Rae and I, finally, after two years, visited my parents’ grave with its new headstone, and Mum’s ashes interred in Dad’s grave. All looks well, even though the Tambellup cemetery is a bleak sandy hill suitable for no habitation – except for rabbits! Continued after picture....

It set Rae and me discussing where we would like our remains to be placed. Our conclusion was that we would like our ashes interred in the rose garden at St David’s in Ardross where we met and were married, and where we worshipped for a dozen years until moving to Busselton.

It also set me thinking about the meaning of death for a Christian. I have been reading and reviewing Adams Vs God – the Rematch, and find this atheist’s view of death quite attractive. Because Adams believes that there is nothing after death, he values life highly. Death may mean extinction, but this extinction is no problem; after all, he says, we were extinct for eternity before our birth.

In my own thinking, Philip Adams’ concept of death connects with that of the King in Ionesco’s intriguing play Le Roi se meurt, (The King is dying), who cries out in restrained agony, “When I die, the Universe dies with me!” Existentially that rings true. My death is the death – from my perspective – of everything that there is. Upon my death, the material universe, my wife and friends, will no longer be available to me. In that sense, they die with me.

I know I take a line unpopular among Christians when I state the place to start in our understanding of death is here: that death is death; it is final, extinction both subjectively and objectively. After death is nothing. Evidently thinking of King Louis XV, the King in Le Roi se meurt reflects on the absolute finality of death and exclaims, “Après moi, le déluge!” One interpretation of Ionesco’s flood to follow is that if you state the blunt truth that death is the end, a flood of denial will greet you. 

I know: I have started arguments in congregations by making this claim. Some Christians flinch in the face of death; in a fit of wishful thinking they turn the resurrection into a comforting statement of personal immortality. Instead of the death of death (“Death, where is thy sting?”), they wish to slide right past its appalling reality and avoid dying altogether.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we slipped over death into everlasting bliss? Wouldn’t it be lovely to meet our lovers and friends, and converse with Virgil and Dante in paradise? Wouldn’t it be just perfect?

In Scripture, the snake tempts the man and the woman to think that they will not die.”Of course you will not die... You will become like gods, knowing good and evil.” The temptation to ignore death is real.

Denying death in this way makes a travesty of resurrection. Unless we face the finality of death, unless we acknowledge in our depths that death is the end, we cannot begin to appreciate the grace of God who chooses to raise us from its finality.

I felt little emotion as Rae and I stood at my parents’ grave with its new headstone. Theirs and the neighbouring graves of Nan and Grandad and our little niece Ebony did not tap the well of grief even though it still there, still fresh from Mum’s death. Those whom I loved are certainly not there, and in any reasonable sense of the phrase, they are certainly not “anywhere”.

Anna, the young friend of Mister God, made the best attempt to describe the ‘place’ where their dead are.  They are, she asserted, “in Mister God’s middle”. The childish phrase captures the grace of God who knows the dead are dead (God mysteriously experienced the death of Jesus) and yet who simply does not allow death the final word.