“That’s enough, O Lord! Take my life…” (1Kgs 19:4)

My plan wasn’t to read three books about death in a row. But I just did.

If I sound like I’m obsessed with death, I’m not. As we get older, I see our relationship with death becoming closer. People we know are dying. People we love are dying. We are slowly becoming the oldest people we have ever known. At the same time, we become increasingly aware of the fragility of the human body and, in particular, the impending mortality of our own.

People we admire die. I met the author of the first book I read by chance: Richard Gaillardetz. We shared a publisher and once mentioned that we each had four children and were writing a book about marriage. He was an acclaimed theologian and professor, and I often attended his talks at the Los Angeles Religious Education Convention. I was saddened to learn of the diagnosis of stage four pancreatic cancer.

His last book I Hope While I BreatheIt is subtitled “The Mystery of Dying”. Dr. Written as a series of reflections while Gaillardetz was dying, the book was published posthumously. I expected this book, like all of his writings, to be deeply theological and carefully researched. It is, but it is also a poignant exploration of doubt and faith, poetry and pathos, gratitude and abandonment. The brutal physical and the compassionate spiritual walk hand in hand with him throughout his final months.

Dr. “I walk toward death every day in the company of saints past and present, heroic and ordinary,” Gaillardetz wrote. “It’s been enough.” This final work is a fitting coda to a life well lived and a death well accepted.

I savored this book in small divine bites, finding it moving and thought-provoking. Although Dr. While I suspect Gaillardetz underplays his legacy, he is honest and philosophical in the face of grief and loss. “To put it bluntly, after appropriate mourning, the world will move on after I am dead,” he wrote. It will be so – we know in our hearts that it will be so for all of us – but a world without his presence is poorer indeed, especially for his loved ones, but also for his readers.

With my heart filled with the ongoing science and faith of Rick Gaillardetz, I read my next book. In My Time of Death, by Sebastian Junger. Mr. Junger is a famous journalist who reports from war zones. But this book is a personal and heartfelt account of a health crisis that should have killed him. I have always appreciated Mr. Junger’s writing, but this book intrigued me because although Mr. Junger describes himself as an atheist, it describes his encounter with his long-dead father while he was on the verge of death. The subtitle of the book explains his reason for writing it: “How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of ​​the Afterlife.” I read this short book in one sitting, although it is full of medical research and physics language, neither of which I found easy to follow. It also provides an extensive bibliography. Mr. Junger describes in stunning detail how, by fate or luck or both, he survived a ruptured aneurysm in the pancreatic artery (also in the pancreas), which required delicate emergency surgery and a 10-unit blood transfusion.

The contrast of an investigative journalist investigating his near-death experience and a theologian who believes in eternal afterlife got my brain spinning in a good direction. Mr. Junger felt suspended in an image between a black pit on his left and his dead physicist father on his right. The darkness was pulling him. His father reassured him. “There is nothing to be afraid of,” his father said. “Don’t fight it. I will take care of you.

When Mr. Junger came out of surgery, he told the nurse attending to him how frightening it was that he had almost died. “Instead of thinking of it as something scary, try thinking of it as something sacred,” he said. When he later tried to find the nurse to ask for this advice, no one knew who she was. It was as if it had never existed.

Mr. Junger’s story is not a transformation, but a story of mystery consciousness, of not knowing. It doesn’t answer any questions, but it poses them with grace and a gradual recognition that there are no scientific, concretely satisfying answers. And aren’t these questions that our believers share about the existence of the soul, of our beloved dead, of heaven, of God, of something sacred? Mr. Junger’s body is healing, but his mind is still wondering. His final word to his readers: Donate blood as often as possible. Your blood can save lives and make you part of something bigger.

It was the third book in my death pile Faith, Hope and Carnage, It’s actually a book-length interview by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan. musician Mr. CaveFrom Mr. O’Hagan, the journalist whose music I love. Mr. Cave begins by saying he hates interviews, and for nearly 300 pages he pours his heart and soul into Mr. O’Hagan’s questions. Mr. Cave doesn’t talk so much about death, but rather about grief, the pool into which the still living dip after death: Mr. Cave’s teenage son, Arthur, died after falling off a cliff, so that’s where he comes from. The experience every parent dreads. He equates grief with an experience of God; When you mourn, “you are taken to the extremes of suffering…. Everything seems so fragile, precious and exaggerated, the world and the people in it seem so endangered yet so beautiful… In fact, it feels like God and grief are somehow intertwined. In pain you feel that you are approaching the curtain that separates this world from the other world.”

You might not expect such naked spirituality from a bad-boy singer and performer (his band is called Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), but Mr. Cave eloquently describes how his lost son figures into his songwriting and imagination. His loss led him to writing “Red Hand Files” She’s a sort of online advice column where she answers fans’ questions about just about everything: grief and creativity, music and inspiration, love and life.

While reading these three books, I felt that their authors, the theologian, journalist and musician, were writing from both sides of the curtain. Someone is led to death, someone escapes death, and someone deals with the pain of the death of a child. All three offer very important information about our humanity, our mortality, and our perspective on eternity. We are all here in this life now, but we know death. We accept this life as it is, even though we know that its outcome is both inevitable and accidental. When someone we love dies, they take a piece of our heart to the other side of the curtain. But we continue to live with a wounded heart. The pain of lost love can intensify the joy of having that love. Grief and death can sharpen our focus on life and love.

We all know how life is. Some of us know what death is like. As these writers use their talents to tell their stories, they illuminate the truths we hold in common that sometimes hide in the corners of our souls. They lift the edge of the curtain a little. They give us hope, sadness, and everything in between. This reader is grateful.