Death: Not the Way It's Supposed to Be

Dad’s been dead for almost three months now. It was only a few days ago that I had my first good cry about it. This is the first of a series of entries that I wrote in the days following dad’s death. 

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Three weeks ago now, my dad died. As it goes with deaths, I’ve had moments where it’s been difficult to get used to a new kind of life. 

Moments like yesterday when I built a really cool train track for the boys. What made it cool was all of the bridges. The piers for these bridges were granddad’s Christmas present to the boys. It was less than a month ago that dad and I were in the shop cutting and sanding the piers. I really wanted to FaceTime him so he could see the boys enjoying them. 

On Tuesdays and Fridays I hang out with the boys all day. Before he died, I would give dad a call after the boys woke from their naps. Now I’ve got to find something to do after naps and before dinner.

“It’s the little things,” a buddy told me. And he’s right. It’s normal life without dad that’s the hardest. 

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Death.

Dead. 

Die.

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Even seeing these words on the screen is hard. 

And so we insulate ourselves even from the words. 

Just tonight we had some girls from T’s dorm over for dinner. K is a Yooper. (That’s a resident of the U. P., which, for my southern friends, is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.) K grew up deer hunting. Her roommate, M, grew up in the suburbs. During our post-dinner conversation, M realized that the deer in their freezer was killed by K. (Or one of K’s kin––they killed so many last season that K couldn’t remember.) M was shocked. She repeated––loud enough for our neighbors to hear: “You killed the deer in our freezer?!” 

The irony is that M had a pile of chicken bones on her plate. 

The problem wasn’t meat, but killing an animal. 

Aren't we all a little like this? The disconnect in M’s mind between the pile of bones on her plate and the meat in their freezer highlights how we insulate ourselves from death and dead bodies. And this insulation is thickest when dealing with the death of the people who are closest to us. 

Perhaps it’s obvious (and an obvious understatement): We are uncomfortable with death. We are uncomfortable and so we hide, repress, and avoid it. 

As I’ve been living in this uneasy space, I’ve been encouraged to hold two things in tension. 

The first is that I shouldn’t hide. I can’t build a track without a tinge of grief. Each Tuesday afternoon (so far) has  brought a cloud of loss and loneliness. But no matter how uncomfortable I am, I have to be sure that I’m not hiding. (As an aside, I'm so grateful that, on Tuesday evenings, we meet with our house-group from church––a place where I’m drawn out of hiding and into the life of community.) 

The second is that I’ve actually come to appreciate the fact that death should make us uncomfortable. It would have been easy to point to the bones on M’s plate and say “Seriously!? Don’t you see the irony? Death is the way its supposed to be.” Or, more close to home, to touch the cold hands in the coffin or point to the fresh pile of dirt and say: “You knew it was coming. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.” 

After all, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.”

Christians believe that this is a lie––or at least only part of the truth. Death should make us uncomfortable because death is not the way it’s supposed to be. We are dust, but our return to dust is evidence of a major problem. 


I’ll explore this problem more in the days to come. But this is a good place to sit for a while: faced with our own mortality and with the sin that causes it. And now, as we remember Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, it’s good for us to be faced with the sin that caused his death, too. It is there, after all, that the problem meets its solution.