What makes a good death? Most say an easy sleep. Many add a quick one. I find a horror in such ideas. I find something inside me dreading both the slow decline and the sudden stop. Neither, I suppose, if it is your destiny, can be avoided.
Death, I don’t imagine, can be a nice thing, nor an easy one, no matter how comfortable we try to make ourselves. There is a comic character from a sitcom of my father’s era, the old inspector, one of the many thorns in the side of Barney Miller. His main gag is bemoaning his overlong life. All his friends died heroically while retirement slowly creeps up on him; he wonders why a good God won’t send some crazy gunman after him too.
It is an exaggeration, it has an element of truth, but I am reminded of Lewis’s line: “We laugh at honor, and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” Or further, Chesterton, in his essays against Nazism, offers Herr Hitler a sort of tongue-in-cheek toast. To paraphrase what I remember of the essay, Chesterton says: “You may be the sworn enemy of everything I love and a complete humbug, but at least, among the books you burned was All Quiet on the Western Front. I have to give you that.”
I am not yet old, and am no longer young. I am meditating on death, asking myself the question: if I died today, would it be alright? If life is a story, death is an ending. If life is the verb that makes a sentence a sentence, that sentence must terminate to mean something. Until the period comes, the speaker could mean anything, even flip the supposed meaning on its head.
That to me seems the question which answers the question: What is meaningful? The question changes: if I died today, would it be meaningful?
I know “I am mortal and liable to fall.” I know death may come from sudden ambush or stalk me slowly and openly. I only ask, I only pray, that when this life does end, it is a tale told by God, it is a story full of love, that it won’t be mere noise without meaning. God, grant me a good death.
Tale Told 