1 Why Trust this Guide?
Eunice sat on her back porch watching the sun set over the woods at the far end of the pasture. Her husband’s favorite horse nibbled at the grass. Eunice wondered whether the horse knew that her husband had passed just before dawn that morning. Eunice recalled just then, in one of those providences, that her husband’s last words the night before had been to take care of his horse. Eunice knew that her husband had taken care of everything that a good man, husband, and father could when given the time to do so before passing. He had cared for Eunice, their children and grandchildren, and their church, farm, and town. Of course, Eunice half smiled to herself, he would think, too, of caring for his horse. Yet more than anything, he had cared for the one who made him and everyone and everything else he had loved.
Pursuit
Wouldn’t that be a good passing, to leave the one whom knew you best, believing wholeheartedly that you had cared most deeply for everyone and everything but especially the one who was right then holding you in his gracious arms? We indeed have ways to prepare for our own demise. We can seek to care as deeply for ourselves and one another as the one who draws us to him when our caring is done. Yet how one does so isn’t always obvious and isn’t always easy. Indeed, love hides itself in order that we would seek it because by seeking we love more than we would if love were not hiding. We gain all good things both by pursuit and by gracious gift. Pursuing opens our hearts and eyes in search of what we desire, while the surprising gift, where and when we least expect it, confirms by its refusal to be manipulated and grasped that it is the very thing we seek. Trust this guide to give you hints of what you pursue and the surprising gifts you may receive when opening your heart and eyes to eternity.
Guide
A guide can be a great help when pursuing something hard to locate, hard even to discern. And what can be harder in life to discern than what makes a good end, stepping into a beyond that we cannot truly fathom? Take any sound guide you can get when the path traces to its very end. You don’t need a guide to decide what to wear to work for the day or what to have for lunch. You probably don’t need a guide to decide what computer or vehicle to buy. If the one you choose doesn’t work out so well, you’ll soon get another. Advisors might be a good idea, on the other hand, to help you choose an education or career, although you’ll figure that out on your own, too, soon enough. Take a good bit of trusted counsel, too, on when, who, and how to marry, and maybe also how to raise your children. But how to get from this rich but troubled world to the glorious next? Listen to the saints and Spirit, my friend. We all need guides on our crossing to the other side.
Exposure
Different people and professions have different exposures to death. The farmer, rancher, hunter, and fisher live with animal death. So do the veterinarian and all of us who own pets. But human demise, the passing of individuals whom God made in his own image and into whom he breathed his own spirit, differs. Our demise is more than natural, given our spark of God’s divinity. Physicians and nurses know human demise, holding life and death in the hands of their profession. So do pastors and priests as they visit penitents on their death bed, and funeral directors as they help make last arrangements. Lawyers know death from forensic perspectives, in criminal homicide cases and civil cases for wrongful death. Lawyers also know death from a legacy perspective, as they help their dying clients divide up their estate. Americans also encounter death on the highways. How many times have you driven slowly past an accident that likely included fatalities? Adults also know human demise, as we hold the hand of our dying parent. One spouse, not both, shares a similar burden and privilege in the passing of one of the two. They say that Americans insulate themselves from death. Not really. Live long enough, travel widely enough, or choose a certain career, and you’ll see human demise up close. If you haven’t gained enough exposure to human demise to get a grip on your own, consider learning from guides who have.
Depiction
Depictions of human demise are also inescapable. Of course, the media saturates us with images of death. We oddly insist on carrying those media images around in our pockets to view at leisure on miniature screens. Indeed, the media’s real-life images of human demise seem not to be enough for us. And so we flock to what we euphemistically call action pictures, a film genre really all about impending spectacular and gruesome demise. We look for the same exposure in music. Try the popular bands Death, Slayer, Megadeth, Obituary, Murder by Death, and The Grateful Dead. Yet ubiquitous depictions of death aren’t merely features of modern life. Art has depicted human demise for us from the first cave paintings. Literature did likewise as soon as humans learned to write. Theater, too, and not just back to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which the bard had the protagonist’s head delivered on a platter to anoint a new king, but all the way back to the ancient Greek titan Sophocles, whose Antigone portrayed multiple deaths from start to end and their increasingly desultory impacts. Clearly, death has a draw, fascination, and allure for us. We satiate that appetite with grisly depictions of all sorts. Depictions in film, art, literature, and music can be extraordinarily helpful guides to navigating our own demise. But it takes a discerning soul to sort them out.
Personal
Like any adult, I have had my own exposure to death, enough to make this guide my second book on the subject. Like many adult children, I sat by my father’s bedside watching him slowly decline over his last months and was holding his hand when he took his last breath. My mother’s passing came in the night. Like many of us, I have also witnessed death on the highway. Stopping my car and running back to help after narrowly avoiding a high-speed head-on freeway crash myself, I peered through the broken-out window of the crumpled car to confirm the death of its two young occupants. Like most adults, I’ve also attended and participated in many funerals. My wife and I have also lived beside a cemetery for the past thirty years, if that counts. But those are only common exposures. My peculiar close-up view on death has come as a trial lawyer. I litigated wrongful-death cases involving not just car crashes but also airplane and helicopter crashes, accidental and intentional shootings, medical malpractice, electrocution, falls, and other causes. I’ve both advocated for the surviving family members in their loss and defended the ones who accidentally caused the loss, while I studied closely the cause and result. I’ve also helped the dying prepare estate plans and helped their survivors carry them out. I’ve even represented families challenging the horrible mishandling of the remains of their just-departed loved ones. Studying death closely and advocating for the survivors’ relief from its impact have given me a guide’s insight. I’ve been guiding folks through death for quite a while.
