The Art of Dying

Living Fully into the Life to Come

Rob Moll

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780830847228
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Mort en sociologie

Death will come to us all, but most of us live our lives as if death did not exist. Medicine has made dying more complicated and more removed from the experience of most people. Death is partitioned off to hospital rooms, separated from our daily lives. Most of us find ourselves at a loss when death approaches. We don't know how to die well.

For centuries Christians have prepared for the "good death" with particular rituals and spiritual disciplines that direct the actions of both the living and the dying. In this well-researched and pastorally sensitive book, Rob Moll explores the Christian practice of dying well. He gives guidance for those who care for the dying as well as for those who grieve.

This book is a gentle companion for all who face death, whether one's own or that of a loved one. Christians can have confidence that because death is not the end, preparing to die helps us truly live.

A decade after writing this book, Rob died in a hiking accident at age forty-one. This edition includes a new afterword by his wife, Clarissa Moll, reflecting on Rob's life, death, and legacy.

1

WHEN DEATH ARRIVES

OUR CULTURE SIMPLY DOESN’T KNOW WHAT TO think about death. Through medicine and science we know more about death and how to forestall it than ever before. Yet we know very little about caring for a dying person. We don’t know what to expect or how to prepare for our own death. And we’re often awkward at best when trying to comfort a friend in grief.

Our culture is fighting, and sometimes succeeding, to expand the so-called right to die. We hear stories of the compassion of family members and doctors who assist in the deaths of terminally ill patients. Yet our doctors and hospitals are astounding in their ability and passionate desire to rescue cancer sufferers, accident victims or heart-attack patients. We have come to expect medical breakthroughs, vaccines and wonder-working drugs.

There is no shortage of books, studies and experts ready to explain our culture’s fear of death or our eagerness to avoid it. Yet some of our bestsellers—Tuesdays with Morrie, The Last Lecture, 90 Minutes in Heaven—feature stories about people dying, or nearly so, and the lessons they discovered at the end of life. Celebrities give a whole society the opportunity to follow along in the struggle with a terminal disease and publicly, at least on TV, mourn their deaths.

Having volunteered with hospice patients and worked with grieving families at a funeral home, I’ve seen the results of this confusion firsthand. Interviewing families, doctors and hospice workers, it’s clear that our paradoxical approach to death is largely due to the fact that we are strangers to death—despite it being ever present. Caring for elderly parents is typically our first prolonged and engaged confrontation with death. Even then, however, doctors and nurses often guide us through the experience. It’s not unusual for children to care for their parents from a distance, calling doctors or arranging transportation and nursing care, further removing us from face-to-face interaction with death and dying.

Death is all around us, however. Our movies are filled with violent deaths. Daily news reports feature wars that may involve our own neighbors, family members or church friends. We receive appeals from development agencies and news outlets to help ethnic groups, such as those in Darfur, targeted for violence by more powerful neighbors. We are asked to support relief workers caring for people struck by famine, natural disasters or epidemics.

I remember my first experience, after college, in a group that met weekly for prayer. I was amazed that, unlike my college experiences praying with friends, more than half of our prayer requests were for health issues. Often we prayed for people with potentially life-threatening illnesses. Some acquaintances at work went on leave as they received chemotherapy, and some of them never recovered. Often we prayed, as colleagues awaited test results, “Lord, let it turn out to be nothing at all.”

Even at a young age, we are around death. A friend from my high school youth group killed herself. Another friend from college died one summer in a car accident. My brother’s youth group volunteer was murdered at a highway rest stop. Facebook friends fill their updates with information on ailing relatives.

Tragic as these incidents are, however, they are not the same as a sustained face-to-face encounter with a loved one on his deathbed. They don’t affect our lives in the same way. Prayer requests and Facebook updates do not breed familiarity. While they can and should lead us to reflect on our own death and encourage us to live in the light of our mortality, often our busy lives don’t allow this reflection. Death, while ever present, is ever more removed from our firsthand experience.

