Young people have a distorted view of life. They can forget that funerals are waiting on the other end of weddings and baby showers. When we segregate ourselves—when we don’t know anyone who is suffering from arthritis—we can be lulled to sleep.
Law insisted that most people will regret delaying the thought of death. When death approaches, it is often too late to make amends. Law demonstrated this by describing a symbolic character who, on his deathbed, bemoans his absentmindedness:
Do you think anything can astonish and confound a dying man like this? What pain do you think a man must feel when his conscience lays all this folly to his charge, when it shall show him how regular, exact, and wise he has been in small matters that are passed away like a dream and how stupid and senseless he has lived, without any reflection, without any rules, in things of such eternal moment as no heart can sufficiently conceive them! 4
One magazine writer told the story of a shopper who died from a massive heart attack in front of the frozen pizza section of a supermarket. The writer ruminated about the woman’s last thoughts. “Should I get pepperoni or vegetarian?” Or maybe, “How about triple cheese?” The shopper was seconds away from eternity, on the threshold of entering a new era, and she didn’t even know it. Her mind was occupied with the trivial.
This unexpectedness of death should encourage us to take a second look, to reconsider our pleasant denial, to admit that, yes, death might visit us as early as this week.
The Remembrance of Death Serves Life
William Nelson, a Union general in the Civil War, was consumed with the hostilities in Kentucky when a brawl erupted in his fort and he was shot in the chest. He had faced many battles, but the fatal blow came while he was relaxing with his men. He was caught fully unprepared. As men ran up the stairs to help, the general had just one request: “Send for a clergyman; I wish to be baptized.”
He never made time to be baptized as an adolescent or a young man, and he had too many pressing concerns while in command. In half a second, the general’s priorities had been turned upside down. The war raged on, but suddenly his interest had been captivated by another world. Who cared about Robert E. Lee now? And it was too late to bother with a doctor. Get me a clergyman! With only minutes left before he died, the one thing he cared about was preparing for eternity. He wanted to be baptized.
Thirty minutes later he was dead.
How was this general served by the remembrance of death? Hardly at all, because he remembered it too late. To help us avoid such a gross oversight, Thomas à Kempis urged, “Thou oughtest so to order thyself in all thy thoughts and actions, as if today thou were about to die.” 5 Law expounded on this:
I can’t see why every gentleman, merchant, or soldier should not put these questions seriously to himself: What is the best thing for me to intend and drive at in all my actions? How shall I do to make the most of human life? What ways shall I wish that I had taken when I am leaving this world? 6
When we find out we have only 30 minutes left to live, as General Nelson did, we can’t do much more than prepare our own souls. Even worse, the moment of death could prove that our whole life has been a lie.
As vice president, George H.W. Bush represented the United States at the funeral of former Soviet boss Leonid Brezhnev. During the secular service, Bush witnessed a silent protest carried out by Brezhnev’s widow. She stood motionless by the coffin until seconds before it was closed. Then, just as the soldiers touched the lid, Brezhnev’s wife performed an act of great courage and hope, a gesture that must surely rank as one of the most profound acts of civil disobedience ever committed.
Brezhnev’s widow reached down and made the sign of the cross on her husband’s chest.
There, in the citadel of secular, atheistic power, the wife of the man who had run it all hoped that her husband was wrong. She hoped that there was another life and that that life was best represented by Jesus, who died on the cross. She hoped that same Jesus might yet have mercy on her husband.
