The Not-so-Permanent Loss

Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? –Paul

I didn’t know that death could have, in a literal way, a bitter taste. Not till my dad died, and Mom and I wanted to see his body one last time.

I missed by mere hours getting back to California in time to sit with him before he finally succumbed to a heart attack. But now, viewing the body, I hoped for at least a symbolic farewell.

His body prepared for burial, attendants ushered us into the refrigerated holding room, my dad on a morgue-issue mattress. I leaned down and kissed his forehead. There was something powerful about that moment, holy, even — honoring this body I had known for decades, whose shoulders I had sat on as a toddler, my hands gripping his thick scalp of hair.

And that’s when I discovered a sharp reality: Embalming chemicals left an acrid residue on my lips, an unpleasant tang.

The physical sensation pointed to what is, of course, the deeper loss, what the Bible calls the sting of death. Licking my lips stirred again in me our common longing to know that God moves and works in even the hardest things, even in the loss of death.

Part of what hurt most was my wanting to tell Dad one last time that I loved him, when I couldn’t. I had prayed on the plane ride there, asking God to keep my dad alive till I could sit with him in the hospital. It seemed reasonable to ask. I felt there was some final reconciling to be done, especially in light of the break we experienced earlier in our relationship. And there had been no chance for him to tell me about arrangements he’d made for Mom, who was hopeless with finances.

But when I was greeted at the airport terminal by my mom and a friend of the family, I could instantly read in their faces the news I had dreaded: Dad had died, even as I was winging my way home. Death clipped our relational connecting cord, shutting down, shouting down conversation. It seemed so final.

But the days ahead were not bleak or empty, either. When I look back, I see more about the Christian promise that Jesus not only died but also was raised from death, holding out promise for our own good and flourishing when we know loss. What does it mean not to grieve, as one ancient writer put it, as those “who have no hope”?

Do Not Go Gentle

I don’t mean this to sound glib. When someone, getting to know me, asks me about my family — my mom and dad and brother — I could say that I lost my parents twice: Their rejection, first, when they turned me away and boycotted my wedding, absenting themselves for a time. But by lost I mean, as people often do when they use the word, that my folks died — my dad when he was just sixty-nine and then a few years later my mom. For we feel a loved one residing here, and comfortably, reliably in the world, in our world — as it should be. But then they are gone.

Our losses happen in all manners and ways. But especially through dying. Of all the turns in life that cause us pain in our threading through life with others, perhaps this is the most drastic. No wonder that death can shock the system and leave us longing for a story with a better ending.

The poet captured the affront that arises in us, as Dylan Thomas addressed his dying father:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

There’s a reason the poem resonates in us, with its defiance. It’s rooting for life against loss.

But there is a strand in our culture that takes another tack. It wants to see death as the normal, natural completion of any life, a gentle process, a rejoining of an everlasting circle of life, folding into the endless universal cycle. You don’t, the idea goes, live beyond your death in any personal sense.

And I guess some find thin comfort in the whole scenario of a cog in the universe that grinds irresistibly, tranquilly on. There’s a certain logic, I suppose, in submitting to the inevitable. But a drop returned to the ocean, as another image suggests, well, gets lost in the vastness and stays faceless.

No, death is more of an adversary than that. The death we fear for ourselves, the death we mourn in others— its graphic reality makes us flinch. It can even shake our faith. Ernest Becker, in his milestone twentieth-century book on our hesitancy here, our fear of mortality, The Denial of Death, articulates this hard reality. Humankind, he argues, is “split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.” And we want to deny that harshness.

So maybe you wonder, when death stalks, like never before: Where is consolation? How might the vast reality of a triune God get personal here in this supremely lonely moment? When hope must withstand one of its biggest challenges?

The Impermanent Interval

When we overcome our avoidance, there’s another path between our raging defiance and soft surrender. A better story for the end of any human life. And a sign of the way we can live in the meantime, in between birth and death, the impermanent interval. One in which nothing less, no one less than the Trinity participates.

This is where Jesus’ story comes with a blessed reversal. The crucified one’s resurrection from the dead in the Gospels rests at the center of Christian faith for all kinds of reasons: confirmation of divinity, triumph over sin and death, vindication of Jesus’ mission, a promise of eternal life for God’s beloved.

But we see at work the whole assemblage here too: all the persons of the Trinity, not just God the Father and Jesus the Son. We see, in ways that surprise me, the more I look, the Holy Spirit, whom we call in the creed the Lord, the Giver of life. Also now the Giver of hope, even when the human race must face down death.