The average American’s first intimate encounter with death might not occur until she is well beyond middle age. “Until their loved ones lie in the last light,” author Stephen Kiernan says, “families today do not know mortality.”1 In fact, as people routinely live into their nineties, it is now not unusual to have elderly children taking care of their even more elderly parents.

When we are finally called on to be with a dying loved one, we must learn what to do and how to behave on the fly. This is a drastic change from the days when dying was a more familiar, if an equally unwelcome, presence. “All the things that once prepared us for death,” writes journalist Virginia Morris, “regular experience with illness and death, public grief and mourning, a culture and philosophy of death, interaction with the elderly, as well as the visibility of our own aging—are virtually gone from our lives.”2

For most of the last century, death has moved steadily away from view. Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, the site of death moved from the home to the hospital. In 1908, 14 percent of all deaths occurred in an institutional setting, either a hospital, nursing home or other facility. Just six years later the figure had jumped to 25 percent.3 By the end of the century it was nearly 80 percent.4

As the place of death moved to the hospital, people became less familiar with the sights and sounds of the very ill. Medical personnel took over the intimate care of the patient, often simply because their expertise was required. These changes allowed patients to survive—at least temporarily—diseases that would have killed them. But through those exchanges, we forgot what death looks like, and we lost something. We now keep death at a distance. The dying, says historian Phillipe Aries, are pushed out of sight because society cannot endure their presence. While it was once common for friends, family and even strangers to pay respects to someone on her deathbed, Aries says,

It is no longer acceptable for strangers to come into a room that smells of urine, sweat, and gangrene, and where the sheets are soiled. Access to this room must be forbidden, except to a few intimates capable of overcoming their disgust, or to those indispensable persons who provide certain services.5

We have forgotten how to behave as caregivers or simply family and friends. We act clumsily and awkwardly around the grieving, often complicating their mourning. We’re clueless about what to say to a person on his deathbed. We ourselves are left feeling confused and uncertain about death’s meaning and its effect on our faith and our lives.

But our behavior, it turns out, is rather common and understandable, if still inappropriate to the occasion. “Nowadays, very few of us actually witness the deaths of those we love,” writes surgeon and author Sherwin Nuland. “Not many people die at home anymore, and those who do are usually the victims of drawn-out diseases or chronic degenerative conditions in which drugging and narcosis effectively hide the biological events that are occurring.”6 In other words, even those few who have firsthand experience being with someone dying do not fully experience the event—at least not in the way every other society and every other generation throughout history would have.

Living far from our elderly loved ones also removes us from their declining years as well as from their medical care. Adult children find themselves on conference calls with their parents’ doctors. They fret about their loved ones’ safety when their home is no longer a safe place to live or when driving becomes dangerous. They fly a thousand miles for a surgery, never quite knowing what is happening and if this trip will be the last. And, in interview after interview, I’ve learned that relatives who live far away have a much stronger tendency to advocate for aggressive therapy, prompting family conflicts when other members, including the dying person, are opposed.

Not only can our unfamiliarity with death make us incompetent when visiting socially with the ill or grieving, we may also make decisions opposed to the best interests of the people we love. A doctor told me recently of a patient who had lived well for two years after deciding to discontinue her chemotherapy treatment.7 For much of those two years, this woman enjoyed life. She was able to garden, take walks, spend time with her husband and accomplish some final goals she had set for herself. Her mental powers had declined, however. She regularly offered the same joke to her doctor. “Old age is not for cowards,” she chuckled, each time thinking it was an original thought.

But eventually she began doing much worse. She was bleeding extensively, and the doctor could not determine where she was bleeding from. Her short-term memory was failing, and she no longer wanted to eat, as happens to dying people.

“What do we do?” the doctor said to me the day after discussing the issue with the woman’s husband.

Do we say, “We’re not quite sure what the bleeding is from, but we know she’s got lung cancer. We know she’s going to die from the lung cancer. She’s comfortable. She’s weak, but she’s not in pain. She’s breathing okay, and she’s quite content.” Do we put her in the hospital, transfuse her, see if this is correctable, and then let her die of the lung cancer, which could be a much more painful death than what she’s experiencing now?

