Past Sermons by Rev. George Smith, Retired

Death and Dying

November 3, 2002

Reading: "We invent truths about God to protect ourselves from the wolf’s cries we hear and make."—Thomas Aquines

Reading: "One regret that I am determined not to have when I am lying upon my bed is that we did not kiss enough."—Hafiz

Reading: "The dead are not dead if we have loved them truly. In our own lives we give them immortality.

Let us arise and take up the work they have left unfinished, and preserve the treasures they have won, and round out the circuit of their being to the fullness of the ampler orbit in our own."—Felix Adler



The phone rang, I answered it. I was then 8 years old. The caller wanted my father. Little did I know that the person wanted to tell my father that Billy Joslin, my best friend, had been killed in a hunting accident that very day. A lot happened that week to me, I had my tonsils and adenoids out, when I got out of the hospital I went to stay at the home of a friend of the family, that Thursday was Thanksgiving, and my friend died on Friday. He, his father and a close friend of his father had gone out earlier that day to hunt deer. He was not hunting but just standing near his father’s friend when that friend fired the gun at a deer. Somehow the bullet ricocheted off a tree and hit my friend, killing him instantly. My father went over to see the family. When he returned, my mother asked how things were going. He responded that everyone was just sitting around saying nothing. It was that kind of non-descript expressions that seemed to characterize my memories of my friend’s death.

Had I comprehend the idea of death at that time? I really don’t know. I knew that he was gone. Did I know at that time what I personally needed in order to effectively grieve? Remember that all of this took place before the seminal work of Elizabeth Kubler Ross on Death and Dying. I don’t remember being comforted by my parents, nor do I remember not being comforted by them. What I do remember is the sense of blankness but not emptiness that I felt. It did not seem unreal to me, just a part of life or rather the end of life. It seems that now I do wonder what was my real reaction to his death and what was I really feeling about it. I know I had no outward response. It seemed to be all internal. I remember we got out of school one afternoon for his funeral service at the church where my father pastored. I do not remember any of the words spoken but I do remember walking up to the box, my sense of what a coffin was at that time, and seeing Billy lying there—dead. It seemed to me at the time to signal the end of our friendship. I also remember that the friend who was hunting with them whose shot had killed Billy was beside himself with grief. He couldn’t stop crying at the funeral. And about a year later, I remember someone saying that he still had not gotten over his grief. No one seemed to talk about his death, neither my teachers nor my classmates. In those days we didn’t talk through our grief. On a side note, it was interesting as I wrote this; I literally had to translate this information from my childhood consciousness into my adult one.

In recent years I have wondered about its affect on me? I have never seriously worked on the meaning of his death to me. I can’t identify that I went through the process of grieving his death. The numbness seems to have been there. Maybe even the depression. But the anger, the bargaining and the coming to grips with his death, the acceptance, does not seem to be real to me yet. In those days a simple statement of he is in heaven with God was what was considered sufficient for grief. Maybe it did for some but not this 8 year old struggling with the loss of a very dear friend. For me his death ended a very important chapter in my life, that of a very close childhood friendship. His death ended for me, the best friendship I had ever had. We had spent many happy hours playing on his farm, swimming in the shale bed pond, making tunnels in the bails of hay in the hay mow, just being together. Idealized I’m sure by the shortness of the time we had together and our ages. Death ended that relationship.

One dreary, cold February day in the mid 1970’s, not long after I had become the minister of a small United Methodist Church in up state New York, my family and I were preparing to go to a mid winter minister’s retreat when to my surprise my mother burst into our house very agitated asking if we had heard about Jeffy and Shelly, my nephew and niece. She told us my sister’s two children had drowned that morning. I remember thinking when I heard those words, what was she saying? I didn’t quit get it. She had to repeat it for me. Una’s children were dead, she said. We immediately went to my sister’s house. You need to know that we are a strong and stoic New England family, my mother coming from CT and my dad from MA. We just don’t show much emotion and this time was no exception. Everyone seemed so placid. We talked little. I know I personally avoided saying anything so as not to upset anyone, strange, not that anyone would show that upsetness. We go through the funeral fine. After the funeral there were two aspects of my grief--how to help my sister and her husband and how to deal with my own sense of grief. The later I took care of by writing over a period of several years a book of poems about the death and life of my niece and nephew. As for my sister and her husband, I visited them often over the next several years. We talked, sometimes about the emptiness, the fact that nothing seemed to console them. Years later I learned that even in my ineptness, my poor attempts at grief counseling, that something had indeed helped them. Those visits meant a lot to them. What I remember about them is that I experienced what a lot of you have experienced that it was not easy to be with their grief. I found myself asking, what do I say? I have no magical answers for you as I had none for myself. The more I look at what happened the more I am convinced that closeness, being there, was much more important than words. It meant being there even though I felt very much ill at ease with them and their grief. For how can you ever comfort a parent who has lost a child? You can’t!! But being there. Being with them. Is important. It does help in the grief process. We all slowly said good by to Jeff and Shelly.

