we think about very often, if at all. The remarkable achievements of modern medicine have pushed death further and further back in the average Western person’s life span. We enjoy better disease prevention, better pharmaceutical treatments, and better emergency care than any other society in history. That’s a wonderful blessing, no question. But it comes with a major side effect: many of us can afford to live most of our lives as if death isn’t our problem.
Death is no less inevitable than it’s ever been, but many of us don’t have to see it or even think about it as a daily presence in our lives. When people die, it is more likely than not in a medical facility, cordoned off from where we live, a sanitized, carefully managed, even industrial process that occurs when professionals decide to stop giving care.
Remember Death
Matthew McCullough
Claiming that the best way to find meaning in life is to get honest about death, this book aims to show readers the practical effect of remembering their mortality in order to make the most of their lives today.
Death is still inevitable, but it has become bizarre. Death has also become a taboo of sorts, not to be discussed in polite company. We label such talk as “morbid.” It’s a pejorative term applied to words or ideas that are unusually dark—distortions of the truth as we wish to see it. To bring up the subject of death is too often awkward at best, shameful at worst.
But try as we might to avoid the subject, every one of us experiences death’s shadow every day. It shows up in our insecurities about who we are and why we matter. It shows up in our dissatisfaction with the things we believe should make us happy. And it shows up in our pain over the loss of every good thing that doesn’t last long enough. We can’t avoid death and its effects. We shouldn’t avoid talking about it either.
Our detachment from death puts us out of line with the perspective of the Bible. Throughout its pages, whether law or history or poetry or prophecy or gospel or letter, death is a fixation far more common than in our lives today. For biblical authors an awareness of death and its implications for life is crucial for a life of wisdom.
Our detachment from death puts us out of line with the perspective of the Bible.
Consider, for example, the prayer of Psalm 90: “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12). That’s a euphemistic way of saying “teach us to recognize our death.” The prayer comes as a sort of hinge between the two parts of the psalm. The first part focuses on human limitations compared with the vastness of God. For God time is nothing. “From everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Ps. 90:2). “For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night” (Ps. 90:4).
But for us humans, under sin and judgment, time destroys everything. Our lives are “like a dream.” Our lives are like the grass: “in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers” (Ps. 90:5–6). At best, “the years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away” (Ps. 90:10). The psalmist’s prayer for remembrance of death is a prayer for a life of humility, a perspective that understands our limits and the insurmountable difference between God and us. But this prayer sets up another theme in the second part of the psalm. Immediately after praying that God would teach us to number our days, the psalmist prays that God would make us glad all our days with the richness of his love: “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days” (Ps. 90:14).
I believe those two prayers go hand in hand: teach me to live with the reality of my death so that I can live in the gladness of your love. Before I can be astounded by God’s love—before I will see the beauty of his love more clearly than the problems of my life—I must see my desperate need of it and my thorough unworthiness of it. When God teaches us to number our days, he protects us from prideful self-deception and enables us to live with genuine, realistic gladness.
This article is adapted from Remember Death: The Surprising Path to Living Hope by Mathew McCullough.
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