She had already lived more than eighteen months longer than she was told she would after refusing chemotherapy.

It is a complicated issue, even for a doctor accustomed to dealing with it. But invariably, the decision becomes more complex once out-of-state relatives are involved. The doctor continued,

Rarely do I have any dissension when am I talking to people. The dissension comes from those who weren’t there. I fully expect when I get to the office this afternoon to have a phone call from the daughter saying, “Why aren’t you doing this? Why aren’t you doing that?” And I have to go through the whole discussion all over again. Then it will be the son from Arizona.

Confronted by these challenges, we aren’t always able to cope. Sherwin Nuland recounts an Alzheimer’s patient who had moved from New York to Florida for his retirement. When he was diagnosed with the disease, all his children were still in New York. His wife spent every day with him in the nursing home, and she lovingly cared for him during the remaining years of his life. But his children only visited once. Rather than watching a slow decline, the man’s out-of-state children saw one massive drop in their father’s health. Horrified, they never visited him again.8 Their mother supported her children’s decision, saying she didn’t want them to remember their father this way. This extreme instance illustrates a more general truth: unfamiliarity with death can discourage us from fulfilling our familial responsibilities.

A hospice social worker from the Chicago suburbs told me that the most difficult part of his job is finding people to care for his hospice patients. Typically, they don’t require twenty-four-hour nursing care. But often dying people need help using the bathroom, cooking and eating or keeping clean. For many patients, he said, finding someone willing and able to help is nearly impossible.

Though it was a problem in the affluent Chicago suburbs, it was no trouble to find caregivers among the poor communities of Miami, where he used to work. My friend said many impoverished families didn’t have material things, but when a loved one was dying, they would drop everything to care for that person. “They knew what was important,” he says. These families were much better at caring for their families. Still, such devotion is no longer the norm.

ETHICS VERSUS VALUES

I began writing this book at a time when end-of-life ethics was being hotly debated in the press. Not long before, the doctors for Terri Schiavo, a woman who had been in a persistent vegetative state for roughly fifteen years, had been ordered by a judge to remove a feeding tube and other medical treatment that had been keeping her alive. Her husband and her family had spent years in court trying to gain, or to prevent, such a decision from a judge. Congress became involved and tried to intervene.

While the legal process and the decision reached caused great commotion among the Christian community, as well as the rest of the country, I found few satisfactory answers to the dilemma. While most pastors, theologians and ethicists agreed that it was permissible to withdraw medical treatment, Schiavo’s dilemma was more difficult. She only needed food, water and minimal care. Yet her food and water, delivered through a feeding tube, required medical professionals to perform the delicate maneuver to insert the tube. The contents of her food were scientifically and medically determined. She wasn’t simply fed pureed pork chops. Even if Schiavo was so ill that removing a feeding tube was ethically defensible, Christians were rightly furious that anyone would be left alone, without care and human comfort, to die. Yet in my own conversations with doctors, theologians and church leaders, they suggested privately that they would never want to be kept alive artificially (even with just food and water) for fifteen years.

I was unsatisfied with Christian responses that either required the prolonging of life—no matter the physical, mental, relational or financial suffering involved—or that pinpointed what treatments might be appropriate under what circumstances. Instead, I wanted to find a Christian response to these issues that would be useful under any medical circumstance, that upheld the value of life and the dignity of the person.

What I discovered was the Christian tradition of the good death. While the particulars of medical technology in the twenty-first century are unique, every age has challenged Christians with difficult questions of how to die well. And every age, including our own, has wrestled with how to teach fellow Christians the meaning of death and the ways they could practice it faithfully. Each age recognized that how a culture approaches death precisely reflects what it believes and how it approaches life. While this is true for any culture, Christians must also reconcile their approach to death with Jesus, the Son of God, whose death and resurrection provides a very specific example of how to die and offers the hope to all Christians of a bodily resurrection in the last day. If we Christians really do enjoy the life of God, who is victorious over death, our life on earth is therefore cast in a very different light.

Century after century Christians rehearsed and applied their beliefs about death; throughou...