Owing Death

Let’s face it, there will always be people of privilege—the so-called Beautiful People—armed with advantages far beyond the reach of everyone else. Beyond even the wildest dreams of everyone else. “You are truly rich,” wrote Henry James, whose stories are filled with such people, “if you can meet the demands of your imagination.” Such people manage to do so all the time. With seeming effortless ease, too. They are the favored few, the lucky ones who win all the prizes.  

And yet, not even the cleverest or wealthiest among them will escape the long arm of death. Which needn’t be all that long, by the way, since it can quite easily snatch even the youngest among us, carrying them off to the grave with the same blithe indifference paid to everyone else. “Golden lads and girls all must,” as Shakespeare says, “As chimney-sweepers come to dust.” There will be no exemptions issued at the very end, the lucky loophole for those who took their vitamins on time and never failed to recycle. “We are all born,” as Joseph Epstein assures us, “with a serious and unalterable birth-defect: we grow old—at least the lucky among us do—and then we die.”

In other words, we’re all in the same queue, only none of us knows when his or her number will be called. Still, despite all the odds, all the actuarial tables that, for instance, convinced Damon Runyon that “all of life is 6 to 5 against,” most of us are not likely to spend our last hours awaiting transport to a death camp run by the Third Reich. Or randomly targeted by fire in a state run by witless politicians whose policies, while perhaps not at the same level of iniquity as the crimes of Adolf Hitler, have nevertheless proven themselves spectacularly incompetent at protecting either people or property.     

But this is not about California and its raging fires which co-opted so much of the nation’s attention for a news cycle. Exposing the regulatory idiocies of a state unwilling to exercise even minimal forest management is not what this essay is about. Many have weighed in already on the subject, including a great number of the victims of environmental idiocy that has laid such waste to much of what used to be a place of singular beauty. I certainly don’t need to add my own voice to the swelling chorus. 

But death, well, now that’s a subject everyone takes a lively interest in. So long as it’s someone else’s death, that is. However, there are exceptions. Graham Greene, for example, when asked if he wasn’t disappointed on having failed yet again to win a Nobel Prize for all those novels he wrote, replied that he was waiting for a bigger prize. And what, the eager reporter asked, might that be? “Death,” he said. 

Death comes for us all. “Yes, even for kings he comes,” as Sir Thomas More made a point of reminding Master Cromwell, who devilishly sought his death on a charge of high treason, of which crime More was entirely innocent. And succeeded, too. “I die the King’s good servant,” More announced moments before the ax fell, “but God’s first.” 

And so we all owe God a death, including the lucky few who seem not to owe anyone anything. A not unreasonable exchange, you might say, for the gift of a life we never had ownership of in the first place. All being is borrowed, as it were, on loan from a God who has completely cornered the market. Which means that it is not only our death we owe God—a debt which takes but an instant to discharge—but our life as well, which typically takes a bit longer to run its course. 

And since we’ve no claim on having launched it into being in the first place, we really have no grounds for complaint when the Old Guy comes by to collect. We’re all hanging, after all, by the thinnest possible thread, suspended above an abyss of sheer blank nothingness. How did God put it to the saintly Catherine of Siena? I am He who is. You are she who is not.  

Try that text on next time you’re tempted to think too highly of yourself. The first principle of the spiritual life, we are told, is to know that, yes, there is a God, but that, no, it is not you. We are instead, as Plato wisely taught, children of poverty, too poor to summon ourselves into being. How freeing that must be, however, since it actually allows for a relationship between the two of us, which is the result not of necessity but of grace, of God graciously offering Himself to someone He does not need yet desires intensely to join to Himself, to draw into a life of perfect unending love.

However, to properly consummate that connection, we must first die. There is really no other ticket to be punched if any of us are to arrive on the other side. And yet how often do we resist the obvious conclusion, which is that we ought to be ready at any moment to check out. The room is rented, it is not ours to keep. There is a Roman adage of considerable antiquity, Respice Finem, which reminds us that we are to remain always at the ready, “looking to the end.” A piece of advice the Christian world early on embraced, citing Christ’s admonition to the apostles that they be mindful of the end, “for the Son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect” (Matthew 24:44). 

“In my end is my beginning,” is how T.S. Eliot puts it, hitting the precise eschatological note in Four Quartets, his masterwork. Death, then, is the point of entry to begin the life of Beatitude. And thus, we ought not to fear death but rather welcome it, as one welcomes an old friend. Especially when the friend turns out to be God Himself, who will be there at the end to welcome us home.

“To those who live by faith,” declares St. John Henry Cardinal Newman in a moving meditation upon the last things, the first of which is death, 

everything they see speaks of that future world; The very glories of nature, the sun, moon, and stars, and the richness and the beauty of the earth, are as types and figures witnessing and teaching the invisible things of God. 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.

It is not possible to improve upon this. Nor even to add to it.