Nothing
in life is certain but death and taxes. But if death is something we all face
at some point, and grief is part of the human experience, we talk about them
surprisingly little. In fact, it’s something we don’t necessarily do all that
well as a culture.
“The word
death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the
lips,” wrote the poet Octavio Paz in 1961. His words still ring true today.
Some of
us, like musician Phil Davidson, eventually find a way to deal with sorrow
after the loss of a loved one.
“I could hear the foghorns of the ships that were leaving Belfast
harbour and going out to sea,” Phil says about that night after he last saw Agnes,
his grandmother, alive.
“I was lying there just thinking about my
grandmother, I could hear these foghorns, and I’m thinking these ships are kind
of all lost at sea. I thought that’s a great kind of analogy of how I was feeling
– I felt really lost at sea at that point, but she was also lost at sea as well.”
So he got up and started writing Ballymena
Agnes. It was his way of connecting with his emotions and working through his
grief.
For philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, it
has been a different journey. His son died at 25 years of age in a mountain
climbing accident.
When he turned to philosophical attempts to
explain this loss, he didn’t find any of them compelling.
“So I live with unanswered questions,” he
says. “I continue to have faith in that there is a creator of this universe and
that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, but how I fit that altogether with the
early death of a beloved son … I live with the question.”
In this episode,
we explore the tension that is presented in the face of death. On the one hand,
the Christian faith says that death is much worse than we think and our
instincts are right, it’s really not ok. But it also says that there’s far more
hope and comfort to be found in the face of death, more than we might imagine.
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music by Phil Davidson: http://bit.ly/phildavidsonfb
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