I think the movie The Savages, starring Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, exposes our tendency to avoid the reality of death. Linney and Hoffman play siblings who are forced to take care of their father (who is battling dementia) after his ‘girlfriend’ dies. Outside of a care facility Hoffman lays into his sister for being so choosy about assisted living centers saying,
“…the landscaping, the neighborhoods of care, they’re not for the residents. They are for the relatives; people like you and me who don’t want to admit what is really going on here. People are dying, Wendy. Right inside that beautiful building, right now, its a f-ing horror show. And all this wellness propaganda and the landscaping is just there to obscure the miserable fact that people die. And death is gaseous and gruesome and its filled with s*** and p*** and rotten stink.”
[This film is a great one for examining the human condition and coping mechanisms and living up to expectations, etc.]
I have been thinking about death a good bit lately. My family, friends and church have been dealing with the losses of loved ones and I’ve been thinking about how to handle it all. What should we say? Does how we talk about death reveal what we think about it? (N.T. Wright’s book, Surprised By Hope tackles some of these ideas)
We often find comfort in the ideas “it was their time” or “we’ll see them again” or “they’re in a better place”. Recently I interacted with someone who uses the cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 12 to comfort the dying, saying that they will “know things and recognize people” even after they die. This person also uses the promise of resurrection to assure reunion with believing family members. I disagree with both approaches.
Perhaps I need to lighten up and let whatever gets us through the tough times stand. But, my gut is unsettled by how we handle death. I think the typical approaches to the topic fail to recognize how horrible it is. God is a God of life. Death is his opposite. Even though Jesus defeated death, it still seems to reign in our present world. As Jim Morrison sang, “No one here gets out alive.” Is there a good way to speak of the end of a life as the tragic and hideous consequence of sin without causing unnecessary pain to the bereaved? Can we handle talking about the reality of death? After all, it is not as simple as ‘falling asleep’. It is often painful and gross.
Obviously we don’t want to follow the tactless, brutality of Hoffman’s character. Are there better ways to acknowledge the horror of death and comfort the dying/bereaved without resorting to cliches or manipulating the scripture to create an understanding that we are more comfortable with?
Have you seen it done well? What have you found helpful?
October 5, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Another, earlier post about this very scene has been brought to my attention. Good things there. Check it out. http://www.christandpopculture.com/film/death-is-savage/
October 2, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Thanks for the thoughts Gretchen!
I think we can change our culture in terms of how we speak about death. If we think, speak and teach appropriately with regard to death when we are not engrossed in tragedy and grief, then we will naturally think and communicate more accurately when those times do come. Is this naive? Idealistic? Picky?
September 28, 2008 at 9:51 pm
I was struck by the same scene in The Savages, and I really felt that he had hit the nail on the head with that one. I felt very similarly when my grandma went into an assisted living facility the last few weeks of her life. And when she died, I felt that it was a total affront to God and His world, that it was not how things were supposed to be.
Watching my mom and her siblings deal with the loss of their mother, I heard a lot of things like, “she’s where she wanted to be now” and “we’ll see her again”. For some members of the family, I think those were platitudes to avoid the full impact of losing her or to avoid having to admit how horrible they felt about it. But for my mom, it was really how she felt about it b/c of where she was in the process of grieving and how she had gone about that process.
I think she started dealing with the awfulness of the fact that her mom was going to die when they diagnosed her with Stage IV cancer. So by the time she actually died, my mom had reached the stage where she could see the hope and grab hold of it; whereas some of her brothers and sisters had been avoiding the subject all along and just used the hope as another escape mechanism.
Ultimately, I think in order to grieve appropriately and well, you have to recognize both realities (for Christians). You have to let yourself feel how degrading and wrong death is before you can appreciate the impact of the gospel in the situation. But most of the time we’re so uncomfortable with “negative” emotions–ours or other people’s–that we’d rather just skip over them and look for the happy ending.
As to what this means for our praxis, I think our best bet is to “weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice”. If someone is unwilling or unable to face the nasty, I don’t think it’s our responsibility to make them (nor do I think they will thank us for it). Our responsibility is to be in it with them, supporting them in whatever way we can.
September 28, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Thanks for your thoughts Mari!
I want to flesh out a couple of my thoughts.
My dissatisfaction with the use of Hebrews 12 and the resurrection as described above is because they are wrong-headed. The “cloud of witnesses” is a wonderful encouragement to those of us “running the race”. It is, in my opinion, a stretch to use it to offer ideas of what it will be like for us after we die. Is it right to comfort someone who is dying by saying, “you will see them again”? Personally, I’m not convinced we can know that we will recognize each other in the next life. It would be cool, but I worry that idea puts too much emphasis on what I want.
Similarly, the glory of resurrection is not that we will get to hang out with our grandparents again. It would be nice if we could. But do we know that we will? (This is a real question. Is there a good reading of Scripture that teaches recognition of the relationships of this world in the next?)
September 24, 2008 at 3:02 pm
I must say, Bobby–I resonate a great deal with this post. Maybe it’s because I dislike funerals, and feel less of a Christian because of this.
The thing is, the resurrection OUGHT to be a point of hope amidst the tragedy of death. The “words of comfort” you mentioned above . . . these are actually true statements. (Being with Jesus IS better, suffering has ended, etc). So then why do they feel hollow, ought of place, and weird to you and I? I wonder if it’s because these words are frequently offered too soon, rushing past the other truth . . . that death is awful, and saying good-bye is painful.
Maybe this is why I am so drawn to the Psalms of Lament. In them I see God inviting raw, unsanitized RAGING against tragedy. I think we tend to feel this is not ok, that somehow we need to push past feelings of anger, grief and fear. The reality is, the Christian take on death is different from Existentialism. Rather than embracing death in order to live more freely, Christianity acknowledges the ugly, not-normal-ness of death.
And no, death is not the end of the story. (Thanks be to God!) But in order to get to hope, I think it is necessary to sit (and often wrestle) with sadness.