The topic of death, now fashionable and much discussed, raises questions in almost every field of thought. Death has always been thought hateful, or almost always; hateful, and enigmatic. In the Christian and Jewish traditions death has always been terrible, something that reveals the distance between God and man and man’s dereliction; and it is therefore thought to be something that in some obscure sense ought not to happen. The primitive account of the passion in Mark and Matthew—characteristically and no doubt deliberately omitted by Luke—records the great cry of agony taken from Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” In the same psalm we find: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax, it is melted within my breast . . . and my tongue cleaves to my jaws; thou dost lay me in the dust of death.” Here is no attempt to prettify death or to make the process of dying acceptable. Death is intolerable.

Of course, there are other biblical ways of looking at death. In (and out of) the Bible we are given the picture of the just man full of years and honour who dies surrounded by his children and his children’s children. This is a fortunate death, and if to this we add the element contributed by Christianity, namely, the reception of the eucharist (viaticum, journey money, analogous to the placing of a coin in the dead man’s mouth to pay Charon’s ferry charges), and the anointing (formerly) of those parts of the body that have so often taken us away from God, and the sacramental remission of sin through confession and absolution, we understand how this can properly be called “a happy death.”