How to face the space of death

Losing family and friends across a life, leads Natalie Garrett to navigate the space of death we all face. Part of the How to Die Well series.

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

An experimental image mixes distance people with watery paint-like filters of green .

Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

Death is something I’ve thought about quite a lot. As a bereaved friend, granddaughter, niece and daughter. Also, as an Anglican priest who has pastoral responsibility for those who are grieving and who conducts funerals. And as the mother of children who live in a vicarage and hear a lot about Mummy and Daddy doing funerals, too. Death is a part of our life in a way it doesn’t seem to be in a lot of families.

My first experience of death was when my grandfather died; I think I was about six. My memories of it are mostly about how the adults behaved. I remember, with uncharacteristic clarity, the evening when Grandma came to tell us that Grandad had died. I don’t remember what she said but I remember the feeling in the room. I remember it feeling as if someone had sucked all the air out, as if we were floating in a strange and uncomfortable space. I remember sitting in the kitchen with my mother not knowing the rules of engagement for this situation and feeling scared by that.

And in my experience, over the many years since then and in many different situations, I think most people faced with death for the first-time experience that same fear of not knowing how to be in the space of death; “I don’t know what to say”…

While I was a student, I had a friend who was the only Christian any of us knew. He also had cancer and didn’t have long to live. He made the choice do what people his age who didn’t have a death sentence to carry around with them were doing and went to Uni. He was one of the bravest people any of us had ever met. And at his funeral, a whole load of us from Uni turned up to pay tribute to this amazing young man who had touched so many lives by the way he had so courageously lived with death.

I could hold that space that I had been so afraid of all those years ago; I could give form and shape to the place of that which we must all face but which we all avoid so passionately in our western culture.

One of my daughter’s godmothers died of bowel cancer. She was one of the most faithful Christians I’ve ever known. When she was diagnosed, the whole church prayed for her healing. But the cancer grew and the chances of survival shrank. But wow did she use her last few months, weeks, days well. She wasn’t afraid of dying so she talked openly about it to everyone and the healing that came from how she lived then was powerful and widespread. She was an incredibly organised person and wanted to make sure she tied up all possible loose ends, like selling her house. She told with such joy about the conversation she had with the estate agent who came round to value her house who asked all the usual questions, “So are you looking to move soon? Where are you going?” I can only imagine his face as she answered with complete honesty about where she knew she was going. And I remember, with a powerful mixture of emotions, the conversation I had with her when I went to say goodbye. “I’ll see you there.” She said as I closed the door behind me.

Several decades after that visit from my grandmother, as a grown up and now a Christian, I had the privilege of conducting my grandmother's funeral. Grandma had been such a huge and influential part of my life and it was unthinkable that I should lead the service and not be allowed to be a grieving granddaughter – but it was even more unthinkable to risk someone else doing it, in case they didn’t do it “well”. I visited her in a Chapel of Rest, a couple of days before the service, so that I could say what I needed to say and cry as much as I was able. As I led the service and thus guided my family through the process of saying goodbye to the matriarch of our clan, I could hold that space that I had been so afraid of all those years ago; I could give form and shape to the place of that which we must all face but which we all avoid so passionately in our western culture. Because as a Christian, I know something, I know Someone, bigger than death.

Death seems to be the final taboo of our culture, the most intimate and unmentionable part of life. Which means we’re not very good at death. And a good death is a beautiful thing.

There’s a famous story in the Bible when Jesus’ friend Lazarus died. Jesus isn’t there while Lazarus is ill, in fact he isn’t there when he dies – he turns up four days later. In the Jewish culture of which Jesus was a part, there were all sorts of rules to comply with around death and one of the traditions was to gather the local community, including professional mourners to weep and wail, to encourage the expression of emotion.

Lazarus’s sisters were angry that their good friend Jesus hadn’t been there when they needed him. They were angry that their brother, Lazarus, had died. They were angry and needed someone to blame. I think we can all relate to that. When someone we love is suffering, when someone we love dies, a natural part of the grieving process is anger. And that anger is often directed at God, whether we believe in him or not.

