Mummified Granny and the Denial of Death [Column Version]

[I write a column for a chain of suburban Cincinnati newspapers. This is the column version of my post on the mummified woman whose body was discovered yesterday.]

Recently, it was learned that the body of a Madisonville woman was kept propped up before a TV set in her house for two years.

News reports said that the woman, Johannas Pope, had earlier told her family members: "Don't bury me. I'm coming back."

"What was this woman's family thinking?" we wonder.

Yet, Johannas Pope’s insistence that she wasn't going to stay dead and her family's complicty with the fiction is just an extreme example of a common way of thinking these days.

Annually, Americans spend $18-billion on cosmetics and $40-billion on dieting, diet books, diet programs, and diet food. Something like 110,000 people have liposuction done each year.

We're a culture in the clutches of a mass denial of death and of aging.

The process of aging and of death are unpleasant realities, of course. But no matter how long our corpses set unburied, no matter how many times we try to wash the grey from our hair, and even if, as the result of numerous face lifts, we take on the bizarre visage of today's Joan Rivers, eyeballs stretched perilously close to the tops of our skulls, nothing can alter the facts that we age and we die.

The denial of death is really an expression of hopeless. When we deny death and aging, we become detached from reality for the sake of maintaining our grasp on a life that inevitably ends.

The denial of death also expresses our desire to be in control, to be little gods. "The aging process is giving me gray hair," we say. "I'll show the aging process who's boss!" It's a good thing for people to try to remain as healthful as they can throughout their lives. But nothing we do can mask the simple fact that much of life and death are out of our control.

But all isn't hopeless. The God revealed to us through Jesus Christ promises new life to all who turn away from sin and receive the life that He gives. "So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!" (Second Corinthians 5:17) We have the promise that if we entrust our lives to Christ, we will live with God forever.

The follower of Christ isn't called to a denial of death. Christians accept death as a reality of life on this earth. They try to face it as graciously and as courageously as one of our number, Pope John Paul II, recently faced his death. He was as prayerful, productive, and faithful as he could be even as aging, disease, and death overtook him.

He was able to do that because of the hope of Christ. He put no stock in notions of coming to life again within this broken world or denying his mortality. He could die in peace knowing that He belonged to a Savior Who had gone through death and hell in order to bring all who follow Him into a better and eternal country.

A big part of faith is trusting God in the silence, ambiguity, and uncertainty of this life.

Until the risen and ascended Jesus returns to the world, aging and dying will be part of life here. We needn't deny it. We can, as several of the characters in C.S. Lewis' Narnian novels say, "take the adventure" that God puts before us in the certain hope that while we can do nothing to usher ourselves into eternity, the Savior Jesus to Whom we surrender can...and will.