Death, Grief and Mourning . . . More on the Christian Perspective

(Painting is one interpretation of Plato's Cave Allegory)

It was roughly a year ago that I was sitting inside a large, white, nylon tent. In the center of the tent was a long table with twelve, American, medical providers perched on folding chairs. The tent was pitched on a steep, green, terraced hillside, just outside an old, stacked-stone school deep in the Himalayans. We were so remote that it would take a 60 mile walk to reach the nearest jeep trail out.

The moment was surreal to me. It was dark outside, except for the flickering light of a few kerosene lamps. It wasn’t quiet though. Inside the tent was a lively party. Some had carried bottles of Everest Beer over the pass, being chilled in the glacier-fed stream and were now popping the metal caps. We were crunching down on odd, shrimp-flavored, pink, fluffy chips from Kathmandu. Outside the tent the sounds were even louder . . . but not of the party mood. In a sharp contrast, outside I could only hear wailing and crying.

We had a patient come to us that day who was seriously ill with TB. Her family had carried her from a nearby village seeking the expertise of the American doctors . . . their potential savors. It reminded me of how the sick were carried by their families for miles to the feet of Jesus. However, rather than this woman (whom I would assume was in her early 40s) being miraculously healed by the great white doctors, she soon died under (and possibly because of) their care. The reason she died was that the IVs given to rehydrate her and to give her TB fighting antibiotics, over-came her frail heart and flooded her lungs. She died of congested heart failure soon after the sun had set over the towering snow-topped crags.

The two doctors, who were caring for her, bounced into our party tent with big smiles and an eagerness to join the festivities now that their medical vigilance was over. I felt a tremendous unease. They said, in what appeared to me to be a calloused flavor, “Eh . . . she would have died anyway. You know these people don’t have much of a quality of life to start with.” What kind of excuse was that?

I know that I may have mistaken the feelings and thoughts of the others tremendously, but I can speak frankly how I was feeling. I had this sense of the devaluing of the life of a brown person (speaking figuratively as one of the doctors actually had “brown skin”). A more appropriately term would be devaluing the life of the non-American, poor.

I sat in an emotionally-coerced muteness. I couldn’t stand the harsh dichotomy between the family in extreme grief at the loss of their mother, daughter, sister and wife outside, while inside the warm, well-lit tent was card playing, beer drinking and joke telling . . . in English, perfect American-English.

The shadows of the mourning party began to pass our tent. Since there was only one narrow, muddy path off that steep mountain, the party had to pass the wall of our tent by a matter of feet if not inches. It was a surreal moment. Everyone else seemed occupied with the card game as I watched the shadows move access the wall of our tent evocative of Plato’s cave allegory. There were short shadows of children walking and then the adults. You could see the faint outline of the body wrapped in a blanket being carried on the backs of the men. One I’m sure was her husband . . . one her father.

As the broken family passed by, the wailing and moaning began to drown out the card game. Angie, the medical student just to my right, said the most disturbing thing. “What’s wrong with these people? They must not take their Buddhism very seriously. Don’t they know that she might come back next time as a princess . . . or at least not in such poverty?”

Angie was fond of Buddhism herself as the typical American new-age practitioner. She taught a class in NYC on meditation and had superficially studied pop-pantheism.

Before I had a chance to say anything, Char, the one Nepalese among us said, “Oh, they are not Buddhist. Didn’t you see their crucifixes? They are Nepalese Christians.”

Angie’s eyes lit up, “Well that’s even worse. They must not be very good Christians to be crying like that. Don’t they live what they say they believe? Don’t they believe that she is in paradise now or Heaven?”

I turned to Angie, “Have you never lost anyone close to you? Have you ever seen anyone, whom you loved, die and felt the pain of that?”

She seemed to take it as a rhetorical question and never gave me an answer. Maybe it was too personal.

I added, “Well, I have. It doesn’t matter if they are in paradise today. You have loved them and been with them you whole life. Now, in the passing of a second, you will never hear their voice or feel their touch, their breath, their whisker burns or hugs. That is where the intense pain comes from. It would be the same pain if your loved one was taking off to Hawaii and you would never, ever see them again, exchange mail or talk to them. It is really painful. I’m a Christian and being so has only made my grief more acute when I sense the injustice of loss.”

Angie rolled her eyes. I excused myself from the group and went off to my own pup tent to be alone and to share in empathy with the bereaving crowd . . . who was now moving up the far side of the valley as a chain of rocking lamps against the black mountain side. The wailing echoed above the rushing river between us.

Schaeffer has also said that when you take the possible answers to of existence to their final conclusion, only the Christian philosophy truly allows you to clinch your fists and rage against suffering, injustice and death. None of which are natural, according to the way we were created. In the Christian perspective, they are all a horrible aberration. We stand side by side with God and cry . . . as Jesus cried at the tomb of Lazarus.

The pantheist must accept death as part of God. The evolutionary atheists must accept that death is as meaningless as life. Intense grief is only a chemical exchange within the limbic system, indistinguishable from pure pleasure.