Death & Bereavement
Parish, talks by Metropolitan Anthony
From www.masrchive.org
I
12.4.1984
I was asked, last time to interrupt the normal flow of our talks which should have led us to speak now on the Eucharist and to speak on preparation for death, or perhaps on death and the way in which we can think of it and meet it. I would like to add to this in the last talk something about the various rites which are connected in the Orthodox Church with death, what happens afterwards to the body of the person who has died. How do we treat this body which has been instrumental in all that the soul has acquired, all that was done, achieved, or in all those things in which a person has failed. To begin with, I would like to dispel, if I can, the habitual attitude which modern man has developed concerning death - a feeling of fear, of rejection, a feeling that death is the worst that can occur to a person and that at all cost survival must be achieved, even if survival has little to do with living, with a quality of life or with life altogether.
In earlier times when the Christians were nearer both to their pagan roots and to the tremendous, shaking, experience of conversion, of the discovery of the Living God in and through Christ, death was spoken of in terms of a birth into eternal life. It was perceived not as an end, not as the ultimate defeat, but as a beginning. Life was thought of as an ascent towards eternity, and death was felt to be that door which opens and allows us to enter it. This explains why so often the early Christians used to remind one another of death by words like 'remember death’, while in the prayers which St John Chrysostom has left us as a precious inheritance there is a petition in which we ask God to give us a remembrance of death. When such words are spoken to modern man, the reaction usually is one of rejection, of revulsion. Do we mean by such words that we must remember that death is there like the sword of Damocles over our heads, hanging over us on a hair, that at any moment the banquet of life may end tragically, horribly. Does it mean that whenever a joy comes our way we must be aware that it will have an end? Is it that we wish to darken the light of every day by the fear of an impending death? This is not what the early Christian felt. What he felt was that death, as I have said before, is a decisive moment at which all that we can do on earth will have come to an end and that we must hurry; we must hurry to achieve on earth all that can be achieved. This all was, oddly, a function in life, but mainly, in the minds of the spiritual guides, it was achieving to become the true person whom we were called by God to be, to reach as near as we can to what St Paul calls the full stature of Christ, to become as perfectly as possible an undistorted image of God.
St Paul in one of his epistles says that we must make haste to live because time is deceptive. And indeed is time not deceptive? Don't we live all the days of our life as though we were, writing hastily, carelessly a draft of life which one day we would copy out in fair hand, as though one was just preparing to build, collecting all that would later be organised into beauty, into harmony and into meaning. We live this way year after year, not doing, completely, fully, perfectly what we could do, because there is time ahead of us. Later we will achieve. Later it will be done. One day the fair copy will be written. Years pass and we never do it. We never do it not only because death comes and harvests us, but because at every period of life we become unable to do what the previous period would have allowed us to do. It is not in our mature years that we can achieve a beautiful and meaningful youth, as it is not in old age , that we can reveal to God and to the world what we might have been in years of Maturity. There is a time for all things, but once the time has gone, these things can no longer be done.
I have quoted, I think, more than once these words of Victor Hugo, who says that there is fire in the eyes of the young; there should be light in the eyes of the old. The time of the glowing fire passes, the time of light reaches us, but when the time of being a light has come, we no longer can do those things which can be done only in the days of our flaming. The days are deceptive. Time is deceptive. And when we are told that we must remember death, it is not in order to give us the fear of life; it is in order to make us live with all the intensity which we possibly could have if we were aware that every moment is the only moment which we possess and that each moment, every single moment of our life oust be perfect, must be not a trough but the crest of a wave, not a defeat but a triumph. When I speak of defeat and triumph I do not mean outer success or lack of it. I mean an inner achievement, a growth, an ability to be perfectly and fully what we are at a given moment.
Think of what would be every moment of our life if we were aware that it may be the last one, that this moment is given us to reach some sort of perfection, that the words which we speak will be the last, they must express all the beauty, all the wisdom, all the knowledge, indeed also, and most of all, all the love which we have learned in the course of our lives, whether they be short or long. How would we act with regard to each other if the present moment was the only moment at our disposal and if this moment was to express, to embody all that there is in us of love, of concern? We would live with an intensity and a depth which otherwise we never achieve. We are hardly aware of what this present moment is. We move from the past into the future without ever really living intensely at the present moment.
In his diary Dostoyevsky speaks to us of what happened to him when, being condemned to death, he stood, about to be hanged, how he stood and how he looked around himself. How glorious the light was and how wonderful the air he was breathing and how beautiful the world around him, and how precious every moment during which he was still alive while he was on the brink of death. Oh, he says, at that moment, if life was given, not one moment of it would be wasted. Life was given and so much of it was wasted.
If we were aware of this, how would we treat one another, and indeed ourselves? If I was aware, if you were aware that the person to whom you speak may die within moments, minutes, and that the sound of your voice, the content of your words, the gesture which you are making, the way you are relating to this person, your intentions will be the last thing to be perceived and taken into Eternity. How thoughtful, how careful, indeed how loving we would be. For experience shows that upon the face of death so many resentments, so much bitterness, so much mutual rejection dies out. Death is too great for things which should be too small even for temporary life.
And so death, the thought of it, the remembrance of it, seems to be the only power that makes life ultimately intense, to live up to death, to live in such a way that death may come at any moment and meet us at the summit, on the crest of the wave, not in the trough, that our words should not have been a jarring, cry and our last gesture a careless motion.
Those of us who have had occasion to live for a certain time with a dying person, with a person aware of the coming of death, while we were aware of it also, must have understood what the presence of death can mean in a relationship. It means that every word must contain all the reverence, all the beauty, all the harmony and love which was perhaps dormant within the relationship. It means that there is nothing which is small, because everything, however small, can be an expression of love. The way in which a cushion is arranged behind the back of a sick person, the way in which a cup of tea is prepared on a tray, the way in which words are spoken, our motions, the expression of our eyes, the tone of our voice, everything becomes important, and nothing is too small, because everything can contain all love or be a denial of it. This is very important, because it covers all our attitude to death. It may make it a great challenge, the thing that allows us to grow to our full stature and continuously to try to be all that we can be without any hope to be better later if we are not to be right today. Dostoyevsky again in the Brothers Karamazov has a small page in quotes on hell. He says hell can be summed up in one word: it is too late. Only remembrance of death can allow us so to live that never we should be confronted with this frightening phrase, frightening awareness: it is too late. Words that could be spoken, gestures that could fulfil a relationship, can no longer be spoken, can no longer be made. This does not mean that ultimately this cannot be achieved, but in another way, at the cost of much pain, at the cost of much agony of mind.
As I am on this point, I would like to illustrate it and make it more comprehensible. A certain number of years ago an old man in his middle eighties came to see me. He wanted advice because he could not continue to live in the agony that had been his for some sixty years. In the course of the Civil War in Russia he killed a girl whom he loved and who loved him. They loved one another dearly. They intended to be married, but in the course of the shooting she found herself suddenly in the line of his rifle and he could no longer stop to do it. And for sixty years he could not find peace. Not only had he cut short a life that was infinitely precious to him, but he had cut short a life that was blossoming and that was infinitely precious to the girl he loved. He told me that he had prayed, begged forgiveness of the Lord, gone to confession, made penance, received absolution and Communion, done everything which his imagination and the imagination of those to whom he turned suggested and he never could find peace. I remember telling him then something of which I had never thought before, as it happens when your heart is in the grip of a deep sympathy of intense, searing compassion. I said to him: You can turn to Christ whom you have not murdered, to priests whom you have not harmed. Why haven't you ever thought of turning to the girl that you killed? He was surprised. Cannot God forgive? Is He not the only one who can forgive the sins of men on earth? And indeed of course He is . But I suggested to him that unless the girl whom he had shot could forgive, unless she interceded for him, even God could not pass her by.
There is a passage in the Book of Daniel in which we are told that Daniel prayed, and God said to him that his prayer was in vain because an old woman who had a grudge against him was praying against his prayer and that her prayer was like a strong wind that blew down like smoke the prayer which he thought would ascend to heaven. That was the image, perhaps, that came to me unconsciously. I suggested to him that he should sit down after evening prayers and tell this girl of these sixty years of mental agony, of a heart laid waste, of the pain he had endured, ask her forgiveness and then ask her also to intercede for him and to ask the Lord to send peace into his heart if she had forgiven. And he did it, and peace came. So what is left undone on earth can be fulfilled, what has been a failure on earth can later be healed, but sixty years of pain and remorse, of tears and loneliness were the result of it.
Now when we think of death, we cannot think of it either as of a glorious or of a miserable event. The vision which the Bible, Gospel, God gives of it is more complex than this. To put it in short, I will say the following: God did not create us unto death and unto destruction. He created us for eternal life. He called us to immortality - not only to the immortality of the resurrection but to an immortality that knew not death. Death came as a result of sin. It came because man lost God, turned away from Him, looked for ways in which he could achieve all things apart from God. The knowledge which could have been acquired by communion with the knowledge and wisdom of God man tried to acquire himself. Instead of living in the familiarity of God, he chose his own independence. The French pastor Roland Curie wrote in a way that perhaps is a good image, that the moment man turned his back on God and looked into the infinite in front of him there was no part for him, and as God is the only source of life, he could do nothing but die.
