Death is beautiful though dreaded

American blogger Rod Dreher has reported to the world the last days of his father, Ray, who died aged 80. "It was a beautiful death", he stated. But Dreher later reviewed the nature of that event, which is so climactic for every person, young or old. Many people do not know what a "good death" looks like. Dreher's willingness to share what he witnessed and felt deserves our gratitude.

Ray Dreher near death

That first reaction was a delight almost in the way family and friends supported his father as best they could. "He was not useless to the rest of us. His utility was in giving us a chance to serve him." The love shown by family, friends and members of the community had a richness that could only draw forth a fullness of gratitude that this man had made possible by choosing to follow the path of his life to the end, rather than cutting it short in a mess of conceit.

In due course, Dreher describes the fight against the darkness* that his father had to wage alone, while those around him remained the supporting cast. These are some excerpts from several days' blog entries:

Daddy was one of the most intelligent men I’ve ever known, but he distrusted contemplation. He was a man of action. His entire sense of self depended on his ability to do things. Ray Dreher house-bound and bedridden was not Ray Dreher at all, in his mind. His greatest suffering, I think, was his loss of identity.

Daddy felt useless, and in a different culture, this would have tempted him to euthanasia. Nearly everything that gave his life meaning had been taken from him. He could not stand to be dependent on anybody, for anything, but in the last period of his life, he could not do anything on his own. Why did he not kill himself? Perhaps it was out of Christian conviction, but I think it’s closer to the truth to say that he thought it would be the coward’s way out. Better to bear it till the end. And that he did.

If anyone thinks of the sick, the elderly, or the infirm as useless — or if they think of themselves as useless — send them to me. They are gifts to the rest of us to make us more compassionate, and more Christ-like, therefore more human. It was hard to look upon the wreckage of my once-handsome, once-strong father’s body as he lay dying this past week, but it was also a lesson in humanity, and a lesson in divinity. And it was a lesson that my action-hero daddy taught me about the value of not simply thinking about things, but acting on those thoughts.

Death humbles us all.

 There is something uplifting in the character of Ray Dreher. His son portrays it this way:

As a philosophical and theological matter, I didn’t quite agree with Daddy about the role of suffering, and how to meet it, but it was impossible not to admire — mostly — the moral courage with which he endured. I posted a photo yesterday of him as a boy; you can see in those eyes an intense determination to seize life, and wrestle it to the ground.

That's the type of person I hope will (or does) make up the great majority of every society. People who are determined to go all the way, no matter what, even if there is no other reason than "it's there!" That's where the dignity of the human lies, not in closing their life down before they have experienced it all, though hard and humbling.

* Dylan Thomas expresses the need to see strength rather than the debasement of the man when he calls on his father: "Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray." Thomas's father was a learned man, but could be fierce with it. Thomas does not care what his father does toward him but he wants to see a sign of the old man's former strength. The son needed the father even as the father approached death. Listen to Thomas read his own poem, with that particularly emotional last stanza, here.