When Jesus arrives, he generously receives their emotional rebuke, allowing them to give voice to their pain. And then he goes to the grave where Lazarus has been lying dead for four days. And in the shortest verse in the Bible, we are privy to his reaction. Jesus wept. Even God is distressed by the reality of death. Death was never meant to happen; death was never part of God’s good plan for humanity. And it makes him weep. He turns up, unafraid of the raw reality of death and bereavement.

Of course, in that situation, there was a reprieve – Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. And the mourning turned to celebration. But of course, although we never hear about Lazarus’s final death, he did die, just like all the rest of us.

Death is the one thing we all have in common. Different cultures react to death differently. In some cultures, the entire community stops doing normal life and gather round the bereaved. In our culture, all too often, we pretend nothing has happened. We are determined to keep death in a box, packed as far deep as possible so we don’t have to look at it. Death seems to be the final taboo of our culture, the most intimate and unmentionable part of life. Which means we’re not very good at death. And a good death is a beautiful thing. The Christian friends I’ve known who died untimely young deaths have shown me that. People who are not afraid of death, people who know what’s going to happen after they’ve died can pave the way for us to walk into the place of death and find beauty there.

As we face death head on, we stare into the place of what’s really important. Everyone says glibly that on our deathbed we won’t be wishing we’d spent more time at work. But let’s not wait till our deathbed to work out where we need to spend more time. Let’s learn how to live well now, not hiding from the only guaranteed fact of our future.

At Lazarus’s graveside, Jesus made the rather elliptical claim:

“I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.”

When Jesus died himself, naked and nailed to a cross, he took on the greatest enemy of life. And he won. As Jesus rose again on the third day, he claimed victory over death. As Christians follow Jesus through this life, they do so in the assurance of eternal life with him after death. Wow, that’s the place of hope. That’s the place where you can look death right in the face, unafraid.

The Christian message of hope is a life raft in the cold, choppy waters of bereavement. It gives form and shape to something we don’t understand and don’t want to have to navigate. It gives us courage to accept the truth, when we really don’t want to. Knowing that there is something, Someone, who is bigger than death. And knowing that death – either my own or that of someone I love – isn’t the end of the story gives me the capacity to walk confidently and unafraid through my life towards its inevitable end. And into what’s next. To quote my friend, I hope I’ll see you there.

Article

Books

Change

Mental Health

17 June 2024

5 min read

Reading together helps us read our own lives better

The rush and tumble nearly squeezes the life out of the clock’s second hand.

Jessica Brown

Jessica is a researcher, writer, and singer-songwriter. She is studying at Trinity College Dublin, and is an ordinand with the Church of Ireland.

A painting shows two 19th century women in a carriage, one reading as the others snoozes.

The Travelling Companions, Augustus Egg.

Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.

Even ordinary days seem to have frantic edges. A friend of mine, a salesman and father of four teenagers, said the other day that it felt like he was the hamster in the wheel, but so dreadfully exhausted, he’s flopped over, thumping around as the wheel keeps spinning. If we put a finger on the pulse of our current cultural desires, one pulse would be the longing not only for rest — spots of digital fasting or a day hiking — but an overhaul and renewal of what we’ve done with time. Yet it is difficult to know how to slow down, and it often seems that our attempts for self-care and being intentional are not enough to register that desired sense of slowness.

If we managed this, we would not just be able to slow down, but we would figure out how to bring our experience — the texture, the feel — of our paced lives into something like healing. The rush and tumble of a normal day nearly squeezes the life out of the clock’s second hand, and far too often, most of us reach each evening in some state of exhaustion.

