I am a debtor to death. It furnished work to me for almost
half a century: in its approach, in its advent and in its aftermath.

I am no stranger to many of its causes and forms. Though I
have never seen an execution or a murder or a battlefield death, many is the
time that I have seen death come in a hospital ward or emergency room.
As a parish priest for more than 40 years, I was naturally
involved with death as I tried to help people prepare for it when its imminence
was certain and to accept it when it struck suddenly and without warning.

I have never been able to decide which alternative is easier
to manage: watching and waiting for what is understood under the circumstances
to be inevitable sooner rather than later, or sustaining the concussion of the
unexpected.

I missed being present at my mother’s death by a matter of a
few hours, though I had seen her that day at the very terminal stage of a
ravaging carcinoma and clearly sensed then, even at the age of 14, that I was
seeing her alive for the last time.

Perforce, I have written and spoken volumes about death,
and, like any human being I have ever known, tried in the process to
rationalize it. With the left side of my brain I accept without quibble the
wisdom of the psalmist: “The days of our age are threescore years and ten; and
though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their
strength then but labour and sorrow; so soon passeth it away, and we are gone.”

Easy to intone from pulpit and altar; difficult to absorb in
the pew and in the after-days and nights of the palpable absence of the one
loved.

During my career as a parish minister I was noted for my
direct, concise and honest homilies — especially those given at funerals. In
that respect I had one rule in the observance of which I never failed, and that
was to say only those things I had come to believe on the basis of experience,
research and reason.

That left me without access to the superficiality of the
comforting bromide. I could never say that such and such a death was “the will
of God,” or that “everything happens for a reason” or yet that so and so “had
gone to a better place.” Such utterances were expected of me, and not
infrequently did annoyance and disappointment greet my unwillingness to speak
them.

My ministerial career had a kind of interruption as, for most
of a decade, I was in the employ of a large circulation newspaper, first as its
religion expert and later as a utility-infield editor and finally as an
editorial writer and columnist.

On and off during those years I was from time to time
involved in the writing of obituaries — supposedly the bane of the serious
journalist’s existence. I did not mind at all the occasional obituary
assignment. I believed then and believe now that there is somewhere in every
life a pretty good story.

Thirty years ago it was considered both proper and desirable
to say in an obituary that the deceased had “died.” We did not resort to such
euphemisms as “passed away.”
Interns and younger reporters would occasionally try to
hedge on the use of the verb “to die,” but an alert copy editor would almost
always restore the directness and concision of the piece.
The two daily newspapers published in Detroit in 2010 will
occasionally run reporter-written obituaries. Most of them are too cute by half
and seldom say that so and so “died.” What’s worse is that now both papers,
apparently in a scramble to maximize revenue, sell space for death notices and
print whatever literary atrocities are submitted by the bereaved.
Under this dispensation I cannot tell you how many people
have “gone home to Jesus” or have “escaped this vale of tears” (it was spelled
“veil”) or have “gone to sleep in the Lord” or whose “molecules have re-joined
the author of life.” Evidently no one just dies anymore.
Let me say that as much as I prize my life for all its
pleasure and promise, I am as aware as a person can be that it will come to an
end in one way or another — and, for all I know, within the next 10 minutes. I
am 71 years old and in robust health. I have yet to feel that first tell-tale
throb of a fatal growth. My cardiovascular system seems sound, etc., etc.
I have, however, passed that three-score-and-ten mark made
so familiar by the Bible and am pressing on toward fourscore. I will have
outlived my mother by 57 years on the 31st of next month and my father by
nearly 33 years and all my attendant aunts and uncles plus cousins on
both sides.

Withal, my time is coming, and when it does, I would like it
said in all private and public communications that I have “died,” am “dead.” I
shall not have “passed away” and will on no account have “gone home to Jesus.”

Harry T. Cook

(Google his name for more articles by Harry Cook on our website. I don’t often agree with him, but I like him, and he’s a brilliant wordsmith. Rowland).