Death

Death is a natural part of the human experience. From my earliest memory I was taught to not fear death. It was always assumed that children were present for the funeral and burial rituals. In the rural part of Texas in which I grew up we went to the home of persons who had died and often “viewed the body” laid out in a casket in the parlor of the home where the deceased had lived.

During grade school years all of us students in the Lutheran school attended all funeral services in the church situated next to the school. At the close of the service we would all walk by and look into the coffin. My father tolled the church bell as the coffin was moved from the church to the nearby cemetery. The church-owned “teacherage’ in which we lived adjoined the cemetery. Death was not a stranger.

But dying was. It was not until years later that I was physically present when a person died. By then I was in Hong Kong. A student from the school of which I was principal was involved in a traffic accident. I was called to the emergency room. In those days medical services in Hong Kong simply could not cope with all the challenges of a refugee swollen population. I found the student unattended, lying on a stretcher on the floor, bleeding profusely. I grabbed a medical staff person and pleaded for assistance. I was told, “Can’t you see? He’s been fatally injured. There’s nothing we can do for him. He will soon be dead.” I knelt next to him, held his hand, prayed, and felt him die.

There were other death experiences. The aged Lutheran gentleman from America was finally released from house arrest in China by Mao Tze Tung and allowed into Hong Kong. He was frail, weak, unable to stay alive. So I stood by the side of his hospi8tal bed. Since he spoke German we prayed the Lord’s Prayer in German - and then he died - with his aged wife virtually the only one who knew him.

I immediately took the grieving widow to our house where she sobbed inconsolably and went to sleep only when my wife took her into bed with her.

Then I went to the casket-making street in Hong Kong, negotiated a casket, found a grave site and hired 4 coolies to carry the coffin up a hill to an open grave. Halfway up the hill the bearers set the coffin down. They refused to carry it further up the hill until I paid them an extra stipend. Then we laid Mr. Henkel in the grave, conducted the interment liturgy and made our way slowly back down the hill.

Since then I have been present for peaceful deaths, the quiet death of a still-born and the lingering death of those ill with cancer.
So I see death as one step in the God-given journey of each human. Because of the death and resurrection of Christ, I think I am moving to my own death completely unafraid.