Speaking from my own story, a shift happened when we moved from Los Angeles (which was, to be fair, a great place for us until it wasn’t) to East Clare in the Midlands of Ireland. It was a shift that my whole being needed—needed at a limbic and somatic level, in the spiritual self, as an artist, for family dynamics, and for my partner, a sense of freedom in work. It wasn’t that we merely got more time in our day: it was that our immersion in time, our soul’s experience of the clock, found an ‘easing up’ that — though the daily round is still arduous enough — afforded a little more time in every direction to breathe, think, walk, write; be.

It’s been in the wake of this move, nearly eight years ago now, that I’ve pondered why it felt that the hills here gathered me up into their arms and helped me to actually slow down. Is it these hills, the lovely stretches of variant greens and the countless walking paths hidden among them? Is it the congregation of artists — local artists, who refashioned my ideas about artistic success, inculcated as I was into seeing it as only with a large following? Is it the deliberate decisions to keep family overheads as low as we can, freeing up a bit of time from the understandable and ongoing need for wages?

Among the many reasons for the shift in how I experience time — for the sense, not just of slowing down, but of time affording more space — is the grace of reading with others.

The pastor, physician, and poet—this trio of us still are surprised by the deep, serendipitous connections that our poems make, week after week.

In fact, before this shift there was the keenly disappointing realisation of how little time in the land of adulthood could be set aside for reading. In the last few years, though, the regular habit of reading in companionship has grown into one of the most structural elements of my week. With Monday evening comes lectio divina, an ancient Christian practice for reading scripture in an authentically ‘listening’ way. Two lovely pals from town and I meet (often over a WhatsApp call, but sometimes in person) to read together a passage from the Bible, usually what will be read at a service the following Sunday.

On Monday night, my brother in Texas and I unpack whatever book we’re reading at the moment. We started with Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, went onto Michael Foley’s School of Life book on Henri Bergson, and after a few more texts, are now reading the stunning poetry collection The Art of the Lathe by the Texan-Kansan poet B.H. Fairchild.

On Tuesday nights, I gather via Zoom with two other women—a minister in Connecticut and a doctor in Sydney; we met at an online course about Rilke in the winter of 2021, and still meet regularly, each bringing a poem to share and the stories of our lives as we’re living through the week. The pastor, physician, and poet—this trio of us still is surprised by the deep, serendipitous connections that our poems make, week after week.

I think too what happens in this reading companionship is that the muscles we use to attend to words together are the very muscles needed to read our own lives.

As these fellow readers and I weave together silence and articulation, listening and exploration, our time together edges eternity. In this, I think I glimpse how God works to redeem the violence we do to time. When we enter into the invitation to holy spaces—like time spent with the Bible, times in prayer, times of friendship—our usage of clock time becomes secondary to the content within that duration, and certainly secondary to the presence of others (be it the writer of the Gospel of John, Emily Dickinson, the Holy Spirit, or a friend down the road). Our experience of time becomes inflected by the psychological richness and the interplay of spiritual growth with another person or persons.

I think too what happens in this reading companionship is that the muscles we use to attend to words together are the very muscles needed to read our own lives. In this, we can suss out how the longing for slowness is an appropriate one and one to listen to. Using metaphors at hand, reading our lives with the modalities of dialogue, listening, and in-time discovery means that our longing for slowness can help us see that we’re looking for a waypoint, a stop along the road; or a few days at basecamp, patching up and cleaning worn gear; or a longer stretch of wintering in the plains before crossing the mountains; or a period of convalescence in a home by the sea. These images for rest, for pause and restoration, can help us see how to open to God’s care in our living narratives, care that seeks to renew and redeem our often grueling experience of time.

The special grace that reading companionship yields is not just the hour’s content that is spent in shared conversation, though this is nourishing and transformative in its own right. It is how this hour sets the context for all the other hours. The humble stance of reading with attention and cherishing the voices of others models a kind of immersed slowness for the rest of our personhood. At the end of the day, I think it’s a radical counterpoint to what we often ask of a day, an infusion of divine grace into the pumping vessels of time.