If we look at the Bible, there is something that may strike us as the destiny of mankind. Death came, but it did not conquer mankind suddenly in the same way in which it conquered him later. Whatever the objective figures that indicate the length of days in the life of the first ten great generations in the Bible, what we can see is that length of days diminishes gradually. There is a passage in the Bible that I was unable to trace that says: And so death conquered mankind step by step. Death had come, but the power of life was still there, but gradually from generation of mortal and sinful men to another generation of mortal and sinful men death reduced the life of mankind more and more. So there is a tragedy in death. On the one hand, death is monstrous, death should not be there at all. Death is the result of our loss of God. On the other hand, there is another aspect in death. An endless duration separate from God, thousands and thousands of years of life without any hope that there will be an end to this separatedness from God would be more horrible than the dissolving of our bodily frame and an end of this vicious circle. So there is another aspect of death: narrow as the gate is, it is the only gate that allows us to escape the vicious circle of endlessness, apart from God, apart from fulfilment, a creaturely endlessness in which there is no space for our becoming again partakers of the life of God and ultimately partakers of the divine nature. This is why St Paul could say: For me to live is Christ. Death will be a gain, because as long as I live in this body I am separated from Christ. This is why he said in another passage that for him to die is not to divest himself, drop off his shoulders temporary life, for him to die means to be clothed in eternity. It is not an end; it is a beginning. It is a door that opens and allows us into the vastness of eternity which would be closed for us for ever if death does not free us from our integration into things earthly. In our attitude to death these two sides must play a role. When a person dies we legitimately can be heart-broken. We can look with horror at the fact that sin has murdered a person whom we love. We can deny the fact that we accept death as the last word, the last event of life. We are right when we cry over the departed, because this should not be. He was killed by evil. On the other hand, we can rejoice for him because new life unbounded, free, has begun for him or her. And again we can cry over ourselves, our bereavement, our loneliness, but at the same time we must learn what the Old Testament had already foreseen, foretold, when it says love is as strong as death, the love that does not allow the memory of the beloved to fade, the love that makes us speak not in the past tense of our relationship with the beloved ones: 'I loved him, we were so close’ but makes us think in the present tense: 'I love him; we are so close'. And in the New Testament we find something even greater than this, because with the resurrection of Christ, death is virtually overcome. Death is overcome in more than one way. It is overcome because we know through the resurrection of Christ that death is not the last word and that we are called to rise again and to live. Death is also defeated in the victory of Christ over sin and over death itself in the harrowing of hell, because the most horrible aspect of death, as was conceived in the Old Testament by the people of Israel, was that the separatedness from God that had brought about death was made definitive, unconquerable, by death itself. Those who had died - and this applied to everyone - those who had died of the loss of God in death lost Him for ever. The Old Testament Sheol was the place where God is not, the place of definitive, irretrievable absence and separation. In the resurrection of Christ, in his descent into hell, the harrowing of hell, this has come to men. There is separation on earth and the pain of separation, but there is no separation in death from God. On the contrary, death is the moment and the way in which, however separate we were, however incompletely united or in harmony with God we were, we present ourselves before his face. God is the Saviour of the world. Didn't He say more than once: I have not come to judge the world but to save the world? We stand before Him who is salvation.
So death has got a complexity -one could perhaps even say an ambiguity - but we have no right, if we are Christ’s own people, to allow ourselves to overlook the birth into eternity of the departing because we ourselves are so deeply wounded by our bereavement and our earthly loneliness. There is also in death a power of life that reaches out to us. If our love is faithful, if we are capable of remembering, not only with our mind but with our heart, those whom we have loved on earth, then, as Christ puts it, where our treasure is our heart is, and through the death of the beloved ones we are, as it were, already to a certain extent in that eternity where they live. If our hearts are faithful, we are already together with them, but at the same time, if their lives have meant something to us, if their lives have been either an example or a warning, we can continue to live, not in separatedness, but in continuity with them. We can live to their redemption and their glory. We can live embodying in all our life all that was meaningful and noble, true, in them so that one day when the time comes for us also, together with the whole of mankind, to stand before God, we can offer to the Lord all the fruits, all the harvest of the seeds which were sown by their example, their lives, and which grew and fructified, thanks to the undying love which we possess, and say to the Lord: take all this for me; it belongs to him, to her. I am only a field; he was the sower. His example, his words, his person were like seed spread on this ground, and now the harvest which has come belongs to him or to her.
We will continue next time by thinking how we can face our own death and the death of others, how we can face bereavement - ours and that of others. And then we will move on, as I have said, to the funeral rites of the Orthodox Church. I will try to show that what I have said today is embodied and expressed in them.
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II
3 May, 1984
It is difficult if not impossible to speak of questions of life and death without being personal. So I will be personal, perhaps more than some of you may wish. We meet death in our lives first of all not as subjects on which we reflect, although this happens, but mainly as a result of bereavement, either our own or someone else's. And it is this vicarious experience of death that serves as a background for us to reflect afterwards on the certainty of our own death and on the way in which we relate to it. So I will begin with a few examples of the way in which I personally have met other people's death, and that will explain to you perhaps my own attitude to it.
My first reminiscence of death was very far back, at a moment when I was still a child in Persia. One evening, as it was currently done, my parents took me to visit the rose garden of a man who was renowned for the beauty of his flowers. We arrived there. We were received by the master of the house and his household. We were taken round his most beautiful gardens, invited to share refreshments and sent home with a sense of having enjoyed the warmest, the most open-hearted, the least constrained hospitality one could imagine. It was only on the next day that we discovered that while we were going round with the master of the house, admiring his flowers, being treated to refreshments, entertained with all the courtesy of the Orient, that his son, who had been murdered a few hours before, was lying in one of the rooms of the house. And this, small though I was, gave me a very strong sense of what life and death are, and what the duty of those who are alive to other people who are still alive is, whatever the circumstances that are our own.
The second memory that I had is a conversation that refers to the Civil War or to the end of the First World War, between two young women; the brother of the one who was the bridegroom of the other had been killed. The news reached the bride. She came in to her friend, the sister, and said to her: 'Rejoice, your brother has died heroically fighting for his country.’ This again gave me a measure of the greatness of a human soul, of the vastness which human courage would possess, the ability to stand up not only to danger, to suffering and to life in all its manifold aspects, all its complexity, but to the simplicity and the sharpness of death.
And now a few more memories. When I was a teenager I came back from a camp. My father met me and expressed his worry about the way in which the camp had run. 'I thought,' he said, 'something had happened to you.' Flippantly I said: 'Did you expect me to have broken a leg or my neck?' and very earnestly he said to me with the sober love he possessed., 'No, this would have mattered little. I was afraid you had lost your integrity.’ And then he went on to say: 'Remember that whether you live or die is of little importance. What really matters and should matter both to you and to others is what you live for and what you are prepared to die for.' This again gave me a measure of light and a vision of what life should be in relation to death, the ultimate challenge and the only ultimate challenge and the inevitable one, to learn to live in such a way, as he said to me at another moment, that you should wait for your own death as a young man waits for his beloved or his bride, to wait for death to come as the beloved one, to wait for a door to open. And then - and this is a thought that requires a great deal more thinking than I have done, but something which I perceived in my heart almost violently in the course of this Holy Week - if Christ is the Door which opens into eternity, in a sense which I cannot yet perceive either by myself or express, He is our death. And indeed it could be substantiated formally by what the passage from the Epistle to the Romans, in which we read that in Baptism we are merged in the death of Christ in order to rise with Him. And also this other passage from an Epistle which says that we carry in our bodies the deadness of Christ. He is death and He is life itself and the resurrection.
And then a last image. The death of my father. He was a shy man, He spoke little, and we spoke little with one another. On Easter Day he felt unwell for a short moment, so he lay down. I sat next to him and for the first time in our lives we spoke with total openness. It was not our words that were so significant. There was an openness of mind and heart. The doors were open. Silence was as open and as deep as the words. And then I had to go. And I said good-bye to everyone who was in the room, not to him, because I felt that, having actually met, we could not ever part from one another. There was no good-bye. There was not even an au revoir, a 'see you again’, we had met and that was for ever. He died the same night. I remember coming back from the hospital where I worked, being told, that he had died, walking to his room and shutting the door behind me. What I perceived was a quality and depth of silence that was not to any degree an absence of noise, an absence of sound. It was a silence that was substantial, a silence, as the French writer Georges Bernanos expressed it in one of his novels, a silence that was a presence. And I heard myself say, 'And people dare to say that death exists. What a lie." Here was for me the certainty that death as separation, death as the victory of corruption and destruction, did not exist, A door had opened and eternity had come in, swallowing up a temporary life, replacing time by eternity and ephemeral life of the earth by a fullness of life which is only in God.
These examples I bring to you for you to understand why my attitude to death is perhaps so one-sided, why I see the glory of it and not only the pain and the bereavement. And I do see the pain and the bereavement. These examples which I have given you refer to sudden death, to death unexpected, the death that comes like the thief in the night. This is not what happens habitually. But if the examples which I have given you, if such experiences come your way, you will probably understand how one can, while one's heart is in searing pain and agony, still rejoice, and how - to this we will come later - how we can in our funeral service exclaim ‘Blessed is the road which thou treadest today, O human soul, because the place of refreshment is prepared unto thee’; why we use the words of a Psalm in the same service, earlier, as though the departed was speaking to us and saying ‘My soul lives and I give glory unto the Lord.’ But more often than a sudden death we are confronted with long or short terminal illnesses and with old age that brings us gradually to either our grave, seen from one viewpoint, or to our freedom, the supreme encounter for which each of us, knowingly or unknowingly, longs and struggles throughout his earthly life, our meeting face to face with the living God, our encounter with Life Eternal, our communion with Him. And this period of illness or of increasing old age must be faced and must be understood creatively, usefully.
