How Did You Die?

 A neighbor recently died. We weren’t good friends. I knew him in a “neighborly” way, meaning if we were both outside, we’d stop and talk, or maybe we’d check on something for the other if it was needed. I’d never been in his house, and he’d never been in mine, but we considered each other friends in the way that most neighbors these days do.

He’d had cancer about a decade ago and had recovered. But in the process, the treatment had weakened some bones in his jaw to the point that, finally, they broke. The doctors did surgery to replace the bone, but – and this I don’t know the exact medical stuff, this is just how I remember it – he’d developed a serious infection that the doctors apparently weren’t able to get under control.

He battled it a long time. Eventually he was so weakened he was put on a feeding tube, lost his ability to talk, was in pain, and finally passed away.

At his funeral, the pastor who knew him and stopped by often to talk to him, told of how this man had passed from anger, not understanding why this happened to him, to eventually hoping he’d handle this situation in a way that honored God and his family. Essentially it seemed he reached a point where he said (and these are my words, not his, but it’s the general idea), “God, I don’t understand. But I love and trust you. Help me to handle this the way You want me to handle it, to show the reality of knowing You.”

What the pastor did tell us was that my neighbors’ last message to him, written on a white board that he used to communicated, was “My life has been worth the suffering.”

I realize this story raises a lot of question about suffering and God’s glory and where were the doctors and so forth, but that’s not my point.

After all was said and done, my neighbor died well. He left behind children and grandchildren that loved him, that were with him at the end. He was preceded in death by a wife that he loved.

And, perhaps most importantly, he was ready to die. Not that he wanted to die. But he was ready for when it happened (as it will to all of us).

As I said before, I grew up on John Wayne movies. They weren’t all John Wayne movies, but similar in style. And often these movies had a character who died in a tragic yet noble way. You were saddened by the death, but at the same time inspired by it. You might even think, “That’s how I’d like to die.” Maybe not in a hail of bullets or whatever it was, but in a way that was noble, that you could be at peace with, that your family, even though heartbroken, would be at peace with.

I don’t mean to be morbid. I mean, I recognize I am in the last decade or so of my life. I don’t know how long I will live – who among us does? – but I recognize I am closer to the end than I ever have been.

As has been said by others, I don’t have a fear of death as much as I worry about actually dying. Who knows what happens in that moment of passing from this life to the next (for I do believe there is a next one)?

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but the English historian Williams Mitford is credited with saying, “Men fear death, as if unquestionably the greatest evil, and yet no man knows that it may not be the greatest good.”

Among the many words I have collected over the years is a poem by a guy named Edward Vance Cooke. He lived at the turn of the 20^th Century, born in the 1800s and died in 1932. It’s one of those things I’d call the “wisdom of the ancients,’’ although usually we think of the “ancients” as those from thousands of years ago, not just a hundred years.

But wisdom is wisdom.

So, I share this poem without further commentary and leave it as Cooke does.

How did you die?

Did you tackle that trouble that came your way

With a resolute heart and cheerful?

Or hide your face from the light of day

With a craven soul and fearful?

Oh, a trouble’s a ton, or a trouble’s an ounce,

Or a trouble is what you make it.

And it isn’t the fact that you’re hurt that counts,

But only how did you take it?

You are beaten to earth? Well, well, what’s that?

Come up with a smiling face.

It’s nothing against you to fall down flat,

But to lie there – that’s disgrace.

The harder you’re thrown, why the higher you bounce;

Be proud of your blackened eye!

It isn’t the fact that you’re licked that counts,

It’s how did you fight – and why?

And though you be done to the death, what then?

If you battled the best you could,

If you played your part in the world of men,

Why, the Critic will call it good.

Death comes with a crawl, or comes with a pounce,

And whether he’s slow or spry,

It isn’t the fact that you’re dead that counts,

But only how did you die?