From Birth to Death to Life

“In my beginning is my end.”—T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

What is the leading cause of death? Does anyone out there know? What do all the experts say? Suppose we ask them; perhaps they’ll tell us. Heart disease, they say, is the reason most people die.    

But is that strictly true? Yes, but only in an immediate and proximate sense. But remotely? I mean, what ultimately accounts for death? The answer is quite simple: birth. That’s because from the moment we first begin to be, to exist—“mewling and puking,” as Shakespeare so elegantly puts it, “in our nurse’s arms”—we are old enough to die. What other qualification do we require?  

What then is death but an event that follows upon birth, the dread certainty of which awaits us all. Indeed, says Pascal, “it makes all the difference in the world, if it is certain that we shall not be here for long, and uncertain whether we shall be here even for an hour.” There can be no exceptions, each of us having been predetermined to die at a given time and place none of us knows in advance—toward which we find ourselves inexorably moving from the first moment we begin to exist in our mother’s womb. Not even the tiniest of zygotes may escape the net of death.

To live each day under sentence of death, such is the fate overshadowing us all. And to what originating event does that finality point? Nothing less than the fact that, somewhere along the line, you managed to get yourself born, that being the catalyzing moment for jumpstarting all the rest. “Birth, copulation, and death,” is how T.S. Eliot puts it in Sweeney Agonistes, “that’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks.” For each of us, therefore, there is but one thing left to do: “wait for a knock and the turning of a lock for you know the hangman’s waiting for you.”

Putting aside the middle term (this is not a porn site, after all), let’s just stick with the other two, concerning which here is what that great spellbinder John Donne had to say on the subject. In his final sermon, preached just weeks before his own death, he reminds the king, Charles I, who will shortly be facing the hangman himself owing to the fury of Cromwell and his parliamentary mob: We are all doomed from birth. “This deliverance,” says Donne, 

from the death of the womb, is an entrance, a delivering over to another death, the manifold deaths of this world. We have a winding-sheet in our mother’s womb which grows with us from our conception, and we come into the world wound up in that winding-sheet, for we come to seek a grave. 

Even at birth, it seems, the cries we make will prove celebratory of the funeral to follow. Death is a historical event, in other words, which we shall be forced to live through right from the start. That we all die must, in some sense surely, be the meaning of our life. 

Of all the creatures fashioned by God, we alone must carry our deaths before us. We are made to see our own death, the outer limit of human finitude, as the final cancelation of all that we might have been or hoped to have achieved. “In death,” writes Hans Urs von Balthasar, “we will forcefully be led from ourselves into total abandonment, because we will be commanded to abandon everything and ourselves.”  

We’re all in a play, as it were, and we instinctively know the last act will be bloody, however pleasant the previous scenes. Alone, we shall pass through the door of death, which admits only one at a time, each holding his or her scheduled appointment. “Someday,” writes Karl Barth, 

a company of men will process out to a churchyard and lower a coffin and everyone will go home; but one will not come back, and that will be me. The seal of death will be that they will bury me as a thing that is superfluous and disturbing in the land of the living. 

Not only are we born to die, a connection we share with all the other animals, but we know that we must die, which the animals do not know. Not even in the extremity of their final moments can they detach themselves sufficiently from the event to meditate upon its meaning. It is reserved for humans alone to ponder the prospect of what we most fear: namely, our impending extinction.  

And so death is at once the most commonplace of all happenings while, at the same time, the most painfully incomprehensible, the least tolerable or welcome of all that conspires to overtake and destroy us. “We climb up the mountain of time, bearing with us the instruments of our death,” writes Joseph Ratzinger in a moving reflection on death.

Where is it going? What does it all mean? We look with apprehension at the signs of death which, up to now, we had not noticed, and the fear rises within us that perhaps the whole of life is only a variation of death, and that life is actually not a gift at all but an imposition.

But then, all at once, we must check ourselves, put an end to the gloom, and remind ourselves of our great good fortune, which is that Christ, the living God Himself, entered into all of this when He became one of us, choosing not only to live a human life but to die a human death.  Something utterly transformative happened to death, therefore, the moment Christ allowed death to happen to Him. We are thus empowered by His example, mediated to us by His very person, no longer to see or to speak of death as a wall against which we go smash but as a door through which we may enter upon a life of unending happiness with God.

How beautifully St. John Henry Newman has put it in one of his sermons, exhorting us to be at peace in the certainty of Christian hope: 

All that we see is destined one day to burst forth into a heavenly bloom, and to be transfigured into immortal glory. Heaven at present is out of sight, but in due time, as snow melts and discovers what it lay upon, so will this visible creation fade away before those greater splendors which are behind it, and on which at present it depends.

“In my end is my beginning.”—T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets