Mortality, Death, and Hope
Two of my uncles have died in the last 18 months, and while neither of their deaths was right, one of them was surely too soon. Uncle Nat was only 70 when he died, and outside of the cancer that ravaged his body, he was a man marked by vigor and life, not death. He was the kind of uncle who breathed life into you as he believed in you. I said to my wife after we heard of his death: “Everyone dies, I know. But why would Uncle Nat be the one to go, right now?” The same could be said of Uncle Joel, who was 82 when he died. He was a man of life for most of his years on earth. Sometimes he had too much life. His attention in conversation was full, but his energy and life were always taking him somewhere else. He always had something to do, a place to be, energy to discharge. Two uncles whose lives were taken by death.
This summer I read Ephraim Radner’s Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty. Radner argues that politics should concern itself with the securing of “mortal goods”: birth, generation, labor, and friendship. But, and this is the point: these are goods for beings who will one day die. Politics can not improve the human condition, since death comes for us all.
This semester, our class read and discussed Edward Luttwak’s 1999 essay, “Give War A Chance.” Luttwak argues that the United Nations, NATO, and nongovernmental organizations have all been complicit in extending and exacerbating conflict despite their well-intentioned desire to remain disinterested and neutral in the pursuit of peace. Cease fires, bombing campaigns, and refugee camps may assuage the world’s conscience, but they only empower the warring parties to create more death. Luttwak provocatively concludes that America and the world should mostly allow these conflicts to work themselves out on their own, like a parent who refuses to intervene in a fight between children with the hope that their differences will be better resolved without parental assistance. After I left class, however, I sensed a missed opportunity to say how insane it is that we are debating the following choice: intervening only to delay the slaughter to come or doing nothing while innocents and guilty alike are sent to their deaths in front of a watching world. An absurd choice not of life v. death but many deaths v. fewer deaths. A choice of death v. death.
This fall Choral Arts of Chattanooga (of which I am a member) performed John Rutter’s Requiem, a moving and powerful work of music. In the “Agnus Dei” movement, the text reads: “Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery/He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; He fleeth as it were a shadow…In the midst of life, we are in death.”
In light of the above reflections, I wonder why we bother to pursue life at all if death is always around the corner, waiting to pounce at a moment’s notice. If we are in death even in the midst of life, it seems the best we can do is to keep the finality of death at bay for a time.
Then I remember what happened a few months ago, when my daughter’s schoolmate De’Kota Williamson died from a drowning accident in a swimming pool at a birthday party. She wasn’t 70 or 82 but only nine years old. The questions are perhaps too obvious to ask, but here they are, nonetheless: How could someone so full of life so suddenly meet death? How could someone who enjoys learning and play and laughter — at a celebration of life’s beginning, no less — so senselessly have her life taken away? How could someone whose life is still so young…die?
So I remember De’Kota, but I am still left with the following thought: uncles and refugees and schoolmates and daughters will all die. And while some of them die before their time, none of them die at the right time. None of us do.
The answer to all of this is not just a re-statement of a creed or confession, a rehearsal of words that gives comfort to some of us who recognize our mortal frames. The answer is not only found in the completion of Rutter’s “Agnus Dei” movement, which says the following: “In the midst of life, we are in death: Of whom may we seek for succour? I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though hе were dead, yеt shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
No, the answer to the problem of mortality is also given by those people who lay claim to life even while they endure the most impossible death. In this case, the answer is found in the person of De’Metria Williamson, the mother of De’Kota. My wife and daughters attended De’Kota’s funeral, and De’Metria sang Shana Wilson’s anthem, “Press In Your Presence.” Her singing was deep, rich, and joyful. Confounding the most cynical, her hope in eternal life was real, and her testimony confirmed that life in Christ gains the victory over death.
Still, the testimony of De’Metria does not end there. For in her presence and in her singing, something else was true: De’Metria was pregnant with twins. Here is a woman who reveals the paradox of human existence in her very being. De’Metria’s baby girl of just nine years old died too soon, and yet the babies who live inside her body serve as a witness that God’s breath of life cannot be resisted or defeated, even in the face of the most bewildering death.
