Death Be Not Proud

Two griefs observed

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This spring, my father and I took a 5-hour road trip from Michigan to Ohio to place ourselves in the path of totality for the solar eclipse. When I got home, I wrote an essay about the wonderful experience of watching it with our hosts, Tom and Sara. Our visit was sweet and too brief. At the time, Tom was facing a dispiriting job setback in his work as a Christian opinion columnist, and he worried about what the future held. He was pushing 70, weighed down by various chronic ailments. He earnestly wanted to continue serving God to the best of his ability, but he wasn’t sure what form that service was now going to take. We sat and chatted and listened to him talk gently of his dreams, his hopeful plans.

None of us knew that within the year, Dad and I would be making the same road trip back together. But we wouldn’t be staying at Tom’s house again, because Tom would be dead.

The sentence was handed down in the summer: pancreatic cancer. Treatments were tried, but no one was in denial. There was just time for my dad to make one last visit on his own. Tom lived long enough to celebrate his 68th birthday in early October, but not much longer. By the end of November, we were making our way to the memorial through an early snow, swirling thick and ghostly in the headlights on the highway.

It’s a cliché to say that someone died after a brave fight, etc., but Tom lived the cliché. Dying couldn’t distract him from living. He mapped out the time he had left with precision and foresight. He recorded videos to train pastors about matters of faith and culture. He worked on material for a new edition of a book about how the character of Jesus is “too good to be false.” He delivered talks to his local apologetics community up to the week before his death—and not just by Zoom, but getting himself loaded in the car so he could be physically present. This was almost impossible, but he did it.

One day, his wife was trying to take a picture of him with a friend, fussing over where he sat and how the light was angled because he “looked yellow.” With mild exasperation he said, “I am yellow.”

He hated the drugs that made it impossible to think, but sometimes the pain was so much that it couldn’t be helped. Then came the day the doctors told him, “It’s time.” He wouldn’t be going home again.

This September, while Tom was still making his nobly measured march towards death, I was in Wisconsin with a friend, gleaning treasure from a fading used bookstore. Among the gems in my haul was a vintage copy of the memoir Death Be Not Proud, by the mid-20th century American journalist John Gunther. Gunther was a prolific and popular writer, but this spare chronicle of his teenage son’s death from a brain tumor is by far his most enduring work. The title is of course lifted from John Donne’s poem by the same name.

As I traced the valiant last days of this beloved son of promise, Johnny, so vividly rendered that by the end I felt like I’d known him, I thought about Tom. Their backgrounds couldn’t have been more different. Johnny was an elite child, Harvard-bound, destined for greatness. A child of precise and proper diction, who addressed his parents as “Mother” and “Father.” Gunther’s connections were such that Johnny could write a precociously inquisitive letter about physics to Albert Einstein, and Einstein wrote back. When he died, the great scientist was among the many leading lights who mourned.

Tom was a Midwestern kid. He didn’t attend an Ivy. He didn’t even attend the best school in his state. No one of great importance would know Tom’s name, which suited Tom fine.

Yet their personalities were alike in some uncanny ways. In his diary, Johnny writes that the adjective he likes least for himself is “naive.” The same could be said of Tom. They had a similar sweet spirit, but combined with a puckish sense of humor, and the ability to deliver an absolutely withering one-liner as the occasion arose. They had a similar tendency towards absent-minded daydreaming, yet to the very end, they had the same ruthlessly self-imposed work ethic. They stared death down with a similar greatness of soul, a similar purity of lion-heart. But in the end, the final difference between them was that one of them had accepted death would eventually win, and the other hadn’t.