Purpose
And that’s the purpose of this guide, to help you navigate your own demise, whether from a long way off or up-close view, as one seldom really knows. The young couple whom I saw killed on the highway surely had no idea their demise was literally right around the corner. Yet even those diagnosed as terminally ill sometimes live on for decades. Read a bit of medical history, and you’ll even see that those presumed and declared dead sometimes arise to live on. You don’t ordinarily know until it’s relatively near that your demise is actually upon you. And even then, you may not see it coming. While the wish of many of us is to die in our sleep, we still don’t know which sleep. So a little preparation, or a lot of it if you really wish to do your best at passing, could be a good idea. This guide is my best effort at helping you do so.
Effect
To prepare for your own demise might not be as hard as you think. You might even find that preparation eases the journey. Indeed, you might find that giving some thought and planning to your demise, whenever it may happen when we don’t exactly know, will brighten your journey. Some might think that giving any thought to one’s demise is morose, overly morbid. And perhaps for them, that stance is right. But you might be of the opposite disposition. By taking a little closer look, not necessarily a close look but at least a glance now and then and a few small steps in preparation, you might find that you have greater clarity and confidence, along with clearer sight. You might even find that you have a lighter, not a heavier, step and a brighter, not a darker, view. After all, proper preparation for one’s demise ultimately means stepping from whatever your experience has been on earth into a transcendent realm of pain-free glory. Shouldn’t that sight lighten your step and brighten your path? That’s my hope for this guide, that it will have a strongly positive effect.
Roadmap
To accomplish that goal, the guide begins with a brief study of what demise entails, taken from medical, scientific, artistic, literary, and other views. We have not just one but multiple views on demise, all of them in their own way valid. Choosing the right view for the right occasion is an important step. The guide then addresses what is after one’s demise and why consider it. The guide then addresses why you should care about your passing and who else likely cares. Only then does the guide lead you through important practical steps on issues like healthcare, housing, property, legacy, and legal affairs. The guide ends with a series of chapters on last days, final words, departure, memorial, and future transcendent reacquaintance and embrace. With the journey done right, the road is indeed to glory, not to a morose or morbid end. Your demise in that respect is like other journeys. The road you choose to take has a large impact on your destination. Choose the right road so that your destination is the one that you, and all those who know and care about you, would much prefer.
Use
Let this guide also stimulate better and clearer thoughts about passing. You can have confidence on this most-important subject. You cannot and should not try to remove all mystery. But you can relieve yourself of enough of the uncertainty to look forward without fear. You may even learn to look forward with anticipation. Don’t take the view that you’re better off leaving the present realm for the next. That decision is not up to you. You are instead best here for as long as you have here. But when your time comes, you are indeed better off in the next realm. The other realm is everything good that this realm is not. And so use this guide to make your time here its best possible, while preparing to enter the better realm in a better condition and on immeasurably better terms. That challenge is the great challenge of every life, to share in life’s grandest circumstance and narrative.
Obstacles
You will face obstacles while you go about this grandest challenge of preparing for your passing with the joy, commitment, and anticipation it demands and deserves. Indeed, you will face active opposition. You have an enemy in this greatest challenge and opportunity of life. Death is only evidence of that enemy, neither the enemy itself nor the enemy’s success. Don’t mistake death as an obstacle. And don’t mistake death as defeat. The revelation of the grand narrative turned death’s defeat into final victory. Your challenge thus isn’t to overcome death. Death has already suffered its own defeat. We will all pass from this world. But you can still choose life over and beyond death. This guide will continue to point you to that grandest escape.
Reflection
What caused you to pick up this guide? What exposure or experiences do you have related to passing? How have they affected your view of passing? Have you already encountered reliable guides on how to address passing? Who were those guides, and what did you learn? Have you drawn already from art, literature, philosophy, medicine, or faith on how to navigate passing? Would a better view of passing brighten and lighten your path? Would taking positive steps in preparation reassure you and give you greater confidence to move forward?
Key Points
In passing as in life, pursue that which is good and then best.
Seek reliable guides for the most important journey of your life.
We encounter the demise of others enough to anticipate our own.
We also see countless depictions of demise from all angles.
You may have your own peculiar exposure to the demise of others.
This guide’s purpose is to help you navigate passing to best effect.
The effect of properly preparing for passing is to lighten and brighten.
This guide addresses preliminary, important, and ultimate questions.
Use this guide to improve your life and posture toward your passing.
You have victory over obstacles and enemies to your proper passing.