The first time I was confronted by death was when my nanna passed away. I was still in primary school. Not long after, my pa succumbed to cancer. My grandfather Ackland had died when I was just two, so I have no recollection of him. However, my grandmother Paterson was still with us until late 1958, the year I met my wife-to-be.
The first time I caused the death of an animal, apart from the odd mosquito or fly, was when I was told to take a certain hen from our family flock and put it out of its misery. I believe I was asked because one of my chores was chopping the wood for the family fires, so I was handy with an axe. Having caught the chook, I carried it up to the woodheap. The chook wriggled furiously, dangling from my left hand with the axe in my right. Her little brain must have worked out that the axe had something to do with her and she wasn’t going to give up without a struggle.
This was about the worst thing I was told to do in my childhood, but having been told what to do . . . down came the axe. In that split second, I let go of her legs. Not having used an axe for that purpose before, what happened next was quite a shock. The headless chook fluttered all over the woodheap with blood spurting everywhere, like tomato sauce over a gluten steak.
I recovered from that trauma and as I grew older, I became more aware of death and its unhappy implications.
My wife had lived with her grandparents during and a little after the War. During that time, she became very close to her grandmother, to the extent that she called her Mum, and her natural mother, Mummy. So it was with great sadness that her grandmother passed away just several months before our first child was born. How my wife would have loved to have shown her first baby to her grandmother who had cared for her as though her own child.
We had thus entered the world of death with all of its finality, tears and heartache. But even though in our humanness we experienced heart-rending sorrow when someone dear to us went to their long rest, as Christians we knew that was not necessarily the end.
We knew from God’s Word that God has planned a time when we shall be with Him, a time called eternity. A time when there will be no death, no sorrow or parting, but only vibrant life, peace and safety. And best of all, no more sin and no more death.
Death can be described in various ways, but when death strikes in the here and now, we are not interested in definitions, we just want someone to hug us, to share our sorrow and to help us pick up the pieces—the shattered pieces of our life.
When my precious Barbara passed away, it impacted me more than I can say. There are still the occasional tears when I think about her too much.
As callous as it may sound, maybe a little forgetfulness could help. The other thing to help is to realise that our dear ones have been entrusted to God until the day of the great resurrection when the Life-giver returns and calls His saints from the graves.
So, when someone close to us closes their eyes for the last time, let us think of the time to come when we shall be together again. And let us not forget that even God experienced death in His family and that all the angels were silenced by that dreadful event when our Saviour gave up His life on the cross for you and for me.
William Ackland is retired in Cooranbong (NSW) and has written eight books.