One of the great tragedies of life which bring great agony of mind and torment to people is that they see a beloved person grow older and older, lose his or her physical and mental faculties, seeming to lose what was the most precious: a clear mind, the witty, always ready response to life, what not. So often this process is put on one side, not overlooked, but we close our eyes so as not to see, because we are afraid of seeing and of foreseeing. And the result is that when death comes, it is a sudden death which not only has the horrors of an unexpected death - those which I have mentioned before - but has got the additional horror of hitting us in our most vulnerable situation, because the pain, the fear, the anguish have been growing and growing in intensity within us while we were refusing to give them the freedom of expression and any possibility of maturing. The blow is even more painful, more painful, more destructive than that of sudden death, because then, apart from the horror, the pain of bereavement, comes all the self-reproach, self-condemnation for having not done all that should bedone, because to do it would have forced us into truth, into honesty and into unveiling for ourselves and for the aged or dying person the fact that death was gradually opening a door and that this door would one day open wide and the beloved one would have to enter into it without even looking back. It is important for all of us, whenever we are confronted with this gradually coming bereavement, to face it from the beginning and to face it in the wonderfully balanced way in which we can do it while the person is still alive and in our midst. For against the thought of the coming death there is the reality of a living presence. We can all the time lean on the security of this presence while we become more and more aware of the complexity of the coming bereavement. It is this balance between the power of reality and the frailty of thought that makes it possible for us to prepare ourselves for the death of people who are precious to us.
This preparation of course entails also - as I said last time - an attitude to death, an attitude to death which recognises on the one hand, its horror, the pain of bereavement but at the same time the fact that it is a door opening into life eternal. 'To me to die is not to divest myself of temporal life but to clothe myself in eternity,' said St Paul.
This period of preparation I will also illustrate with a couple of examples. A number of you will have heard them, but I want to bring them to this context, because it is of death that we are speaking, and for once I want to say about death all that I have gradually collected in my mind and my heart. The first refers to the importance of breaking barriers, of not denying fear, to build a wall of partition between the dying parson and ourself so that the person who is dying is condemned to a loneliness, is condemned to be abandoned, to struggle against all that death may mean to him or her without any support and understanding, and also a barrier that prevents us from doing all we could so that nothing of rancour, of self-reproach, of despair be left behind. It is not always that one can say to a person: 'Beware. You shall die soon.' In order to be able to face death one must be anchored in the certainty, an experiential and not only theoretical certainty, of eternal life. And so on many occasions when we espy the first signs of the coming of death we must work intelligently, systematically to make the person who will enter into its mystery discover what life eternal is, to what extent this eternal life is already possessed, the fact that there is in this possession of eternal life a certainty that reduces to nought the fear of death - not the pain of separation, not the regret that such a thing as death exists, but fear. But there are people to whom one can say: Death is there. Let us go hand in hand to its threshold. Let us draw together into the experience of dying. And let us go together into the degree of communion to eternity which will be accessible to each of us.
Some of you know that my mother died of cancer over a period of three years. She was operated on unsuccessfully. The doctor told me about it and then added: ‘But of course you will not say anything of it to your mother.’ And I said: ‘I will.' And I did. I remember how I came to her and said to her that Dr. Asher had rung and that the operation was not successful. We kept silent for a moment and then my mother said: 'And so I shall die.’ And I said 'Yes.’ And then we stayed together in complete silence, communing without any words. I don't think that we thought thoughts. We faced something that had entered life and made all the difference to life. It was not a shadow. It was not an evil. It was not a terror. It was the ultimate. And we had to face this ultimate without yet knowing what this ultimate would unfold itself into. We stayed as long as we felt we had to stay. And then life continued. But two things happened as a result. The one is that at no moment was either my mother or I walled in within a lie, forced into a comedy, deprived of any help. At no moment had I to come into say mother's room with a smile that was untrue or say words that were untrue. At no moment were we to play a comedy of life conquering death, of illness waning, of things being better than they were, when we both knew they were not. At no moment were we deprived of one another's help. There were moments when my mother felt she needed help. She would then ring the bell and I would come and we would speak of her dying, of my bereavement. She loved life. She loved it deeply. A few days before she died she said that she would be prepared to live 150 years in suffering, but to live. She loved the beauty of spring that was coming. She loved us. She grieved over separation - oh for the touch of a loving hand or the sound of a voice that is still. And then there were other moments when I felt the pain of it and I would come and speak of it to my mother. And she would give me her support and help me face her death. This was a deep and true relationship. There was nothing of a lie in it. And therefore all that was true could find a place in it. And then there was another side which I mentioned last time. Because death was there, because at any moment death could come and it would be too late to put right something that had gone wrong, all life had to be at every moment an expression as perfect and complete as possible, of a relationship that was a relationship of reverence and of love. I mentioned last time the fact that only death can make things that seem to be so small, so insignificant , into signs that are so great and so significant: the way one prepares a cup of tea on a tray, the way one puts cushions right behind the back of a sick person, the way her voice sounds, the way you move - all that can be an expression of all there is to a relationship. If there is a false note, if there is a crack, if something has gone wrong, it must be repaired now, because there is the inevitable certainty that it may be too late later. Again it confronts one with the truth of life, with a sharpness, with a clarity which nothing else can. I have said earlier that it is important for us, whether we face our own death or the death of another person, to become aware of eternity And this I would like to illustrate also by an example.
Some thirty years ago a man was taken to hospital with, as it seemed, a common illness. On examination it was discovered that he was ill with an inoperable and incurable cancer. His sister was told and so was I, but not he. He was in bed, vigorous, strong, intensely alive. Only if, he said to me - I have so much to do, and here am I bedridden, for how long? I said to him: How often did you tell me that you dream of being able to stop time so that you can be instead of doing. You have never done it. God has done it for you. Now is your time to be. And confronted with the necessity of being, of what one might call a totally contemplative situation, he was puzzled. 'What shall I do?' I said to him that illness and death are conditioned not only by physiological changes, by germs, by pathology, but also by all those things which destroy, our inner enemies, but what one may call our negative feelings and negative thoughts, everything that saps the power of life within us, prevents life from gushing like a torrent clear and free. And so I suggested that he should put right not only outwardly but within himself all that was wrong in his relationships to people, to himself, to the circumstances of his life, to everything, and begin in the present moment, and when he would have done it in the present, go back and ever farther back into the past, clearing all his past, making his peace with all and everything, undoing every knot, facing every evil, coming to terms in repentance, in acceptance in gratitude, with all his life. And his life had been hard. And month after month, day after day we went through this process. He made his peace with the totality of life. And I remember him at the end of it lying in his bed too weak to use a spoon and saying to me with shining eyes: 'My body is almost dead, and yet I have never felt so intensely alive as I feel now. He had discovered that life was not conditioned by his body, that he was not his body, although his body was him, that he had a reality that the death of his body could not destroy. This is a very important experience which I wanted to bring once more, and again and again to you, because it is something which we must do in the course of all our life, all the time, if we want to be aware of the power of eternal life within us and therefore be not afraid whatever happens to the temporary life which is also ours. It is impossible for us to look into the process of dying, because we cannot imagine what it consists of. But we can turn to the experience of some who have gone through an experience of communion with a dying person. And I want to bring a last example to you before I conclude this long talk.
It is taken from the experience of a young man in his late teens or early twenties that was asked to spend a night by the side of an old woman who was dying. She has never believed in anything, except things material. And now she was going. When this young man came in the evening she was already unconscious. He sat next to her bed and prayed, prayed as, he could, words of prayer, silence of prayer, a sense of awe, a sense of compassion, and also a deep sense of bewilderment. 'What was happening to this woman who was entering into a world which she had always denied, which she had never perceived? She was earth. How could she enter into heaven? And this is what he perceived, or thought he perceived, communing with this old woman in compassion and in bewilderment. There was a first period when this women lay still. And then it became clear to him through what she said, her exclamations, her motions, that she was seeing something, and what she saw, from her words, were figures of darkness, the powers of evil that were crowding round her bed, that were crowding round her, claiming her as their own - those beings which were nearest the earth because they were fallen. And then suddenly she turned and said that she saw light, that the darknesses which were pressing on all sides and the figures of evil that were compassing her about, were gradually receding and she saw beings of light. And she cried for mercy. She said that she doesn't belong, but: 'Save me’. And then she said 'I see the light’. And with these words 'I see the light’ she died.
I will end my talk at this point.
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III
17 May, 1984
As I said last time, our first and most continued contact with death is through bereavement. And it is on bereavement that I would like to say a few more things, because it is by learning to live through and to understand the death of others, in them and in ourselves, that we can best learn to face death and eventually face oar own death, first as a possibility - a certainty indeed, but a certainty which is so often apparently so far removed from us that we do not call it certainty - and then as the very reality that comes upon us. So let me dwell a little more on this subject of bereavement.
I have mentioned already that one of the immediate problems which a bereaved person has got to face is the experience and sense of loneliness, of being left behind by the only person, at times, that mattered, by the person who filled all the space, all the time, all the heart. But even if all the heart was not involved, the person who left us leaves a very vast space. While the person is ill we give a great deal more time for thought. Our activities are centred and directed. When the person dies, very often those left behind feel that their activities have no purpose, no immediate purpose at least, no centre, no directedness, a life that, however painful and agonising, was running like a stream becomes a bog. Also loneliness means that there is not one person with whom one can talk, whom one can listen to, to whom one can be attentive, who responds and reacts, to whom we react and respond, and also the fact that the person who leaves us is more often than not the very person who gave us in our own eyes our ultimate value, the person to whom we truly mattered, the person who asserted our existence and our importance.
