Rob Moll - The Art of Dying: Living Fully Into the Life to Come

O N A BOOKCASE IN MY OFFICE, I have a cup full of nineteenth-century rings: some feature skeletons, some hold locks of hair. These were mourning ringsrings that people wore in memory of dead parents, spouses, friends. The rings are engraved with the decedents initials, and sometimes with a death date. This was a commonplace practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, this exchanging of mourning rings. The rings helped the bereaved continue to feel close to their dead. And the rings kept the reality of death ever before people, intimately wrapped around their fingers.

Americans have largely given up mourning jewelry. Indeed, we have given up a whole host of embodied and communal practices of death that once shaped how Americans died and grieved.

If you had been, say, a middle-class white woman in the United States 175 years ago, an elaborate choreography of death and mourning would have been familiar to you. You would have passed countless hours at the deathbeds of friends and relatives who died at home. There, one of your tasks would have been to help the dying person realize that she was in fact dying. You were there, in part, to encourage your friend to make her peace with friends, relatives and God. You would have visited homes of bereaved neighbors and encountered corpses, laid out awaiting burial, in their parlors. You would have regularly walked among tombstonesin your churchyard, or perhaps even in your backyard. You would have been accustomed to meeting men and women in mourning garbblack armbands for men, dresses made of drab black fabric for women. Their mourning clothing would have told you, wordlessly, of their grief. You would probably have worn mourning clothing yourself at some point. Your bombazine or crepe gown would have helped you live into your mourningand the social convention telling you when to put the black dress away would have given you an important calendar, telling you when mourning was to end, telling you when to resume the rhythms of life fully among the living.

For Christians in most times and places, death has been a routine part of life. But during the last century, Americans have embraced an unprecedented denial of death, an unprecedented evasion of death. In general, we have removed death from our homes. People no longer die there; corpses no longer repose there before burial. We no longer allow people to say that they are dyingrather, they are battling an illness. Far from encouraging the perilously ill to recognize the imminence of their death, we encourage the sick (and their doctors) to fight deathbut not to prepare for it. Most of us live far from graveyards, which we now locate on the periphery of suburbs, not in our backyards, not in places we routinely encounter. And rather than acknowledge the long unfolding of mourning, we praise bereaved people for the speed with which they get back to normal after their husband or mother or friend dies.

Some would say this evasion of death is an improvement. Some would say my mourning rings are macabre. I would say our avoidance of death, far from being an advance, is false, costly and alienating. We, the church, need to recover the art of dying. We need to reacquaint ourselves with death. We need to help people die well and mourn well. We need to lament. We need to allow dying Christians to be just thatdying Christians, who can rail against, but also prepare for, death. We need to make space for the exhausting, sad work of mourning.

The history of dying that Rob Moll sketches here, and the practices of dying and mourning well that he describes, illustrate the rich resources we have for a recovered, reimagined art of dying. I hope that people will read this bookand talk about it, and take inspiration from it. I hope we will let Rob Molls insights help us become communities where people can reckon with, rather than dodge, death.