This summer, a holy and older woman in our family passed away at the end of a long period of illness. At the repast following her funeral Mass and internment, her husband told me that the previous twenty-four months had been the hardest of her life but the greatest of their marriage. He told me that she suffered a lot but never complained, and said with conviction that he was so grateful for the opportunity to care for her and to walk with her in her suffering.
In a culture that eschews suffering and looks away from anything but a sanitized experience of death, I wonder if my generation understands, never mind desires the grace of a happy death. (Technically, I am a millennial, though my being married for nearly fifteen years, living in our own home, and having five children would indicate otherwise.) What can a “happy death” mean if one doesn’t understand that there is something greater than this world on the other side of it? To die, in the common view of our secular culture, is to leave this world permanently, produce sadness for the ones who were important to us, and experience something of a “game over” moment. Either we made a positive impact on the world or we didn’t. Either we will be remembered with fondness or we won’t. And what does it matter if we are?
To embrace Catholicism is to seek meaning in suffering and to trust that this world is not the end, that in fact there is something greater, something we can’t begin to imagine, awaiting us. There is a parallel here with marriage: while the world suggests that to find “the One” is to find completion, the other half of yourself, a partner in life, the Catholic perspective understands the union of spouses to be pointed at something beyond themselves as individuals or even as a couple. And so when the earthly marriage ends in death, it’s not game over but something more incredible just begun, something for which we have hopefully been well prepared.
Certainly being married is not a requirement to experience a happy death. And yet I wonder if my peers who perpetually live together or who are married outside of the Church and so refuse the graces of the Sacrament of Matrimony appreciate how the natural end of an earthly marriage can be, in its way, a gift, a blessing, an experience of pure and true love—not something to look forward to but also not something to deny until it happens.
What can a “happy death” mean if one doesn’t understand there to be something greater than this world on the other side of it?
There is no question that living our best lives and doing what “fulfills” us today is bound to leave us empty-handed when the time of our death comes. Platitudes about growth mindsets without acknowledgment of the realities of pain, decline, and limitations point us in the wrong direction. We need to look forward, we need to have hope, surely. But that hope must be firmly grounded in something beyond ourselves. We are fallen; we are imperfect; if we put all our hope in only ourselves or another fallen, imperfect human being, we are certain to be disappointed.
Two recent reads have given me a glimpse into what my husband’s uncle shared with me over that catered sandwich and glass of wine: Marriage can be most beautiful and most profound in the face of death.
A springtime trip to Switzerland—to celebrate, coincidentally enough, a wedding—compelled me to read Maria Augusta Trapp’s memoir, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers: The Story That Inspired “The Sound of Music.” Yes, I know that Switzerland is not Austria, but it’s a lot closer than New Jersey. I finished it stateside and was surprised to find the book ending so shortly after the death of Maria’s husband, Georg.
The antepenultimate chapter, “A Letter,” offers in full a letter that Maria sent “to all our friends in America and Europe” in the summer of 1947. The previous year, Georg had been sick with what was first thought to be pneumonia, then seemed to be nothing at all, then was diagnosed as cancer, and then thought to be nothing at all again. The conflicting medical opinions and the variations in how he was feeling were trying physically, emotionally, and spiritually. What to tell the children? When to call for a priest?
There is not enough space here to do justice to the beautiful scene of family prayer and watching in Georg’s final hours that Maria describes. Suffice it to say that eventually it became clear that death was imminent. Of this experience, she writes,
I knew what I had to do. Many years before, we had promised each other that the one would tell the other when the end was coming. Up to this moment I had waited for a miracle and clung to the confidence of the doctors. But now the word of a doctor had destroyed the very last hope. It had to be.
With a sob, Georg reached for her to offer a “farewell blessing,” and she asked him “the important, the all-deciding question which we had promised each other to ask”: “You accept death willingly from the hand of God, don’t you?” Though struggling for breath, “a hero to the last, he gasped, ‘Yes,’” which was “the last word of the dying father. Indelibly it was burnt upon our hearts,” Maria writes.
As much as Maria wanted to hold on to him for herself and for their children who were all but one present at the deathbed, she knew the way she could love Georg best was to give him the opportunity to profess his love and commitment to God above all else. The moment wasn’t about her; it wasn’t about their relationship. The years they spent together, the children they raised, the joys they celebrated, and sufferings they bore were all leading to this: a moment above and beyond themselves, the true homecoming for which we are all created. The last loving act of the spouse was the willingness to let go.
There is a time when each of them will need to be strong for the other, when each will have to accept that it is time to let the other go.
Some weeks after coming to those pages, I delighted in Wendell Berry’s novel Hannah Coulter, and again came to an insightful and powerful depiction of love even as death did a happy couple part. Here, the image is reminiscent of Pope St. John Paul II’s understanding of marriage as illuminated in both Love and Responsibility and The Jeweler’s Shop—that is, as two individual “I”s who choose to leave their responsibility only to themselves and participate in the life of another, even while maintaining his or her unique identity.
In part 3 of the novel, Hannah relates the circumstances surrounding the death of her second husband, Nathan. (She had to assume the death of her first husband, Virgil, when he didn’t come home from the war decades prior.) Nathan’s physical state had been deteriorating for some time before his wife and stepdaughter forced him to see a doctor. When he did, the doctor told the family what Nathan already knew: Nathan was dying.
The evening after the appointment, when Hannah is coming to terms with the reality that Nathan has accepted for himself already, she begins furiously making a cake, totally at a loss for what she should be doing in the wake of something so painful and so trying. “There we were at a great crisis in our lives,” she says, “and it had to be, it could only be, dealt with as an ordinary thing. Nathan had seen that. For my sake as much as his own, he was insisting on it. But I was too upset to see it then.” Here, Hannah and Nathan are two separate subjects, navigating this reality in their own ways.
She finally asks him what he plans to do about it, and after a pause, he replies, “Dear Hannah, I’m going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself.” In a moment of incredible tenderness, he goes to her, holds her while she cries “as if under a passing storm, and then the quiet came. I fixed some supper,” Hannah says, “and we ate.” Each reaches out to the other—Nathan with an embrace, Hannah with a meal—with the distinctive knowing of the other that is a hallmark of a strong and faithful marriage.
The couple’s conversations about death and how they will approach it are spare, as conversation can be between a couple who has lived and loved for so long. Nathan understands he’s asking a lot of Hannah to not push treatment, to care for him as he dies at home. Hannah can see that there is a time when each of them will need to be strong for the other, when each will have to accept that it is time to let the other go.
There is no clinging to life in Hannah and Nathan’s story, no desperation endured because his death is taken to be an ultimate end. In its place, we see gratitude, peace, and hope. As with Maria and Georg, honesty, trust, and surrender prevail. Together, these four glorify God who loved us in his own suffering, even to the point of death on a cross.
For decades, our culture has been telling us that love is all we need. That phrase holds a kernel of truth, but it is the love of God that will sustain us when our earthly loves necessarily come to an end. It is to the love of God that our unions ought to point. Indeed, such an earthly love can help raise us to the heights of heaven. Experiencing the graces of a strong, free, total, faithful, and fruitful marriage can—and should—prepare us for a blessed entry into eternal life.