What Death Teaches Us

LOSING MUM in 2022 taught me that no matter how much we prepared for her passing, we never truly believed she would be taken from us.  Strange as that is to comprehend 3.5 years later.  As I say at every funeral I officiate, “death always catches us by surprise.”  

Losing Mum taught me that losing a parent is different than losing a child.  These lessons also seem so obvious now, as if I should have always known.  

You will no doubt be reading this conscious of your own precious losses, and I invite you to bring that to your present thanksgiving awareness right now.  Take a moment to honour it.  

We grieve because of love,
that most bittersweet
of concepts in this life.  

When we lost Nathanael in 2014, in spite of the pain of losing him, something was added to me.  I also learned that I grieved better for his loss — with a ton more acceptance — than I had when I lost my first marriage in 2003.  

It was useful to me to observe this in the gait of my grief, over and again — it helped me to face the fact that I was better off for an initial grief that I’d endured a decade before.  

I’d learned an acceptance wisdom that has served me ever since.  The wisdom of letting go.  This is a wisdom that benefits our whole lives, and as our lives always ripple into others’ lives, theirs is benefitted from our benefit, too.  

When I lost a career that was very dear to me — at the time, the centre of my identity — it taught me that my identity was in the wrong place.  So many times I’ve had to learn and re-learn this lesson — a thing that’s stuck a little more in 2022 and then again even last year.  I don’t pretend that I have arrived, I expect to learn more in future on this lesson, but there are some things I’ve completely let go of that needed to be let go of.  

An everyday non-religious way of positing the truth of Job 1:21 summarises a key juncture of our development: 

“Life gives and the Life takes away,
blessed be Life for what we learn.”    

Only when we learn the lesson of accepting the
loss of things have we mastered the key lesson in life.  

The purpose of loss is shrouded in what we gain, what we learn, what we glean; yes, from within the caverns of pain we find ourselves in, from within the fissures of desolate disconnection we endure.  

Never more true: out of loss there is gain.  Spiritual gain for what we learn.  For the wisdom to live life well.  

Love finds itself defined in truth

There are many ways of saying it, but “love finds itself defined in truth” is a good start.  This short article will not be a perfect treatise on the matter of love within truth or truth within love, but it is no less worth writing.  

Truth is an inherent part of love, and what besmirches love is conditionality — a betrayal of love — a place where conditions are or must be placed on the love.  But there is generally an initiator of such conditionality in love, and the parties who respond with conditionality (the abused/neglected) always do so because of the harm the conditionality evokes.  

Conditions can be placed on love, either through the initiation to love — which can make love a thing of abuse or neglect, often based in the initiator’s sense of entitlement — or through the response to love, where safe boundaries are placed in response to the initiation of conditional love.  

Of course, conditional love is one antithesis of love.  

Love by inherent design is sacrificial, unconditional.  

Such inadequacies of love are placed there by those who have been hurt and have not healed or learned to trust again, or by those who feel entitled to love (feeling entitled to love is an antithesis of love — not recognising love’s a respect to be earned and maintained — that loving is giving without expectation of return), and by those who respond to those who feel entitled, installing boundaries for their and others’ protection.  

Where there is conditionality in love, there is also conditionality of truth.  People who cannot handle the truth tend to be those who initiate conditional love.  And in these situations, we tend to be drawn into reciprocating part truth for part truth — it becomes a stunted relationship that cannot reach its full potential; it can feel impossible to safely reciprocate trusting the untrustworthy with truth.  It can be unsafe and unwise.  

There is much more that could be written here, but let me move to truth’s central role in love.  

Let’s turn to the positive duty in love which finds itself enunciated in truth.  

Where truth reigns in a relationship, love is supreme and the parties can live in safety and grow freely as a result.  

Where love is grounded in truth is in the concept of faithfulness.  

One cannot be faithful without being truthful.  

Where there is faithfulness, there are no lies.  The test of true love is whether there is space for lies.  

A lie = any nontruth.

Of course, in our human relationships, we wrestle constantly with sin, which is that capacity in us all to do the wrong thing.  Even if it’s only 2 percent wrong, it’s not right nor loving, especially because we tend to underestimate the value of our wrongs and overestimate the value of others’ wrongs.  In other words, if I think I’m 2 percent wrong, I’m probably 10 percent wrong and other people may think it’s a lot more than that.  

This is where love and truth are aligned.  Love serves to the commitment of truth.  Love doesn’t miss the mark.  Love honours truth.  Love duly repents to the fullest discernable measure of the truth when it is wrong.  

The faithful person is the best person to be in a relationship with because they’re trustworthy.  

The faithful person honours truth and therefore loves unconditionally — the best they can, and when they miss the mark, they repent (make amends).  

The irony is that our task in life is to BE this person.  It’s only when we’re faithful, honouring truth, fully committed to love, that we experience the fullness of peace, hope, and joy available in this life.  

God blesses the faithful, and the more devoted to truth we are, the more abundant life we will experience.  

POSTSCRIPT: I find it’s quite common for people to think I’m writing this about you.  Truth is some of this many relate with.  I wrote this as it came to me as an idea to write on, i.e., not from any actual situation in my life.  It certainly doesn’t relate to any of my pastoral or chaplaincy work.  What I’ve written is to be seen as observations from me, that’s all.