BOOK REVIEW: The Art of Dying: Living Fully Into The Life To Come

I remember it like it was yesterday. It wasn’t too long ago, but the emotional roller coaster was so terrifying that I’ll not soon forget the experience.

I was in my first year of pastoring sitting at a Christian convention meeting at a West Baltimore church. The meeting portion of the mid-day program had just come to an end and the worship experience had just begun. The preacher was introduced and he rose to start out on his sermon for the dwindling faithful few who who had gathered to hear a Word from the Lord.

I was sitting in the rear of the church (a secret treat that many pastor’s enjoy) taking it all in when my cell phone rang. I answered and the voice on the other line said, “Pastor, come quick. One of our members is dying.”

I rushed out into the hall of the church and was told the name of the member who was the center of concern. I rushed out to the parking lot, jumped in my car and began hurriedly making my way through downtown Baltimore during lunch hour traffic to get to the Emergency Room of a hospital in East Baltimore.

While swerving in and out of traffic, I realized that while rushing to the scene, I didn’t know what to do once I arrived. I panicked and instinctively called my father. My Dad has been pastoring for 24 years and the foundational knowledge that I have as it relates to what it means to be a pastor comes from him. Dad picked up his cell and I began telling him the situation that I was rushing to. I didn’t have time to ease into the inquiry or relay my question in a roundabout way so as to maintain the illusion of poise. The question just came out.

“Dad, what do I do?”

He calmly began walking me through step-by-step what I should do while standing at the deathbed of one of the members of the church. Pulling from more than two decades of experience, he instructed and assured me that I was well able to be pastor even in the face of death. Near the end of our conversation, I was screeching into the parking lot of the hospital. We hung up and seeing the Chairman of our Deacon Board standing at the entrance of the Emergency Room, I marched with fragile confidence into the room where the Death Angel was threatening.

I didn’t know what to expect when I walked in. But there she was. Laying on the bed, conscious, in obvious pain. I reached for her hand and she grabbed mine – squeezing with a strength that I did not imagine a dying woman to have. I mumbled and tripped over words of encouragement. To those standing around, I asked the usual, time-filling questions about the diagnosis and the doctors. I looked at the monitors in the room – listening to the beeps of alien machinery and tried with awkward gaze to understand what they meant. I thought I would read some scriptures, but in a strange way scripture didn’t seem adequate for the setting.

(It’s difficult to explain it, but sometimes when I’m face to face with a traumatic experience, the reading of scripture can feel like a hollow exercise.)

So I sat. I held her hand. I spoke with those standing around and I waited. At some point, the prognosis improved and it was clear that though my sister was not out of the woods, death would be delayed until another future time. I called the family into the small room. We gathered in a circle and I led us in a word of prayer.

I left out of the hospital relieved that things went as well as they did, but at the same time deeply aware of my inadequacy and lack of confidence as it relates to ministering to the dying and their grief-stricken family while sojourning together through the valley of the shadow of death.

I’ve made many more hospital visits and officiated many more funerals since then, but still I’m purposing to grow stronger in facing the fact of death for myself and others.

I started reading a book entitled The Art of Dying: Living Fully Into The Life To Come by Rob Moll earlier this year. It has helped me in ways that I could never have imagined from just looking at the simplistic cover. Moll rightly raises the issue that many in America have similar discomfort as it relates to death because death has been moved from our view. We don’t deal with it. We don’t have to. We have professionals who deal with that. We pay people to deal with death. We’ve outsourced the sacred responsibility of serving our loved ones in death. It’s just something that we don’t want to touch. As Moll says, we don’t “live in the light of our mortality, often our busy lives don’t allow this reflection.”

But there was a time when death was closer. I still hear echoes of the old folks telling stories of family and friends who had died – not at the hospital, but at home. I hear my North Carolinian grandfather who was also a Bishop, praying over the church: “Thank you, Lord that last night our resting beds, didn’t become our cooling boards.” I still get invitations to preach at little churches out in “the country” who have regular remembrance of their members and family because the cemetery is out in the back of the church and not across town in a memorial park. I hear of a time when the old folks would go and view the body of the deceased which was on display in the living room of their home – not a funeral home.

But in the 21st century things are not this way. We don’t see death. We don’t touch it. We don’t reflect on it. And Moll says that this has an impact not just on the larger society, but also on the American Church.

I was shocked when I read Moll’s questioning of the church on whether we are “too pro-life”. He cited a study that researched “quality of death” scores. The study revealed that patients who received outside clergy visits had worse quality of death scores compared to those who did not. The research suggested that Christians were more likely to request aggressive treatments for their dying loved ones believing that God might work through it to provide divine healing. In the process of trying all the latest aggressive treatments, opportunities were missed to spend cherished moments with dying loved ones. He said that churches are not teaching people to die well. Instead we (both the church and larger society) are more focused on extending life – with less concern about the quality of life even if it is extended. Moll says, and I now agree – that there comes a time when Christians must “shift their focus from extending life to preparing to die.”

This book introduced me to the term “good death“. I have never in all my years put those two words together. But as he lays out in his book, it makes perfect sense that the church should not only be helping people to live good lives, but Christians have a responsibility as well to teach people how to have a “good death”. He says, “A death that doesn’t afford the opportunity for last words, for reconciliation, for repentance and for spiritual preparation for the next world is not a good death, according to traditional Christian teaching.”

This book not only provides theory and traditional Christian teaching, but it also provides practical advice that all of us – Christian or not – could stand to benefit from. It has helped me on my road to being a better pastor and I am looking to incorporate it into my church…especially the leadership who are often engaged in pastoral care along with me. The study guide questions in the rear of the book make this book a great candidate for any church’s Bible Study program.

But aside from its benefit to the Church, it has helped me personally earlier this year. One of my great-uncles died and I was blessed to be there at the hospital with my family as he was making his transition. As he was slipping away, I was in the waiting room reading this book. In it, I found the support that I was looking for. When we were urgently called back to his room, we stood around my uncle’s bed speaking words of love and appreciation. For the first time in my life, I watched someone die. And though there were many tears, much grief and heartache; I knew that when I saw my uncle take his last labored breath, that I had just seen a good man die a good death.

The Art of Dying by Rob Moll is a gift to us all.

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Tags: Bible Study, Christian Death, Intervarsity Press, Pastoral Care, Rob Moll, The Art of Dying