I have mentioned more than once on occasions of weddings the phrase of Leon Bloy, who says 'To tell a person "I love you" is tantamount to saying “You shall never die" '. And this applies also in this context. The person who leaves us is no longer to proclaim our ultimate value, our ultimate significance. This person is no longer there who can say 'I love you’ and therefore you are ascertained, affirmed, acknowledged eternally. This is something which must be faced. It is not something which must be or can be put on one side and can be forgotten, can be avoided. A void is created, and this void should never be artificially filled with things which are unworthy of what it replaces. We must be prepared to face pain, to face agony of mind, to face all those things which go on in us and indeed which are inflicted upon us by the false good-will of those who surround us and who continue to revive our pain and our suffering by enhancing it and by insisting on it. We must be prepared to recognize that pain is one of the expressions of love, and that if we claim that we truly love the person who has now departed this life, we must be prepared to love this person in and through pain as we loved this person in and through joy, the joy of assertion, the joy of the common life. This requires courage, and I think there is a great deal to be done in that respect in our present day, when so many people, in order to escape the pain, will turn to tranquillizers, to alcohol, to entertainment of one sort or another in order to forget, because what is going on in a human soul may be overshadowed but continues, goes on, and unless it is resolved, it leaves the person the poorer, not the richer.
Another thing which a person bereaved must learn never to do is to speak of the love relationship that existed before in the past tense. One should never say 'We loved one another’. We should always say 'We love each other.’ It is important to remember the words of the Old Testament: Love is as strong as death. Love cannot be corroded by death. We cannot allow our love to become of the past, unless we recognize the fact that we do not believe in the life, continuing, of the person who has died. But then we must recognise that we are unbelievers and atheists in the crudest sense and face it from a quite different angle, face the fact that if there is no God, if there is no eternal life, then death which has occurred has no metaphysical significance at all. It is an event of natural history. It is a victory of the laws of physics and chemistry and it is the return of the person to the elements of nature and a continued life, of a continuing existence not as a person but as part of nature. But we must in that case face squarely either to our faith or to our lack of faith and take a stand and act accordingly.
And then there is another thing. Very often those left behind feel that the loss of a person is not only their loss; it is a loss that bereaves everyone around them of something most precious, of an intelligence, of a heart, of a will, of one who acted rightly and beautifully. And very often the bereaved person concentrates on this loss also. And at that point we must remember - and this is essential that every person who lives gives us an example, an example how to live, an example also how not to live, that we must learn from every person alive or departed the rights and the wrongs of life, learn what was wrong in order to avoid it, learn what was right in order to emulate it. And every person who has known a departed must reflect profoundly on the mark which this person's life has set on his or her life, reflect profoundly on what kind of seed was sown by the life of this person, and bear fruit.
There is this saying in the Gospel that unless the seed die, it will not bear fruit, but if it die, it will bear fruit thirty fold, sixty fold and a hundred fold . This is exactly what could happen if we reflected with all our heart, with all our mind and memory, with all our perceptiveness and with all our sense of justice, on the life of those who depart this life. If we had the courage to use that sword - which is God's own Word - to divide what is light and what is darkness, to use all our discernment to sort out the tares from the wheat and then, having collected all the wheat we are capable of discerning, each of us, every person who has known the departed person, bear fruit of his life, live according to an example given in every seed, emulate, in everything which is worthy of emulation, the life of this person. I know that each of us is more like a twilight than a bright, shining light, but the light shines in the darkness, and this light must be seen, perceived, separated from the darkness within ourselves so that as many as have known a given person may live and bear fruit of this life.
At the funeral service we stand with lit candles. We stand with lit candles signifying, I believe, two things: the one which is obvious. We are proclaiming the Resurrection. We stand with lit candles in the same way in which, we stand in the Church during the Easter night. But also we stand witnessing before God that this person has brought at least a flicker of light into the twilight of the world, that this person has not lived in vain, and that this light we will keep, protect, increase, share out, so that it may illumine more and more people, so that it may grow thirty fold, sixty fold, a hundred fold if possible. And if we set out to live in such a way, to be the continuation of the earthly life of the departed person, if we set out to be the continuation of everything that was noble and good and true and holy in this person, then truly this person will not have lived in vain, and truly we will feel that we do not live in vain. There will be no space in us for hopes of a prompt death, because we will have a function to fulfil.
To take an example which is certainly far beyond anything within our experience, think of the words of St Paul: For me Christ is life; death would be a gain, because as long as I live in the flesh I am separated from Christ. And yet it is more expedient for me that I should live. Where our treasure is our heart is. The treasure of Paul was Christ, the most precious discovery and possession for his ardent and powerful soul, the love of his life which led him to long for the time when he would clothe himself with eternity and see as he is seen, know as he is known, commune without any veil or dark glass between him and the object of his love. But with all this, he knew that, having experienced what he had experienced, he could bring a message to the world which those who could speak only from hearsay could not bring. And he was prepared to renounce the meeting he longed for, the communion in oneness he longed for, in order to bring his testimony. And his love for his own people was great enough for him to exclaim that he would be prepared to be separated from Christ for ever if that could give them access to Him. In a small measure every person who lives and who becomes our treasure or one of the most treasured possessions of our heart in small could be placed against this background.
This leads me to another aspect of the same situation. We are left behind to make it possible for all we have seen, all we have learned, all we have experienced, to multiply and spread and be a new chain of light on earth. But if truly, sincerely, we can say that the person who has departed this life was a treasure to us, then 'Where our treasure is, our heart should be, and we should, together with this person who has entered an eternity, live as completely, as deeply as possible, in eternity. For this is the only place where we can be together with the departed person. It means that more and more, as more and more of the beloved ones leave this earthly pilgrimage and enter into the stability and the peace of life eternal, that we should feel that we belong to that world ever more, ever more completely, ever more perfectly, that its values become ours increasingly. And if one of the beloved ones, one of the most treasured treasures is called the Lord Jesus Christ, then we can truly, while we are still on earth, like St Paul, long with all our hearts and minds, with all our flesh and heart, for the day when we shall be inseparably united to Him.
I would like now to change my subject and go into another direction. Facing death, our own, is something which we do in ways very different according to age and circumstance. We perceive death differently in different situations and at different ages. Think of children who hear the word, have perhaps a notion, have perhaps lost a parent or their parents and grieved in loneliness. Their perception is that of bereavement, but not of the death itself, unless they are confronted either foolishly or wisely. Most children, certainly most boys, at certain moments of their life, play war games. I have shot you down. You are dead. Lie down. And the child lies down and he knows at that moment emotionally, but within the security of the game, that he is dead, which means that he has no right to play, no right to run, no right to budge. He must lie in a certain manner. Life continues around him and he is no longer a part of it, until at a certain moment it is too much, and he jumps up saying 'I have enough of being dead; it's your turn.’ This is a very important experience, because the child through this experience discovers that he can be an outsider to life, and yet it is a game and he possesses the security which games possess. It may come to an end at any moment by mutual agreement, but something has been learned. And I remember a child extremely sensitive in one of our boys’ camps years and years back who perceived it in such a way that he could not stand the tension, and I played for a whole game with him, living, hiding, emerging from hitting and being killed with him, for him to be able to enter into this experience. For for him it was not a game. It was too real. That is one example.
The other example in which a child can either be introduced to death in a monstrous way that will make him morbid, as morbid as his parents, or, on the contrary, sane and healthy is this. I have given a number of you this example more than once and I apologize, but it is a real example, not a parable. A most beloved grandmother died after a long and painful illness. I was summoned to the house, and when I arrived, I discovered that the children had been removed. After my question the parents said: 'We could, not allow the children to stay in a house where there was a dead person.' 'And why?’ 'Because they know what death is.’ 'And what is death?' I asked. ‘They have seen the other day a little rabbit torn to pieces by a cat in the garden and know what death is.’ And so I suggested that if that was the image of death which this child possessed he was bound throughout his life to live with a sense of horror wherever he heard the word, wherever he attended a memorial service, wherever he saw a coffin - untold horror hidden in this wooden box. And after a long argument, after the parents had said to me that the children were bound to become nervous wrecks if they were allowed to see their grandmother and that their mental condition would be my responsibility, I brought the children back. The first question was: 'What is it really that happened to Granny?' And I said to them: ‘You have heard her say time and again that she longed to join her husband in God's kingdom,’ where he had preceded her. `It has happened to her now.’ 'So she is happy,' said one of the children.. I said 'Yes'. Then we went into the room where the grandmother lay. The stillness was wonderful. The old lady, whose face had been ravaged in the course of the last years by suffering, lay absolutely still and serene. One of the children said; 'So that is death,' And the other one said: 'How beautiful.’ Here are two forms of the same experience. Are we going to allow children to see death in terms of a little rabbit torn to pieces by cats in the garden or are we going to let them see the serenity and beauty of death in eternal clothes.
In the Orthodox Church we bring the dead person to the church as soon as we can. We pray in the presence of an open coffin. Adult and children come up. Death is not something to be hidden. It is something simple and a part of life. And the children can look into the face of the departed person and see the peace. We give a kiss to the departed person. And this is the moment when we must got forget to warn a child that when he kisses the forehead of a person that was always warm, the contact will be broken, and we can say: 'This is the mark of death. Life goes with warmth. Death is cold.’ And then the child is not horrified, because he has experience of things cold, and things warm, and each of them have their nature, and each of them have their meaning.
