The Death Rate Is 100%

Larry King is a tough-minded pragmatist. He has managed. through a long career in a highly competitive field, to be not only a survivor, but also a winner. Some say that through his interview program on CNN and his column in USA Todav, he is capable of electing a president. When the interviewer on 60 Minutes asked King about some possible threat to his career, he answered, “The only thing I worry about is dying” (CBS, Sept. 18, 1992).

With that sentence, Larry King reduced matters to their irreducible elements. Everyone is going to die. When Claude Thompson, a beloved theology professor at Asbury and Candler seminaries, learned that he had an inoperable malignancy, he commented, “The most certain thing about life is death. At last census the death rate was 100 percent. The ratio of deaths per capita is one to one-one death to one person.

Since that’s the case, you may wonder why I include Death in my list of great teachers. Since we expect to die only once, whatever we might learn from the experience seems superfluous: after all, we won’t get a chance to put it to further use!

The issue, of course, is not the experience of dying but death. It’s true that we die only once, and for that reason, we shouldn’t approach it as novices. We ought to learn about death so that when our once-in-a-lifetime occasion comes, we will handle it well.

Actually, all of us are exposed to the death process almost daily. Nature offers unending lessons in the flower that withers in its container and the leaf dropping from a tree. Each day the newspaper carries a page or more of obituaries and death notices. We drive past funeral homes. And as we grow a bit older, we lose friends and acquaintances and family members to death with rather alarming frequency.

Nevertheless, we don’t know death the way our ancestors did. A typical nineteenth-century home had one room with a door wide enough for a casket to pass through because the “viewing” and often the funeral service took place at home. Until well into this century nearly everyone died at home. Ours is the first age in which a majority of people die in institutions, such as hospitals and nursing homes – although the new emphasis on hospice care may change that.

On the whole, we are not as close to the experience of death as were our ancestors. And while most of us are probably glad that we don’t have to encounter death as intimately, it may also be true that we are poorer because of this isolation. One should not be morbid about death, thinking about it unduly, but neither should one be a fool. All of us are going to die, so we should do well to see what Death would teach us, before it’s too late.

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J. Ellsworth Kalas, “If Experience is Such A Good Teacher, Why Do I Keep Repeating The Course?” Dimensions , 1994, p. 131