A wise person thinks a lot about death, while a fool thinks only about having a good time. (Eccl 7:4)
The actor Matthew Lillard is starting to tear up, lying in a coffin next to his friend and fellow actor, David Dastmalchian, similarly ensconced in a matching coffin. Despite Matthew being well known for his horror roles, from Scream to Five Nights at Freddy’s, this isn’t the set of a horror movie. It’s for an e-interview show called Grave Conversations. Lillard describes the abreactive effect it is having on him.
Can I just say before we start this question; I don’t think I’ve thought about these answers, ever. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to ponder my own demise. I’ve got lots of stuff going on right now, and I knew I would be laying in this casket with you, somebody I cared deeply about, and I knew that I would be … sitting and cracked open already.
Having his reputation as an actor recently clotheslined by a prominent director giving some off-the-cuff comments during a podcast, Lillard revealed in an interview with People Magazine that it felt like “I had died and was in heaven watching everyone send out their RIP tweets … I mean, it was really being a part of your own wake, sort of sitting there living through all the nice things people say after you die. So it was really, really lovely.” That response made me all the more interested in his coffin talk with David, specifically on the subject of death and dying. “Is that something that occupies a lot of your headspace?”
Yeah. Right now my dad’s sick, and my friend took his own life a couple years ago and another friend OD, so it’s around me. I also think as a father, I know I’m leaving a legacy for my kids. I’m at that age where my parents are getting older and my wife’s parents are getting older. It’s just really present for me right now. I hate this interview.
I laid my hands on my dad’s already cooling body on the gurney in the ER, praying under my breath that God would bring him back to life. The helicopter crew that transported him wept in each other’s arms; he died en route. I looked at my mother’s face across the bed. We aren’t done with him yet, God! I pressed harder on his chest, feeling for the slightest twitch, believing the impossible to the point I was surprised he wasn’t moving. Decades haven’t blurred a single moment of that scene. Not one.
Was I unmoored from reality, or indeed, the Christian faith, to believe that the God who spoke everything into existence, who rose back to life after being dead long enough for folks to know he wasn’t playing possum? That the God who raised other folks from the dead, whose hangers-on also occasionally raised the dead, might he do the same for me? Seemed not unreasonable to ask, what with all the death-to-life language throughout the scriptures. So I did. I’d do it again, too.
Did I believe I could raise my father from the dead? No. I believed the One who rose from the dead could. I tell this story for a very particular reason — the Easter story isn’t abstract for Christians. It certainly isn’t abstract for me. There isn’t anything abstract about a dead body, particularly one that comes back to life. That has cosmic, eternal, corporate, and very personal implications, and not just for me.
Good news about my dad; he’s not dead! He’s just not … here. That’s what Christians mourn. Not their loved one’s end but their present proximity. We suffer death, we suffer that distance, we suffer the loss. In the undertaker and poet Thomas Lynch’s book Whence and Whither, he also points to the clarifying power of pondering our ends, and how our faith doesn’t shy away from the reality of suffering associated with it:
Our theology is shaped by our eschatology; our living faith informed by our best hopes for the dead; our ideas of God informed by our contemplation of Last Things — dying, death, heaven and hell, the judgment with its punishments and rewards. Thus, the defining truth of our Christianity — the empty tomb — proceeds from the defining truth of our humanity: we fill them. Our mortality is certain though our faith lays claim to more. The mystery of the resurrection to eternal life is bound inextricably to the certainty of the cross of suffering and death.
Wise ol’ King Solomon, despite sometimes sounding like a fortune cookie, wasn’t wrong in Ecclesiastes 7; there is a lot of wisdom in thinking about death. In light of Jesus’ rising from dead, thinking about death, thinking about its reality, isn’t thinking about the end but rather the beginning of forever, with Christ who raised us with him.
Toward the end of the interview, the two of them lying in their respective coffins, David Dastmalchian asked what his friend thought happened after we die. Matthew Lillard’s reply was quite simple. “I have hopes.”
I do, too, Matthew. I do, too.
