I am one of the fortunate. Most of my family and friends have followed the unofficial order of dying. The sequence is not absolute, but it’s generally reliable.

Through the first several decades of my life, my grandparents died. One of my first childhood memories was the death of my dad’s father. I remember holding my mother’s white-gloved hand, as I walked reluctantly into the mystery of the hushed viewing room. My mother said quietly to herself, not realizing that the room’s silence allowed the whisper to pierce my ears: “I can’t do this.” I always assumed she was referring to exposing me to the pain of death. I would miss my grandfather, the smell of his unlit pipes that he never smoked when we were around, and his life-on-the-road stories from his truck-driving career. Even though sorrow accompanied his passing, that is the order of death: grandparents die before grandchildren.

When Laurie and I became parents of our own children, our parents started dying. Through tear-blurred vision, I’ve watched both of my parents’ caskets sink into the grave. With every year that passes, I realize how much they shaped my own life. Father’s Day and Mother’s Day conjure uninvited sorrow as I reminisce about my childhood with them, perhaps missing them even more as their dying gets further and further behind me. I lament the fact that they never got to meet our wonderful son-in-law and daughter-in-law, or their great-grandson whose name is shared by my father and me. I miss my parents, but again, that’s the order of death. Parents die before their children.

This stream of thought falls apart when the order is displaced. On the positive side, some young children still enjoy the living presence of their great, and even great-great, grandparents. We call that “good genes.” I knew my great-grandmother during my early years on my father’s side of the family tree. On the negative side, one of my grandfathers, my mother’s dad, died when she was a very young child. Good genes can be so random.

The most cruel upheaval of the order of dying seems to be when some parents face the unfathomable pain of the death of a child. As a pastor for 35 years, I officiated the funerals of many children: infants who never took their first breaths, youngsters who died in accidents, children who made wrong decisions along the way…all undeserving to die so young. I’m thankful that I learned early in my ministry that there are no quick answers to repair the pain of a grieving parent’s broken heart. I found that long-suffering prayer and presence were two of the most helpful gifts I could offer a parent who was wounded by the broken order of death.

The regular order often collapses; and when it does, the hurt goes deep. But we can generally expect people to die in sequence. I’m currently in the stage of life when my friends are dying, and I’m getting real tired of it.

For those in my stage of living, attending a funeral often stirs waves of thoughts of our own mortality. It forces us to personalize the truths of our faith…such as the Psalm of David: “The life of mortals is like grass, they flourish like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more” Psalm 103:15-16, New International Version). We face head-on the reality that the death of a friend closes one more chapter in our own lives, moving us closer to our own epilogue.

What do we do? Those of us who are tired of our friends dying, what do we do about it? For starters, nothing. There is not one single thing we can do about the order of dying. The last part of our journeys rests solely in the hands of the Almighty. We would do well to surrender our concerns, fears, and uncertainties about that to Him.

But that’s what we can do…surrender our fears to the Author of life. His ironic blessing of freedom through surrender removes the feared, clanging chains of our mortality. His liberation comes with great opportunity. First, we are set free to celebrate our friends’ lives. When we are freed from our own fears of following our friends through the unknown, we are capable of celebrating the meeting of our two lives, both here on earth and in eternity.

A second prominent blessing comes when we give our trust to the Author of our lives: we uncover a motivation to continue the best of our friend’s life. Once the passing of our friend is no longer about our own self-centered fears, we can focus on the qualities of that person that formed our friendship…why were we friends? Which qualities of our friendship can I continue forward in my life to make the world around me better? What aspects of my child, my spouse, or my parent can merge with my story to create an even better book of my life?

I will always tire of my friends and family dying, as will you. Death will never be something that happens without some degree of loss and pain. It was painful when I was a pastor, and it is especially painful now. But perhaps these thoughts will give us something to do with that coffin or picture, staring at us from the front of the sanctuary.

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