A word of caution to readers: this piece contains descriptions of death.
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
This is terrible advice. Particularly in a culture that can tend to prioritize length of life over quality, those who staff hospitals will tell you how much better it is when terminally ill people find the grace to transition from futile, painful treatments of their illness to gentle, good treatments of their pain. In the abstract, I think most people—granted that they’d live to be well and truly old—would choose to die peacefully surrounded by family rather than dramatically, surrounded by strangers who are alternating between shocking them with paddles and breaking their frail ribs with CPR. Raging against death is inadvisable.
That’s the thing about this poem, though, isn’t it? It’s self-consciously terrible advice. In fact, it isn’t advice, really, but rather the plea of a son to his dying father. It speaks to us because we know we both want and dread the display it describes—from our loved ones, from ourselves:
“And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.”
We want our elders to know peace, and we want to know peace ourselves one day. We don’t want to watch them struggle against the inevitable. And yet, we romanticize the idea of going down swinging. Moreover, we don’t want to watch the people who gave us life give up on their own.
During my brief internship as a chaplain, I saw both kinds of death—not nearly as many times as most medical caregivers, and perhaps not nearly as many times as most individuals in human history, but enough times to claim a bit of insight. From my perspective, it seemed a wretched thing to die fighting. It seemed even more wretched when families forced such an end on people who didn’t want it.
Yet, I rarely saw a truly peaceful death, let alone a death with dignity. There are those who do not know they are dying, either because a long battle with illness or drug addiction has ultimately robbed them of consciousness, or because some sudden violence left them braindead in an instant. But even those who consciously choose to stop all life-prolonging measures often die wide-eyed, reaching, and gasping. The first dead body I ever saw was that of a young man, frozen in this position. His mother could not bear to leave his side.
“Thus says the Lord:
A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more.”
Jeremiah 31:15
This resistance to death is hardwired. Perhaps neither acceptance nor battle to the bitter end is particularly noble. Perhaps both are.
But the question for many patients and family members, and for myself, is this: what approach to death is godly? If we believe, with the speaker of Thomas’s other most famous poem, that “death shall have no dominion,” if we proclaim faithfully that “though lovers be lost love shall not,” shouldn’t we resist our resistance to death? Shouldn’t we make peace with dying and be immune to grief? Is it even permissible to “rage, rage against the dying of the light”?
I cannot tell you how many times I repeated to grieving Christian families, as they questioned their own faithfulness, that Jesus wept. That he healed the sick and raised the dead and valued earthly life, even as he preached the existence of a different kind of Life in a different kind of Kingdom. The same paradox applies to those who wonder why they cannot “make peace” with their own impending deaths. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all testify to Christ’s anguish at Gethsemane. He wanted to open the gates to eternal life—even more than we want to pass through them—but He did not want to die.
As noted in my previous post, Paul sees death as the final enemy of God (1 Corinthians 15:26; for an illuminating exploration of how death and sin are presented in Paul’s letters as cosmic forces to be defeated, see When in Romans by Beverly Roberts Gaventa). God hears the blood of humanity crying out from the ground, and rages on our behalf (Genesis 4:10). It is inevitable for our fragile flesh to die, but ultimately it is not us but God, as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, who refuses to surrender us to the dying of the light (John 1:5).
One of the most revealing windows we have into the beliefs of early followers of Christ is 1 Thessalonians. It is considered by many scholars to be the earliest text in the New Testament. Like 1 John, it is written to a church that is deeply distressed, but for a different reason: these believers did not expect that anyone among them would die before Christ’s return. Paul had told them, we can surmise, that death would have no dominion. How and why had it begun stealing their compatriots?
In this letter, Paul reassures the Thessalonians that these beloved, faithful souls will join them in God’s Kingdom: “For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died” (4:14)—literally, “those who have fallen asleep.” Their death, like Christ’s, is real, but it is not the end.
But both the mourning and the dying must also hear the line before: “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (v. 13). It’s not about whether these fledgling Christians should grieve—of course they will. It’s about the manner in which they do so: with hope. It is about the combination of raging against death and proclaiming that it shall have no dominion.
For many of us, Lent is a time to contemplate death—it begins with the refrain, “You are dust; to dust you shall return,” ascends to Gethsemane, and reaches its peak at Golgotha. Yet this is also the time when we contemplate the means by which eternal life was won for us. It is when we pay attention to how we want to live our earthly lives, and how dependent we are on the Creator. Lent is the time when we hang all our hopes on the cross.
So then, let us mark these last days of Lent with both of Thomas’s most famous poems. Let us glorify our Creator by raging against the dying of every precious light. Let even our “fierce tears” testify that God’s “mercies…are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:22-23). And still, as long as death exists, may we honor the deeply human need to “rave and burn at close of day.”
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