The words of the Ash Wednesday service of many traditions, with charred grit traced on the forehead with a thumb or finger in the sign of the cross, also place our loss in this larger setting: “Remember that you are dust,” someone says as the ashes are imposed, “and to dust you shall return.” Here’s the realism. The bitter taste on the lips. Any minister in a liturgical tradition might well find before him his or her own child or spouse, and the poignancy only heightens, comes closer to home. We confront the recognition that the human body by itself becomes food for worms, as folks from Shakespeare to Ernest Becker have pointed out, pointedly. Nothing like a cheery sentiment, right?

But the setting of those words reminds us also of another dimension. If the ashes become a “sign of our mortality and penitence,” as the Ash Wednesday service says, they also point us to God’s gracious gift. We are “given everlasting life.” So, if death entered the world in the garden of Eden, snaking through our common frail nature, making dying universal, God has in mind a reversal of such realities.

This is not to peg the Bible’s view as some kind of overdone greeting-card sentimentalism. The Christian faith both sees the disarray caused by death more hopefully and takes it more seriously. It paints the remedy more expansively. Yes, death grieves us, terrifies us, rips from us those we love. Eberhard Arnold suggested the Bible “traces the death of the body back to the fact that sin as separation — as division and isolation — has brought a fatal breach into the living cohesion of creation.”

Something cataclysmically good will intervene, though. The graphic nature of moldering in the ground does not negate the counterintuitive, wildly expectant view that’s possible.

That is one of the gifts of the grittiness of Good Friday’s story of Jesus’ arduous death. He knowingly traverses the distance that death and sin create. That scene of death conquered gives everything — including heartaches full of loss — a new glimmering. For if a breach has been broached, the ending of mortal life now looks radiantly different.

All the more remarkable in light of this: Jesus’ crucifixion didn’t just mean excruciating, mind-exploding pain and shame but also a method of execution that was perversely designed to deny and erase the memory of the accused. The method of killing was designed to leave something repugnant as the last image of the crucified or hung, especially for those who loved, honored, or followed the person. So distasteful was it that the memory would drive you to want to deep-six. The act reduced the other to nothingness, to nonpersonness. It aimed to obliterate not only the victim’s worth but any lingering memory of the person, pushing them to the edges of oblivion.

But something else, wildly different, happened with Jesus’ crucifixion. It is true that at first his agony and squeezed-out, stolen breath reduced his friends to sorrowing disbelief. But only for a time.

And if death, wrote Rowan Williams, “is normally a drastic severing of relations,” if it isolates — and being crucified all the more — something different is at work here. With Jesus, Williams went on, “it is through death that a new and potentially infinite network of relations is opened up. The effect of his death is the opposite of isolation.”

And instead of driving him from memory, we glimpse how this death would endear Jesus even more to a watching humanity. It was a sign not of forsakenness and erasure but a portrayal of sacrificial love. The trauma transfigures into a story of how love triumphs over death. Over loss. Over the sting and bitterness of our own daily losses and griefs. Something shifts within. Another glimpse opens before us, opens us to renewed hope in our face-off with stalking mortality.

At the funeral for my dad, the Methodist minister spoke of my dad’s commendable traits. I don’t recall what all he said, except for one word with which he commended my dad, one that stuck out, struck me: Courage. At the time that wasn’t the first word to come to my mind. But it began to make great sense: My dad’s facing his own mortality with dignity and calm, his having more than one stroke, two heart attacks, and concerns about my mom’s encroaching dementia, more obvious by the day. In his last moments, he displayed courageous willingness to move forward, to walk without fear into the life that awaited.

Adapted from Fully Beloved: Meeting God in Our Heartaches and Hopes. Copyright © 2026 by Timothy Jones Published by Thomas
Nelson.

Timothy Jones is a pastor and author known for helping people uncover greater warmth and depth in their relationship with God. His writing, Sandra McCracken wrote, “names our loneliness and lifelong quest for belonging,” while “with honesty and relatability he invites us to encounter the God of divine love.” Tim is a blogger (www.revtimothyjones.com), Substacker, retreat leader, and author. He has written regularly for the Rabbit Room, Inkwell, Mockingbird, and other publications. His books include The Art of Prayer: A Simple Guide to Conversation with God and Awake My Soul: Practical Spirituality for Busy People. His latest, Fully Beloved: Meeting God in Our Heartaches and Our Hopes, explores God’s triune love set amid our human, everyday brokenness. Tim has presented at Inkwell, Hutchmoot, and, this spring, the Mockingbird conference in NYC. He enjoys all kinds of stories and playing old-time banjo with friends. He lives with his wife, Jill Zook-Jones, near Nashville.