Later we are confronted with death according to these first impressions. As youngsters, as youth, we may be confronted with death in tragic manners - violent death, accident, war. I remember a young man who had never given thought to death in his life, whose friend was killed in a motorbike accident, racing madly. He came to see me and he said, when he saw what folly had done - the body broken, torn, of his friend - he had to think. And you know what thought came to him? It seems to me a non sequuitur. It seems to me something that in a way has nothing to do with it. His thought was: By not becoming a saint I am robbing God of his glory and my neighbour of his due.' The death - brutal, violent, ugly - which he had witnessed had, placed him face to face with values eternal, absolute which he carried within him but which had been always dormant, unused, untapped.
In the war at times death is met in terror and at times it is met with elation. But it is always met by people of an age and of a condition which do not prepare them gradually for the dying or for the confrontation with death. Young, vigorous human bodies that within a few moments, while they possess no seed of death, as it seemed to them, within themselves are confronted with the possibility or at times the certainty, of dying. Reactions may be very, very different. Much depends on what you were fighting for, whether you fought with conviction or by necessity, forced into the struggle or having chosen to fight. And it is not the nobility of the cause, it is the wholeheartedness with which you give your assent and your life to it that will determine the way in which, you die. I remember two soldiers in 1940, two soldiers who were wounded in the most atrocious manner, dying and very close to their death, two young German soldiers. I came up to them and asked one of them: 'Are you in great suffering?' And he looked at me with his dying eyes and said: ‘I don't feel any suffering. We are beating you.’ He could face death from within the certainty that he was doing the right thing. To me he was doing the wrong thing. But that was not the point. His incentive was wholehearted. At times dying is different. 1 remember another soldier, a young farmer who was leaving behind the wife, the farm, and who said to me: ‘I shall die tonight. I am sad to leave my wife alone, but that can't be helped. But I am so afraid of dying alone.’ And I said to him he wouldn't, I would sit with him and that as long as he could be aware of me by opening his eyes, by speaking, he would do that, and then he would hold my hand and from time to time he could squeeze it to be sure I was there. And so we sat, and he died in peace. The loneliness of death had been spared. On the other hand, again at times God grants someone a lonely death, which is not a death of loneliness but which is an aloneness together with God, making sure that no one in a foolish dramatic way will break through and bring anguish, fear, despair into a soul that can freely enter into eternity.
And then there is another aspect of death which is of another type. It is the dying of people who have aged gradually with increasing illness, who have felt that both their bodies, their minds, have gradually grown weak and then begun to break up. In those cases facing death is more complex, because there is one thing to overcome, the fear that death will be nothing else than a final falling to pieces, a final disintegration. That can be met only in the way which I tried to describe last time - the death of one of our parishioners, whose body waned gradually while his spirit became more and more intensely filled with eternal life, so that he felt that his personal being did not depend on the condition of his body, that his person, his ‘I’, was there full of life, while his body was waning.
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IV
31 May, 1984
We are turning now, in the problem of the reality of death, to the various services which are connected with it in the Orthodox Church. As anyone can read them or experience them, I will not go into detail from one sequence to the other but single out a certain number of characteristics. First of all, there are two services which are certainly familiar to all of you. They are the short service in memory of the departed - the panikhida - and also the funeral service of the lay people. There are other sequences which are less familiar - the Canon which is read on occasions when it was possible over a person who is departing this life and whose departure is difficult, hard. Also the service of the funeral of a small child and that of a priest. I want to single out a certain number of features which are basically common to all.
There are two sides to these services: a concern for the soul and a concern for the body. We have in common with all the churches this concern, this prayerful concern for the departing soul or the departed soul. But I believe that in Orthodoxy the attention paid to the body, the attitude which we have to the body, is very special and very significant. In the panikhida all the attention is concentrated on the soul that is now in eternity face to face with the living God, growing into an ever deepening knowledge of God, in ever deepening communion with God. In the funeral service, side by side with this concern for the soul which is departed but is somehow so close still to the earth, there is a deep concern for this body.
I am hesitating as to where I should begin, but let me say a few words about the body in this particular connection. When we read the service we see that it is seen from two angles, to which perhaps a phrase of St Isaac of Syria should be added to give us a full, complete vision of the Orthodox approach. On the one hand, we are aware that this body is doomed to corruption: Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return. And there is an acute pain in the thought and there is an acute pain in the vision. And I was thinking of something which I find difficult to say and which I have said only once in my life, a few days after the burial of my mother, because I felt that it was the only situation in which I could say these words, offer these thoughts. My mother died on Good Friday. She was buried almost a week later. On the morning of the funeral I went to spend a last moment with her in the chapel of our parish house, and for the first time I saw the marks of corruption on her hands and on her face. And it hurt me deeply that these hands which I had loved, this face which I had loved, were now beginning to become corrupted. And my first movement was to turn away and not to see - not to turn away from my mother, but trying not to see these marks these black marks that were spreading. And then I felt there was there a last message which I had to look at and to understand. This message to me was this: This body, which had been so dear, was now going to fall, disintegrate, to become dust. 'And if you want never to lose me, do not come and wait for me at my grave. Indeed, what will be left of me which is earthly will be there, and you can cherish this spot and you can look at it, but our communion is not through the body any more. Our communion is in God.' This I said to the parish, and I was harshly rebuked, as you may perhaps rebuke me for being so crude and insensitive. And yet it is something which I could say only when my mother had died, and could not have said when anyone else's mother or wife or brother or friend had died. And I repeat it now, because we must find, in our attitude to the departed, this balance between the acceptance of reality and our faith, between the vision of corruption and the certainty of eternal life, between the love of the place where rests what is left of a beloved body and the certainty that a relationship of communion can and does continue in God in eternity.
This is a first aspect of the body. We find in the different prayers, in the troparia of the canon, in the hymns of John Damascene, the reflection of this pain and this sense of tragedy - a human body that was called to eternal life, killed by mortality born of the loss of God. On the other hand, another aspect of our attitude to the body: Holy Scripture uses the word body or the word person or the word soul on occasion to signify the whole person. And indeed the connection that there is between the body and the soul, between the body and spiritual experience itself, is so complete. Haven't we got the testimony of St Paul's, saying to us that faith comes from hearing, and hearing from the word of God - a word spoken, a word heard, both through bodily means: the lips of the speaker, the ears of the hearer. And yet it reaches the heart; it reaches the mind. It reaches the core of a person in such a way that one word of God can transform the life of a person. And we know how much all our senses participate in every event of our mind, of our heart, how much love is expressed by a mother to a small child by touch, by carrying, how much consolation can be given by the touch of a hand, how much love in all its forms finds expression through the body. And so if we look at the body of a departed person, we do not see, as many try at least to say to console themselves, to blot out the pain, a clothing that has been discarded. It is not clothing and it is not discarded. It is a body which is as real, as really the person, as the soul. It is only together body and soul that we are a complete person.
This is brought up in an unexpected way, in a strange way perhaps, by St Isaac of Syria, who, speaking of the body, says that the eternal destiny of man cannot be fixed before the resurrection of the body, because the body has as much right as the soul to choose and to determine the eternal destiny of the person - words which are mysterious to us because we cannot imagine how that can be. And yet, yes, this body is me as much as the soul is me. And it is only in their togetherness that I can be seen. And so when we look at this body we look at it with veneration. We see in it all the suffering and all the joy, all the mystery of life that has been that of the person The body could be called the visible of the invisible. In that sense perhaps it is not in vain that in Slavonic in the church services we use for the body the wordmoshche, which is the word we use for relics. Every body surrounded with love, with veneration, with wonder, called to the resurrection, that was instrumental in the course of a whole life, in the mysterial communion with God through baptism, through chrismation, through anointment with the oil of the sick, through communion to the Body and Blood of Christ, through the reception of blessing - this body is, as it were, a seed – to use the words of St Paul – ‘sown into corruption that it may rise in glory’. This body of corruption, of which St Paul wanted to be freed in order to live fully face to face with God, at the same time is called to eternity.
And so, on the one hand, we see this body, so dear and so precious, wounded and conquered by mortality, subjected to death. And on the other hand we see it as a seed sown in order to rise again in the glory of immortality through the resurrection. And looking at it we cannot help seeing its connection with the Body of Christ. St Paul used the phrase 'our life is hid with Christ in God'. Our bodily humanity is hid in the mystery of the Trinity, and this bodily humanity comprises our humanity. In Him, in the Mother of God, we can see what our body is called to be: a glorious body. And so we are not divided but in a complex situation in which, heartbroken that we are separated, we look in wonder at this fact that a human body can die, and in faith and hope at a body which one day will rise like Christ's.
And then the soul. There are several prayers that precede the death of a person. There are several sequences that are connected with preparation for death. First of all, there is that preparation which consists in turning from things temporary to things eternal, what I have tried to describe to you when I spoke of the process which led one of our parishioners to the discovery that although he was physically dying out, he had never been so intensely alive, because he had freed himself from everything that had been negative and destructive of life in him. In the same vein St Seraphim could say before his death: bodily I am nearing death, and in spirit I am like one just born, with all the newness, all the freshness of a beginning, not a finishing.
This leads to the preparation for death through a stern, invigorating process of coming to terms, making one's peace with everyone, with oneself, with one's conscience, with one's circumstances, with the present and the past, with events and with people, and indeed with the future, the coming of death itself. There must be a process by which we come to make our peace, as I think St Isaac of Syria puts it, with God, with our conscience, with our neighbour, even with the feelings which we had earlier. So that whole earth can say to us ‘Go in peace’ and so that we can say to all that the earth was to us 'Stay in peace and may God's peace and blessing be on you'. One cannot enter into eternity tied, fettered by hatred, out of peace. And if we want to be able in the short time which the coming of death offers us to do this, it is essential that we should consider all our life as an ascent, an ascent into eternity, not a gradual decay towards death but an ascent to the moment when through the narrow gate of death we shall enter into eternity - not divest ourselves from temporary life but clothe ourselves with eternity, to use the words of St Paul.
