Spending Time With The Dead

I’m not a big fan of trigger warnings, but they seem to be all the rage these days. So if you are uncomfortable reading about death, then you should probably skip this post. Or maybe you shouldn’t.

When I was a kid, the dead weren’t always carted off to a funeral home and laid out in elaborate caskets under rose-colored mood lights. Often, they were stretched out on a bed in the living room where they rested for days while family and friends confronted the undeniable fact. That’s how it was with my paternal grandfather, Belton Hayes Vickery. I was only ten-years-old, but I remember standing next to his body watching for his chest to rise and fall, his fingers to twitch, his eyes to open. I expected him to sit up and resume being my grandfather. He did not.

In the rural South, hovering over the deceased, we said things like, “Don’t he look good.” And he usually did, given what he’d been through. But there was no escaping the fact that he was, in fact, through.

One summer between lackluster college semesters, I worked near the morgue at St. Mary’s Hospital in Athens, Georgia. Among other duties, I helped undertakers move autopsied bodies out of the hospital into hearses. I’ll never forget the first. I was mopping the hallway when a man in a dark suit stuck his head out of the door to the morgue and said, “Hey, kid, can you give me a hand?”

By then a fan of gallows humor, I wanted to say, “There’s probably a bunch of them in there — take your pick.” Instead, I swallowed hard and said, “Sure.”

A gun-shot victim was lying naked on a stainless steel table. The undertaker took the end with the head and shoulders. I wrapped my hands around the dead man’s ankles. Then I let go.

“Cold, ain’t he?” the undertaker said. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.” We did, but I won’t ever forget how those cold, dead ankles felt.

I reflected on this verse in a recent post, but Acts 1:3 still haunts me like the memory of that autopsied man in the Athens morgue, like my grandfather lying dead in his living room. “After his suffering.” That’s Luke’s uncharacteristic shorthand for being beaten to a pulp, nailed to a cross, pierced with a spear, laid in a tomb and sealed behind a boulder. When I read vs. 3, I slow down at the painful word “suffering.”

It’s good for me to stand watch over Jesus’ dead body, now and then, the way we used to stand watch over dead loved ones before death was euphemized, detached and segregated. From a distance, everything looks smaller. I need to stand right up next to His death so that it looms. I need to notice His ashen pallor, to look into His open but unseeing eyes, to touch His arm and feel the cold. I need to smell death and shoo away an opportunistic fly. None of this is pleasant, of course, but it is good for me.

If I do not pause at “His suffering,” enduring the undeniable fact of His death, the unforgiving finality of it, I cannot experience the wonder of “He showed himself . . . and gave many convincing proofs that He was alive!” Without a visceral mindfulness of His death, I cannot know the miracle of His resurrection.

When I go to funeral homes to pay respects, I always touch the hand of the deceased. I want to remember that this was someone’s spouse or parent or child or sibling. I want to remember that one day it will be my loved one. Or me. I want to confront the reality of death, to be sobered by it, to be overwhelmed by the inevitability of it. Because one day, after I’m dead, I will experience the same miracle Jesus did.