Endpiece

We trust this book will be an encouragement and a source of hope. Where is this hope to come from? For us and for many, it comes from our Christian faith that God does not want death to be the end for us, but only the gateway to everlasting life. God sent his only Son, Jesus Christ, to overcome death and sin for us. By raising Jesus from the dead, he was declaring that Jesus’s death had achieved a way for us to enter that everlasting life. We can be confident of Jesus’s resurrection because the Bible’s New Testament records evidence of Jesus meeting not only with his special friends, the apostles, but with hundreds of others as well.

A few years after Jesus had returned to his Father in heaven, another encounter with him is recorded.1 It was with a man on a journey to the city of Damascus, all fired up to arrest and kill Christian believers. That man was Paul of Tarsus (who later became St Paul). After his dramatic conversion that day on the road to Damascus, he wrote the powerful words of confident hope which we quoted at the end of Chapter 1 and set out again here. We do not need to face death alone for, whatever its agonies, physical and emotional, the love of Jesus Christ himself will be with us.

My first wife died after a long, painful illness. I recall looking out of the window of my study that morning, thinking of our three-year-old daughter. On our mantelpiece was a photo of a friend whose husband had been drowned in front of her on holiday in the south of France: Lord, I do not understand you; but I trust you just the same. Those words came to me again when Myfanwy, my second wife, died so suddenly thirty-seven years later. With them came the line of an old hymn I learnt as a boy in a small country parish in Gloucestershire: Lead kindly light amidst the encircling gloom… Keep Thou my feet: I do not ask to see the distant scene; one step enough for me. And so it has been, and continues to be, one step at a time. Thanks be to God.

Let’s help one another. Let’s share our pain, and share our confidence and hope. That is why, whether we are the person dying or we are facing the death of someone close to us, we can and should talk about dying. Had I had a book like this available when Duncan telephoned me, it would have been so much easier to talk to him and his wife about preparing for his death.

Here, then, to close, are those powerful words again from St Paul.

I am convinced that neither death nor life . . . neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth or anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:38-39