If there is a complete concentration of attention in the panikhida on the departed soul, there is also attention paid of course to the departing of this soul in the funeral service. According to Orthodox tradition, for the first three days after the death of a person his or her soul remains close to the earth, visiting the places perhaps or recalling to memory all that a person had been, so that it is in possession of all memories that a soul will leave the earth and stand before God. And we surround these three days with particular attention. Prayers are offered, panikhidas are celebrated, our thought concentrates upon all the complexities of our relationship with the departed person.
And we also have our part to play. We also must untie knots within our soul. We must also be able to say to the departed person: 'Forgive’, and say that from the depth of our heart, of all our being, and also say 'I forgive you. Go in peace.' Perhaps it is there that we find the sense of the old saying that one should not speak badly of the departed. If we had truly, in all truth and reality, said to the person who has departed this life: `I set you free; I will stand before God proclaiming forgiveness, let nothing that has happened between us stand in your way to fulfilment and eternal joy,’ then how can we go back and remember evil and remember bitterness? It is not a way of closing one's eyes on reality, because if truly there has been evil in the life of a person, if truly there has been evil between us and the departed person, then how much we must pray to God to set both free - ourselves and the other one - to hear the word of forgiveness 'go in peace' and to say the same words once and forever with an ever-increasing depth of understanding, with an ever-increasing awareness of an increasing, freedom.
There are difficulties in this burial service. To start this service with the words 'Blessed is our God' requires all our faith and all our determination. It stretches our faith at times to the limit. God has given, God has taken, blessed is the Name of the Lord, said Job. But it is not an easy thing when our hearts are rent and when we see the person whom we love above all, dead before our eyes.
And then there are prayers which are prayers of faith and prayers of reality and prayers of human frailty - prayers of faith accompanying the soul of the departed person offered before the face of God as a testimony of love, because this is really what prayers for the departed are: a testimony before God that this person has not lived in vain, but however sinful, frail this person was, this person has left behind a loving memory. Everything else will become dust. Love will survive all things. Faith will go and hope will go when faith is replaced by vision and hope by possession, but love will never go. And when we stand and pray for the departed, all we say is: 'Lord, this person has not lived in vain. What is left on earth is an example and is love; the example we shall follow; the love will never die.’ I have quoted more than once the words of Leon Bloy saying 'To say you love a person is tantamount to saying "You shall never die”.’ To proclaim before God our undying love for the dead person is a way of affirming this person, not only in time but in eternity.
And when we stand with lit candles at the service, indeed we proclaim our faith in the resurrection, but also we proclaim before the face of God that this person has brought a light into the world: 'Let your light so shine before all men, that seeing your good works they may give glory to your Father who is in heaven,' - that this person has shone not a creative light, not impressed us by genius, by beauty or talent alone, but allowed the light of God, the uncreated divine glory to shine. And this is something that will never die on earth. Heartbroken we may well be, but there are still words of faith which we proclaim: 'Blessed is our God.' At times almost more tragically, the troparion of the Resurrection: 'Christ is risen from the dead; by death he has undone death and to those in the tomb he has given life'- words that claim our faith when before our eyes there is the dead body of a person whom we love. There are the words of faith 'Blessed is the way thou treadest today, oh human soul, for a place of rest has been prepared for thee.' Also the voice of the Church speaking to us in comfort and consolation: 'My soul liveth and I give glory unto the Lord.’
And then all the pain which legitimately, rightly we perceive, a pain which is expressed on the part of the dying person in one of the troparia of the canon of the soul that has difficulty to depart this life. 'How painful it is to think of our separation', says the soul. And the same do we say also: 'How heartbreaking it is. Oh for the clutch of the vanished hand, for the sound of the voice that is still!' Yet also our certainty that death which is our bereavement is a birth into eternity, that it is a beginning and not an end and is a great and holy encounter between God and the living soul which can be fulfilled only in God. I will end this talk at this point, and I apologise for the necessity for having later to come back to one or two points which 1 have been incapable of putting concisely today.
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12 July 1984
ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS ABOUT DEATH
Q: The following question was addressed to Dr. Kubler-Ross: Is it ever too late to finish one's business? - to which she answered: 'No, it is never too late, but don't tell it to everybody, for some will postpone it. I think it is a very wise answer in the sense that, if we speak of businessmen , the practical level , of course it may be too late. They may have no time to sign contracts or to be sure that the sale is done. But as far as the business of living is concerned, I think it is never too late, because at any moment, even at the hour of death, one can suddenly put right the only thing that prevented one from being fully alive and truly worthy of life.
I remember an old woman some 35 years ago, an honourable member of a parish who was good, respected, in whose life there was only one problem, a fierce hatred between her and her son-in-law on her part. She came to her deathbed and I was summoned to see her. She made a confession of all her life. Everything seemed to be clear. Suddenly as I was asking her: 'Is there anything between you and anyone that you cannot take into eternity with you, something which will jar with the beauty of eternal life, could not come into the presence of God?’ She said, 'There is one thing, but that one I am not going to put right. I hate my son-in-law and I will hate him.’ And I remember saying to her, 'In that case I can give you no absolution and you will die without Communion. I'll give you an hour to think. I'll go for a walk. If in an hour's time you have not put things right, you can die without sacramental health.’ And I went. As I was going out I was assailed by relatives, accused of being an insensitive brute, of condemning the old lady to a desperate death. And I said, 'No, it is in her hands, as in the Lord's Prayer there is a demarcation line: `Forgive us as we forgive others’ which is within our power to cross and within our power not to cross, as in the Beatitudes there are the words: `Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy’, and it is again a line of demarcation; mercy or not; be merciful, you shall obtain mercy.' And I walked out. And when I came back, this woman, confronted with this problem with a sharpness which she had never perceived, because she had never perceived that her hatred could be carried into eternity unto condemnation, had made her peace, and she had within an hour fulfilled the work of her life. She entered into eternity at peace.
On the other hand, Dr. Kubler-Ross says, 'Don't tell everybody, as some will postpone it.’ We all have a tendency to leave for tomorrow the things which could be done today. We live as though we were writing quickly, awkwardly, carelessly a draft which one day we will make into a fair copy. And if we say too insistently: `At the last moment you will be able to put things right’, how many of us will lead a life even more careless, in the hope that at the last moment, indeed within a split second or within the hour, we will have put everything right and we will enter into eternity free. I think indeed we can tell anyone that anything can be put right, but also warn everyone that death is not always a slow-coming process. There is such a thing as sudden death. People die of a stroke. A few days ago I met a woman in her thirties who was driving with her husband from France to this country, and suddenly he died in the car. There was no warning, there was no time; it happened within a split second. His heart failed him and he was dead. There was nothing he could do then to put things right. That leads me to a question which I have here also concerning sudden dearth.
Our feelings about sudden death are usually either mixed or sharply contrasted. There are people who are longing for death to come gradually so that knowingly they can face it, that knowingly they can enter from time into eternity, having done on earth all they meant to do, made their peace with people, but also on a more simple level, said goodbye to all those whom one loved, having said words of wisdom that had been left unspoken perhaps in the course of a whole life, there is another attitude also: how wonderful it would be to be caught up into eternity of a sudden, half way in the right action, halfway within the right words. Yes, if it is the right action, if it is the right words. But what of the many jarring words which we speak, what of the moments when our voice grows shrill and our tongue sharp and our heart cold? So there are these two attitudes. But on the other hand - and this is perhaps an unwarranted conviction of mine - I do not believe that anyone dies without God saying ‘The time has come.' I do not believe that death can harvest us without God's wise and loving decision. So whether we die slowly or whether we die suddenly we must be prepared for it and know that it will happen in God's own time.
I remember an officer of ours during the war, who had fought bravely, was made a prisoner, escaped three times, was caught three times, escape a fourth time and reached freedom. During all these dangerous periods of life he had remained unscathed. And then he ran after a bus, slipped and died. To me it was either a proof that the whole thing was an absurdity, that there was no point in his courage and bravery, in his enterprise in all the dangers he had undergone, in anything, if all that had not ended his life and the slip could do it. On the other hand, to me it was not an absurdity. What I felt was that this was truly an act of God. How when someone dies over a long period or any length of time - I have spoken of that quite a lot - the person must be prepared to enter into eternity by putting all things right that have ever gone wrong in life. And those people who are around him must prepare themselves for the bereavement by putting, as it were, on the two sides of a scale his real presence and his expected absence, leaning, as it were, on the safety of a presence to face, but to face, not to escape what will happen later. And then praying for the departed is an easier thing, because one has gone all the way with this person, and when this person has crossed the threshold, which it is too soon for us to cross, then we can, in prayer, in faith, in longing and in love be with this person at the foot of God's own throne. We can, thanks to this person, reach out beyond ourselves, because, as Christ puts it, where our treasure is, there our heart shall be. Ultimately our treasure should be God, but we have other treasures which God gathers gradually into his kingdom, making it easier for us to follow into it.
