From Birth to Death to Life
The loss of everything we love to the ultimate arbiter of life – death – is ultimately what makes the Good News good.
Meditating On Death Is Critical To A Good Life
Dying a heroic death is strongly correlated to living a heroic life.
To Hell With Ozzy Osbourne
There are many professed sentiments about “partying with friends in hell,” but in reality, no one in hell will have a single friend or anything remotely resembling a party.
The Wishful Thinking of Deathbed Conversions
The sacrament of reconciliation is the ‘Clavis David’ in opening up heaven to the repentant sinner, but waiting for the hour of death is like playing a game of Russian Roulette with your soul.
Joe Biden’s Diagnosis: A Call to Prayer and a Reckoning With Eternal Truth
With Judgement imminent, we pray for a sign of repentance as Biden stares into the reflecting surface of eternity.
On Needing a Why Before We Die
Many of the greatest saints understood that mankind’s death sentence shows us how we ought to live our life.
You Are Going to Die!
Death is the one thing we absolutely cannot escape and also the one thing that should shape how we live. Yet we ignore death all the time. Why keeping death in our minds will help us live better lives.
Love is Stronger than Death
The killing of police officer Jonathan Diller demonstrates the power of evil in this world. But there is something more powerful still.
Awaiting the End
At the end of our lives the yearning for God innate in all of us is more and more revealed.
The Final Countdown
We like to have countdowns to special dates: Christmas, New Year’s, etc. But we can’t have a countdown to the date of our death.
The Beauty of a Holy Death
If you are able, do not hesitate to assist at someone’s holy death. You will never regret it.
Human Composting: The Ultimate Denial of the Soul
From time immemorial, people have buried the dead. Sometimes they even risked their lives to carry out this most basic duty. In times of persecution, for example, Christians put themselves in great danger to recover the bodies of martyrs so that they might receive the holy rites of Christian burial. The Old Testament recounts the … Read more
Keeping in Touch with Death
When my friend’s little brother died, his family performed rites that are rare nowadays. They brought the body of their boy back home. They dressed him and laid him out for a wake in their dining room. They built his coffin and carved his headstone. They dug his grave and buried him with their own … Read more
How Do I Want to Be Dead?
The July 9 New York Times Sunday Review contained a feature by Richard Conniff. Driven by his research on English moles, he visited the grave of Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows. What impressed Conniff, and inspired his op-ed, was that Grahame’s grave was in both “a graveyard and a wildlife refuge. … Read more
On the Death of a Brother-In-Law
My brother-in-law, Jerome Vertin, died in Chesapeake, Virginia, in hospice care at about five A.M. on February 25. My sister, his wife of sixty-three years, was with him when he died. She said that he seemed most peaceful in death. I thought: “This is the reality that marriage vows prepare a couple for, the ’till … Read more
When the Dead Go Home to God
When my mother-in-law died, following a long and unhappy illness, her passing was seen by all as a blessed and merciful release. Free at last—that was the universal refrain among family and friends. It was not just the burden of old age, whose cumulative debilities wore her down, but the ravages of Alzheimer’s, which left … Read more
Teaching Death to Nursing Students with Leo Tolstoy
To make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. ~ T. S. Eliot We’ve come to the close of our annual month-long reminder of the obvious: We’re all going to die. It’s a truism that we learned as kids in Sunday school and CCD—the first of the four … Read more
Thoughts on Euthanasia Prompted by My Uncle’s Death
My French uncle, whom I always knew as “l’oncle Jean,” recently died. I was struck once again by the dignity and mercy of a Christian death, despite the accompanying pain and anguish. Unlike Brittany Maynard from Oregon who, suffering from terminal brain-cancer, euthanized herself, and unlike “Laura” from Belgium who, though physically healthy, intends to … Read more
