A TENDER DEATH ON THE EVE OF ADVENT I

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The eve of Advent I, I found myself on Zoom giving last rites. A parishioner in his eighties was dying from COVID-related complications. He, like so many, was dying alone. His wife of sixty years was the only family member permitted to see him. The nurses gowned her, placed a chair six feet apart from his bedside, and told her that she had ten minutes to say goodbye. Physically spaced, barely recognizable in PPE, she had ten minutes to say goodbye to the man that she had loved for sixty years. 

Shortly after the wife returned home, the family and I gathered around our screens to Zoom with this beloved dying man. The wife, her two grown children, her dying husband, and I assembled for the man’s last rites. There he lay in his hospital bed, barely able to hold up the tablet. With IVs everywhere and an oxygen flow, he prepared to say goodbye. The nurse in the room assisted him as he greeted his family. 

I prayed, “Almighty God, look on this your servant, lying in great weakness, and comfort him with the promise of life everlasting,” as I began the rites for Ministration at the Time of Death. At a certain point in the service, I invited the family to share prayers for their beloved as a way of saying goodbye. The wife prayed a prayer, so sweet and so tender, that only a person who has long-loved someone into their old age, who had cared for him in his failing health, could pray.  She prayed:

Lord God, I pray that he would feel your love and your peace. 
May he let go, oh God, knowing that I and the family will be ok. 
I love you, Lord. Amen.

At that moment, he began to weep. This eighty-year-old man began to weep alone. But then into the room came the nurse. She held him in her arms. Wrapped in PPE, the nurse held the dying man hooked up to machines just as Mary had held Jesus. She held him with tenderness on behalf of his family who could not be there. The nurse held him like Mary had held Jesus after he died on the cross. A living Pieta before our eyes. 

Advent begins with death. It begins with Mary holding Jesus’ dead body after it is taken off the cross, and it ends with Mary holding her newborn baby. At both beginning and end, Jesus is held tenderly in her arms. The church has long taught that the first week of Advent begins with meditating on death as one of the four Last Things. In our time, COVID forces us to confront death, to face the reality that we are mortal and that one day we all will die. And while our overly medicalized views can often understand death as a medical failure, this is not always the case. Yes, people can die tragically, but the truth is that death is a natural part of life. 

It is from this lowly place, this dusty place, that we enter into the season of Advent just as we enter into the season of Lent. Advent and Lent are linked together, just as Christmas and Easter. We begin both seasons through the checkpoint of mortality as we prepare to receive the promise of everlasting life made possible through the cradle and the empty tomb.

As we enter into the season of preparing to receive the gift of the Incarnation, we enter through the gates of contemplating our death, even as we hope in the promises of Advent. Because Christ will take on human flesh, he will share in our human experience of death. As a result, when we die, we will not be alone. Jesus will take on human flesh in order to die and transform that part of our human condition which is death. He transforms it from death to life. We will enter into a different kind of being as we become part of that great cloud of witnesses. In contemplating death, traditionally the first of the four Last Things, we receive again the comfort of the season of Advent as we place our hope in the coming of Christ. O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.