This summer, I was awakened early one morning by my sister’s call telling me that our mother had died. It was not particularly startling as my mother had been failing rapidly and dementia had settled in. She had literally not been with us for several months. She didn’t know who we were or where she was. She would go to the cafeteria to eat and if you did not watch her carefully she would eat the flowers in the vases on the tables. In some respects it was good that she died. She had suffered enough. We could at this point discuss euthanasia, its ethical and moral concerns and how other cultures deal with this issue but suffice it to say that for myself personally, I do not want to live if my life were like my mothers during her last several years. I would hope that I would have the courage to end my life, both my own suffering and that of my loved ones.

Loosing my mother was different for me from that of loosing my friend and my niece and nephew. Over the years my mother’s struggle with mental illness made it difficult to form a close bond with her. She had had a severe episode of her illness at the time of her pregnancy with me continuing for 2 years after my birth. She had not wanted to be pregnant. She wanted a daughter though as she already had her son, my older brother. She was reported to have said that if I were not a girl she would leave me at the hospital. Years later when she was doing a bit better, she tried to atone for her rejection of me. As a result of this I was the one in the family with whom she could most easily communicate. So when my mother died, I had mixed feelings about her death and still do to this day.

Simply put deaths are not easy and they are not all experienced the same. AS you can see from my three experiences with death, each affected me differently. One of the things that I have gained in my years of adulthood and especially from my experience as a minister is that our personal experience of mourning of a death is very much related to how we were connected to the deceased in life. The depth of that connection is expressed in the feelings of loss we experience and as always expressed in our own individual way. It is the connection that is important. My connection to Billy was very strong. Years after his death I have experienced tears over his loss. My niece’s and nephew’s death as I remember them can bring some tears to my eyes. My connection to my mother was not as strong because her illness had made my experience of her death shaded by my experience of her life. To expect each of us to experience the death of another in the same way that we do is just not consistent with reality.

Death is rather strange thing if you really think about it. Not only are different deaths experienced differently, our own sense of our own death is not experienced in the same way at the different stages of our development. It is usually not until we reach middle age that death really seems to have an impact upon us personally. We begin at that point to feel vulnerable to death. In a study of heroin addicts done many years ago, It seemed that many stopped using the drug after they reached midlife. That is they stopped without going into treatment. What was discovered was the simple fact that these individuals finally faced with their own mortality reevaluated their lives and stopped using. In fact more stopped that way than who had gone through treatment. The possibility of death had altered their perception of life.

For us who have reached this midpoint of life it is that we for the first time realize that we can and will die, asking what have I done with my life? What do I have left to accomplish? What do I want my end life to be like? The older we become the more we face the end. For some of us, the ending comes easily. If we have felt that our life has been of value. If we have felt that we have accomplished something. If not, death may be a terror to us.

So death is a challenge to us in many ways. Another’s death is a challenge to our sense of self. Our response to death is as varied as we are. And yet what of those that have passed on? Those that have died? What are they to us now?

Every religion has some sense of life after death. Each speaks of a lifting of the veil, of time without time. Each explores these elements within their own framework of understanding to touch the heart of their mourners.

Several years ago there was a girl about 10 years old who was slowly dying of cancer. Her parents though very brave, at times were overwhelmed by the thought that their child would soon be dead. One day she saw her mother crying. She said to her, mom, don’t cry for me. Even though I will die, you will still have me with you in your heart. I will always be there. What true words. The dead are not gone. They are still with us in our hearts, in our minds, and in our souls. They occupy a very special place within us.

So is death. So is life.