But when death comes suddenly we do not know most of the time how prepared the person was, what there was that was left undone. And all we can do is to stand before God proclaiming that this person has not lived in vain, that this person has left in our hearts a root of love, that this person has left behind an example and a message - an example for us to follow, and a message which we received and to which we will remain attentive, a warning that, in the words of St Paul, time is deceitful. One cannot count on its flow - a message that the grave, but also eternity, may open wide of a sudden before us. And when we stand during the funeral service with our candles lit we do not only proclaim our faith in eternity and in the Resurrection. These candles are reminiscent, indeed they are the same candles as those which burn in our hands during the Easter Midnight Service proclaiming victory. But these candles also tell God that the departed person has left at least a spark of light in our hearts, within our lives, that there is a glow that came from this person, and that we are witnesses of it, and that what we have become, what we are, what we shall be, thanks to the life of this person, must be accounted to this person unto salvation. All the good that will result in our lives and beyond our lives through us and the lives of others as the result of this person's life, example, work and message should belong to this person who has died a sudden .
Now another question. It is important for us to put right unfinished things in this life. The same Dr. Kubler-Ross says it will be harder for those who have not done so afterwards. Life for each of us begins obviously here on earth, but it is continued and pursued. And if we do not, in the course of this earthly life, come to fruition, if we do not set ourselves right before our conscience, before God, in our relationships and enter with a burden or a deformity into eternal life, it will have to be lived through and put right after our death. I cannot say how, but what I have said before about the importance of the lives of those who are left behind for the salvation, for the fulfilment, for the full growth of those who have departed this life, the importance of what has happened to them in this life, is perhaps an indication as to the fact that also on the other side of the grave a continuous change occurs in those who have died.
There is a curious and interesting passage in the works of St Isaac of Syria in which he says that if the soul that has not fulfilled its destiny on earth finds itself in eternity, then all the good that lay dormant, that lay like seeds that have not been brought to bear fruit, tries to break through. And he says that such a soul is like a pregnant woman who cannot give birth to her child and is in pain of agony and of physical suffering. And he commends the delivery of this soul, the freeing of this soul, the growth and the coming to life of all good, to the cry of repentance of this soul which has now understood what should have been done on earth, and also to the prayers of all those who stand in intercession. And this intercession involves the Lord Jesus Christ, our Saviour, our Advocate, the Mother of God and Saint John the Baptist, our intercessors, our angel guardian, the saint whose name we carry, so often in vain, all those who both in eternity and in time, have loved us and love us. So there is something happening there which reach us in the writings of the saints as images, as analogies. But what seems to be certain is that there is for ever and ever a growth in maturity and a growth in communion with God for everyone. And it is only after the Last Judgement that everyone can be seen as he finally is called to be. What happens to those who have nobody to pray for them? I do not think there are such people. The Church on earth prays not only for its children, for its members, but prays for all those who have lived ever, ever - not by names, because names get lost, but by mentioning all those who have departed this life before us, leaving it to God to know, as the prayer of St Basil the Great puts it, everyone's name, everyone’s condition and everyone’s need. There is one moment in particular when this intercession for all of the departed, all who have ever lived, comes to the fore, I believe, or can come to the fore. What I am going to say is a controvertible point. I follow in it my own part and conviction, but also the teaching of one of our great bishops of this century, a man called ? who was Bishop of Lithuania between the two wars. He wrote in one of his letters - it is now in the hands of an old friend of his who is still alive – that there is one moment when we can pray for everyone without distinction of creed, without taking into account the worthiness or otherwise of this person, leaving it to God to know, and in the certainty that God answers with mercy and with love. It is in the Liturgy, the Liturgy which is an image of the work of salvation worked by the Lord, which is an image of his Passion and of his death upon the cross and of his descent into hell to meet there those who no longer were accessible to him on earth in his words of forgiveness: Forgive them Lord, they do not know what they are doing. And he says that when, having prayed for all conditions of men, having prayed for the living and the departed, those known and those unknown to us, the priest pours out the particles that were taken out of the prosphoras with the reading of names and with a universal prayer, when he pours them into the chalice with the words: ‘Wash away, O Lord, the sins of all those here remembered in thy precious Blood’, it is an act that integrates everyone into the tragedy and into the mystery of salvation. It does not imply a mechanical salvation. It does not imply a cleansing without participation of those who need cleansing, but it means a cleansing is there, purity is accessible, salvation is accessible.
And to add one more controvertible point to this one, I remember speaking with Father Basil Osborne of my anguish for the destiny of Judas, the feeling which I have of how can I condemn him? Who am I? In what way am I better? I was not submitted to the same temptation, I was not faced with the same trial. Given opportunity, given my frailty wouldn't I have succumbed as he did? And I remember Father Basil saying to me: Have you never thought that when Christ descended into hell Judas met him again? It implies nothing. It is not an assertion that Judas is saved. It implies only the fact that, yes, even he has met Christ again, like Peter who had denied Christ, like the apostles who had fled, like so many others who had not lifted their voice in defense of him who had raised their dead, healed their sick, dispelled their agonies of mind, changed their lives.
Another question about burial and remission. The normal practice of the Orthodox Church is to bury our dead. This was contrasted in the ancient world with cremation that was practised by the pagans, while burial was the rule in Israel within the company of the chosen people. It is centuries since cremation has lost its connotation of a pagan rite I do not believe that any of the arguments brought against it are sufficient or convincing. I was told that the separation between body and soul by cremation is brutal and sudden, but we do believe that when a person has departed this life the soul is free of the body. The body of corruption, the body of death is lying there, but the soul is not a prisoner of it. The soul may well detach itself from the vicinity of the body gradually, but it is not imprisoned in it, and it is not an artificial sacrilegious tearing apart that takes place. I was told alsо that God would have greater difficulty on the day of the resurrection to unite the body of the departed with the soul if this body was reduced to ashes. That, I think, is a very poor argument. I think that anyone who is aware of what is left of a body after a year, two years, ten years, a century, a thousand years, will not imagine that there is any difference between the dust that is left behind after a burial and the ashes of cremation. So in this Church and among us we accept cremation as one of the ways in which one can reverently put to rest the earthly remains of a person whom we loved.
Now I have here a longer letter which says in essence what follows: A woman has lost her husband. She buried her husband in the absence of all friends, all relatives, keeping the tragedy for herself. She did not tell anyone where the grave was, and since the death of her husband she has secluded herself, refusing to see her friends, speaking to some only on the telephone. She has no children. She has no relatives. She is afraid that she has been left behind alone. But at the same time she refuses all close relationships with anyone. And here are the questions: How can a good friend behave to this woman? Should one respect her desire for aloneness? Is it a vocation resulting from the depth of her feeling for her departed husband, or isn't it the result of a very deep depression? And I think the answer is given also in the following line: because, in the course of this year which has elapsed since the death of the husband, she has thought of committing suicide. What can one do? I think that the first question is answered by this thought of suicide, that it has nothing to do with the vocation to oneness, a vocation to be with God, to withdraw from everything superficial and concentrate and live with things eternal. No one thinking in such terms will think of suicide. I think the vicious circle should be broken somehow - not by intrusion, but I think, one way or another, this circle should be entered into by someone who loves this person sufficiently who will be prepared, without being intrusive, to stand by and to bring back this person from this condition of depression. It may be that medical help is needed. It may also be that prayers are needed for this person. But it is probable also that this person should be given a task in life, be made to understand that it is her role to live in such a way that the death of her husband should not deprive the world at large, and the small world in which he lived of all the beautiful qualities which he possessed, while the other characteristics, less good or positively bad, should be cleared by forgiveness, by compassion and by prayer.
Now here is a question of another type. 'You have spoken about coping with the falling to bits of the body, but could you also say something about the falling to bits of the mind?' I think that this is an important question. The weakening of our mind, the loss of perceptiveness, the sense that one is aging mentally, losing one's memory, losing the quickness of one's understanding and one's response is distressing to most if not every aging person, and also distressing and frightening for people to whom it happens because of illness irrespective of their age. It may happen to people comparatively young when illness has undermined the physical support of the intellect, of the mind. We must remember then, that there is a core of the person which is beyond reach of this destruction. There are so many old married women whose mind has gone to a very great extent but whose heart is ever warmer, ever more childlike, ever more tender, and that while this bright mind of ours falters, the heart remains alive, perceptive, capable of responding and indeed capable of shining upon everyone around us. Also on a certain level less is necessary for us than we imagine. I remember the wife of a friend of mine, a contemporary of mine who was in her thirties when a slow and a quick-moving cancer was discovered. To begin with she prayed. When she became too weak to pray herself and she asked her husband to read aloud prayers in her hearing. And then her weakness increased to such an extent that she could not concentrate on the words she heard. It was a blurred noise, a tumble of sounds that reached neither her mind nor her heart. And she said one evening to her husband: 'It is pointless for me to try. God is depriving me even of praying.' And the next morning when he came she greeted him with a smile and said, `How foolish I was!’ During the night I was lying awake and suddenly it became clear to me that all the Christian faith lies in the words 'Christ is risen.’ And all Christian prayer holds in the words `Have mercy’, and that is simple enough for me to hold until my dying hour. So here there was a person who had come to the limit and who had found the words and the faith that was sufficient to carry her through.
Now another example is that of a Baptist who was arrested in Russia and interned in a mental home. Gradually, as a result of `the treatment’ he had been receiving from the doctors, he began to deteriorate badly in his mind. The doctor said to his wife when she came to see him: 'You see, our treatment has got good results. All his brilliance of mind, all his outstanding qualities which you praised in him were really the result of his mental illness. Now he is becoming what he truly is.’ He gradually was losing his mind. One day he smuggled into the hand of his wife a note in which he said, 'Every day my mind is going more completely. One day nothing will be left of it. But I can say like Job: ‘God has given; God is taking. The Name of the Lord be blessed.’ He accepted the greatest sacrifice a human being can make, the loss of his mind, not only of the brilliance of his intelligence, but of his intellectual awareness of self, of his surrounding. A moment came when nothing was left of it. And yet somewhere he continued to be.
