As part of our Lent series, Bishop Graham Tomlin looks at death, and why it has become taboo. 22/03/2023

It used to be said that the three things you couldn’t talk about in polite company were sex, politics and death. I guess we’ve changed our minds about the first two. A cursory scan of the Internet cannot not fail to reveal our deep obsession with sex and endless discussion of politics. With death however it’s different.  

There are of course occasional exceptions. Marcus Zusak’s huge bestseller, The Book Thief, is a story narrated by Death, ironically brought to life as a storyteller, and it begins with the line: “Here is a small fact. You are going to die.” Julian Barnes’s 2008 book Nothing to be Frightened Of was a rare but brave example of an atheist looking into the abyss of death, and a reflection on what it felt to grow older and suddenly become aware of your own mortality.

But these are rare. Most of the time we still don’t like to talk about death, because while it remains the ultimate statistic, that 100% of us will one day die, and is therefore one of the few things we all have in common, it also remains the ultimate mystery. 

I have taken many funerals in my time. I often look into the grieving and sorrowful faces of the congregation, and detect a note of fear as well. There is the dawning realisation in people’s eyes, that one day it will be them who lies in the coffin, their frail remains which are ushered into the incinerator in the crematorium or buried beneath the ground, while everyone else walks away and gets on with their lives. 

We fear death because it threatens to take away all we value, and we don’t know what happens after it. As a child I had a recurrent nightmare. It stemmed from an occasion when I was playing with a toy car in a church hall. I pushed the car across the floor and to my horror, it vanished down a gap between the floorboards and the wall. My four–year–old mind knew nothing of the way floors and foundations were made, and so somehow I imagined this little car falling into space, falling, falling into outer darkness, and on into oblivion, never coming to an end. It was my first brush with the fear of death. Is that what comes after life? The sheer descent into nothingness? 

I recently sat with a friend very near to death, surrounded by his family. When you see someone approaching the end, crossing the threshold from life into death, it’s inevitable to wonder what happens next? As they go through that strange door marked death and disappear from sight, leaving behind the shell of a body, where have they gone? Do they still exist? Is that it? 

The title of Julian Barnes’ book is of course a little ironic. You feel reading through it that he is trying to convince himself that death is ‘nothing to be frightened of’, but there always lurks the dim fear that it might be: 

“It is difficult for us to contemplate fixedly, possibility, let alone the certainty, that life is a matter of cosmic hazard, its fundamental purpose mere self–perpetuation, that it unfolds in emptiness, that our planet will one day drift in frozen silence, and that the human species, as it has developed in all its frenzied and overengineered complexity, will completely disappear and not be missed, because there is nobody and nothing out there to miss us.” 

In our times, death is something that we can reasonably expect to happen at a relatively old age. In previous ages, people died all around you – of all ages and stages all the time – and so they perhaps talked about death a bit more. But then again, there has always been a reluctance to think about dying. Blaise Pascal, that perceptive analyst of the human condition, wrote in one of his short Pensées: “being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.” 

In the Bible there is a good deal of reflection on death, and at its heart one of the most powerful and influential ways of overcoming the fear of death that the human race has ever known. 

St Paul, as he did so often, came up with an image to help us look at death differently. He invites us to see our dead bodies as like seeds planted in the ground. Imagine a gardener, planting a row of bulbs, burying them deep into the dark earth and covering them over with soil. They begin to decay and it seems that they have gone from sight or memory forever. Yet of course that is not the end of the story. Soon the mysterious magic of germination happens, the green shoot appears and finally a flower emerges. The flower doesn’t look anything like the bulb that was planted but is somehow still continuous with it. 

So maybe, he suggests, rather than falling into black nothingness, there is the possibility of a new form of life after death, that doesn’t look much like this life, but is in fact even greater and more colourful. The Christian belief that this could be true isn’t just plucked out of the air as a bit of wishful thinking, but stems from the astonishing and unique event of the first Easter, when Jesus, like all the rest of us, entered the darkness of death, and yet passed through death to the other side and came back to show us what was on the other side. In one sense, it was unique and a one–off, but it didn’t need to be. The idea that St Paul discovered, and that has sustained Christians for centuries in all nations, in all ages and all backgrounds (remember death is the one thing we all have in common), is that by believing in Christ, binding ourselves to him by simple trust, as it were, when it is our turn to draw near to the dread door of death, we might enter death not alone, but hand in hand with the one person in human history who showed us what was on the other side.  

Christians fear the process of dying as much as anyone else. But they have this hunch, this belief that is sometimes hard to hold onto, but remains stubbornly persistent, that death just might not be the last word.

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