And I would like to give you one more example, of a man, an artist, outstanding, creative, who started a period of mental illness. For more than a year and a half he was what one would call in crude colloquial speech 'raving mad'. He recognised no one around him, he blasphemed. He was so totally different from himself. And then after a year and a half or so he recovered. But what was so striking is that he had entered into his illness and into the hospital and he emerged out of his illness with a maturity he had never possessed before, both as a person and as an artist. And this made me think, in those days, of the words of John of Kronstadt that there are souls too frail, too delicate, which would be not only bruised but destroyed by the experience of the outer world, and God allows a curtain to fall between them and this world so that they can mature protected by their mental illness. I am just quoting these things. I am not asserting anything because I have no ground for an opinion. But these are the things which I have seen and which I have read.
And so when our own mind begins to falter, what we should do, I believe, is to try, of course, to keep alive all that is capable of living, because very often minds deteriorate for lack of exercise, they are allowed to lie fallow and in the end they become a waste. But on the other hand, when the process becomes irreversible we should accept it with a sense of peace and then turn to our heart and see that this heart of ours remains pure and transparent and such as the Beatitude describes it when it says 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God', see directly in a contemplative mystery of silence, beyond intellection beyond emotion, in direct vision.
I have two questions here concerning the bereavement of unbelievers, 'What can one say to an unbeliever who is bereaved?' I think that there are two things one can do. The first one is not to fall in with the despair of this person, not to behave as though we shared his or her unbelief, but without being insulting to the grief of this person, without being pressing, simply continue to believe, simply behave from within all our faith, help this person to share the peace and the serenity of our minds and of our hearts, refuse to be dragged and drawn into the unbelief of the other person. At times the unbelieving person needs very little in order to discover a dimension of faith.
I remember a person whose husband was buried here, who came and said to me: 'I believe in nothing. What shall I do at this funeral service?’ And I said, 'Pray with us or simply stand and listen to our praying.' And the experience of this prayer offered by her friends and by us who were taking the service made such an impact on this person that it broke through the unbelief and revealed something that later blossomed out into a living faith.
The other thing which we can do is what I have mentioned time and again: tell the person: 'Your role is to be a continuation of the life of this person; you have no right to concentrate on your grief. You have no right to concentrate on your despair. You have no right to turn away from life and to recoil inwards. The person whom you loved, whom others loved, has died. You must be in the midst of his friends, his presence. You all must be, in the midst of the surrounding world, this presence. And I have seen more than once that the moment a person has a purpose in life which is connected with the departed, believer or unbeliever, something happens between them and something happens to the unbelieving bereaved person. I think at times there is nothing more that we can say. All we can do is to stand by, to love with all our energy, all our openness. And at times this standing by may be one of the most fateful experiences. I remember a letter written by Theophan the Recluse saying that both for a physician and for the spiritual guide, one of the most terrible experiences consists in knowing that God does not allow him to help, because this person must grow and must go through her experience in her own tragic manner.
Now a question which is very different. No, before I come to this I would like to say a word about someone whom I remember and someone's dying, just as an example, just as an image. Many of you have read Constance Babington Smith's book on Julia de Beausobre. I remember that at the end of her life I came to see her after she had had a stroke. I found her lying on her bed very quiet, attentive. And she said to me: 'You know, it is so interesting. I am trying to take in what it means to be physically dead, because half of my body is paralyzed and half of my body is alive. I am trying to understand what it means to be a corpse when the whole of my body will be like this.' I think it is a remarkable attitude to one's own death, this ability to watch and see death conquer the body gradually while the person whose body it was remained unconquered.
Now the other question is this. About praying to the departed or talking to the departed. We pray to the saints, we pray to the Mother of God, saying 'Save us'. We turn to the saints, saying 'Pray for us.’ What can we do about those who are not recognised as saints, canonised, who are not in the list of our liturgical books. First of all you must remember that canonisation is something that may happen or not and does not make any difference to who the person is in the sight of God, nor does it make, at times, any difference to what people see in a person. A saint may be recognised as such because he responds, he represents something essential in the life of the people of a given period. In the history of Russia, for instance, Boris and Gleb were recognised as saints at once after their death because, rather than defending their lives against their brother, they accepted to be killed defenseless in order not to shed his blood. And Vladimir, who had been the baptiser of Russia, was recognised as a saint a great deal later, because Boris and Gleb were acknowledged as a living example, as an image of Christ-like attitudes. It is only for a greater maturity in the understanding of what baptism was in the life of the nation that Vladimir was recognised. And there are so many saints unknown, nameless, so many whom we remember as nameless. In every one of the Holy Tables of Orthodoxy there is a small relic of a saint. It is passed from century to century, from church to church on occasions. The name is lost. No one knows who it is. And yet it is a real presence, body, mysterious, of someone. We have such a particle in our Holy Table. We cannot even pray to him. We have no name. But we can pray to him, nameless though he be. I have a difficulty with this question because I cannot really see the absolute difference between talking and praying. I remember a monk on Athos to whom I said, would he pray for us, answering: ‘O no, I do not know how one prays. All I can do is to mention you to God and leave him to do what he can.’ I think it is a very interesting kind of reply, because it means that we can turn to someone who has loved us on earth, to whom we were dear, who prayed for us in the course of an earthly life, and say, ‘How wonderful.' Love is as strong as death. Indeed it is stronger since the resurrection of Christ. Remember me. Send me your love. Turn to God and speak to him as you did when you were alive on earth.’ This distinction between saints and others is a very artificial one. What unites us all is our mutual love When there is love there is prayer, there is intercession. And where there is love, apart from any particular virtues or greatness, God can listen and hear. So we may well not turn to a departed person and use exactly the same words as we use when we speak to one of the great saints of Orthodoxy. although I do not see why not, but we can quite easily continue to talk to the person. There is an additional rider to this question: By doing this do we not prevent this person from growing into eternity? Do we not keep this person earthbound? I think we should not worry about it. God will not allow us to make of a departed soul a prisoner of our selfishness. And certainly one cannot be a prisoner of love. Love is perfect freedom. And I do believe that if we turn to a person who has departed this life and say: 'We loved each other. Remember me', it will echo into eternity. And a cry of love belongs to eternity. It is not a way of bringing a person down to earth; it is a way of bringing things earthly into heaven. I am speaking from myself. I am telling you how I respond to this question. I do not say that there is no other answer to it.
Now: 'What do you think of the book of Dr. Moody ‘Life after Life’ - about people who have gone through clinical death and had some experience of the after death?' Honestly, I have absolutely no right to have an opinion. What is described in this book the condition of people who under an anaesthetic in the course of an operation felt that they had come out of their body, were hanging over it, seeing it as their body and yet being themselves out of it and then were brought back, having tasted of something of the bodiless condition and at times feeling a great sadness at the necessity of being again encapsulated in their body and re-entering the hardship and the tensions of life. I think this is not an experience of death. It is still an experience of life. It is akin to a number of psychic experiences but not akin to the mystery of death. For what makes death into what it is, is the passage of the threshold that leaves us out of things earthly without any possibility to return and brings us into God's own realm. But I have not got a better reply than this.
Another question, which is the last I think I can answer tonight:` I have a friend who from the age of twenty-five has been struggling with cancer She is now forty. But since she is struggling, happily and I must say successfully from the fullness of this life, she often despairs and thinks of suicide, and her Church doesn't seem to give her much in the way of eternity. And what of Hemingway, who committed suicide, because he had cancer? And one could add so many other names: Stephen Zweig, Koestler and who not?’
What strikes me here is the strange discrepancy between fighting for life, which is the substance of this struggle against cancer, and this despair and thought of suicide? What is the point of struggling for life and thinking of suicide? What is the root of it? I think that it is a comparatively common situation ,that it seems an easier thing to end one's life suddenly, to finish everything rather than to wait and wait for the unknown moment when death will come. In that sense in the case which is described here I see this desire for suicide as the fear of the unknown both in length and in pain, both in struggle and the tiredness which comes as a result of a long struggle while one is not sure of victory in the end. It is said that a modern church seems to be unable to open up any sense of eternity to this person. I think anyone who knows this person and who has a sense of eternity should share and share and share this faith, this conviction - and more than this conviction - this longing for eternity - share with her the fact that, although the friend has no cancer to struggle against, there is in this friend a longing like that of St Paul who said that he longs for death - that would be a gain - and share. The question of Hemingway, of Koestler or Stephan Zweig or others is another kind of question.
I think that a number of men or women who are afflicted with an illness that will eventually result in their being incapacitated, indeed becoming repulsive, helpless, feel that the best they can do for their friends is to die before they become an insufferable burden. I think that they do not believe sufficiently in what they mean to their friends or to their relatives and in their readiness to love them to the end, not to find them repulsive, not to be revolted by one or another aspect of the illness, but be ready to go all the way with tenderness, with concern. And I think that this is something which we must learn ourselves and help others to understand. The person who commits suicide does not set others free. The person who commits suicide says to the others: ‘I do not believe that your love and your devotion is great enough to survive what I will become. I had better go before you discover that you cannot bear it any more.
There are suicides which have got another quality. The companion of Scott, whose inability to walk doomed the group of explorers to death on their return from the South Pole walked out into the gale and died, but that was laying down his life that others might live. I think there is a difference is quality and intention here.
