Lessons on Living from People Preparing to Die

Mrs. Hunter's Happy Death
by Reverend John Fanestil

What is the secret of people who die contented and fulfilled? What makes it possible for them to attain such spiritual heights as they approach their physical demise? What enables them to make death a completion of life, rather than a tragic end? And what can they teach us about life and death, love and loss, grief and spiritual growth?

The way we die, like the way we live, makes a difference — in our lives and the lives of others.

From time to time during his work as a pastor, John Fanestil has witnessed someone dying with remarkable and uplifting grace. Fanestil was moved yet puzzled by the spirit of happiness and holiness he observed. Contemporary literature on dying, filled with talk of anger, acceptance, and forgiveness, provided little to explain it. But the chance discovery of articles about the ritual of the "happy death" in religious magazines from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought Fanestil the answers he sought.

Mrs. Hunter's Happy Death blends the captivating historical accounts Fanestil uncovered with his own pastoral experiences to reveal the secrets that enable people to transcend pain and suffering and embrace death as a completion of life, not as a tragic end. A fascinating introduction to a historic approach to death and its contemporary incarnations, Mrs. Hunter's Happy Death also offers specific lessons on living and dying, from the "exercise of prayer" to the "labor of love" to "bearing testimony."

With the spread of in-home medical and hospice care, death is once again being embraced as a natural part of life, infused with profound emotional and spiritual dimensions. The inspiring stories in Mrs. Hunter's Happy Death beautifully demonstrate that the way we die, like the way we live, makes a supreme difference — in our lives and in the lives of others.

All quoted passaged by J. Wood are taken from "An Account of Mrs. Hunter's Holy LIfe and Happy Death."

1. Whatever Degree Of Grace: Sharing God's Greatest Gift

Whatever degree of Grace is communicated by the Lord Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church, to any individual, is not intended for the good of that person only, but that he might shine as a light in the family, the church and the world.

— J. Wood

I have known a few people who died with a spirit of apparent nonchalance, but for most the approach of death raises -gut—level questions about the true meaning of life. Is there a God? What kind of God? And what are we, as human beings, that God should care about us? Can we really hope to know God in this life? . . . in the next?

The world's great religious traditions answer these questions by asserting that the fundamental nature of God is characterized by grace. The Hebrew word hesed, or "mercy," appears over two hundred times in the Old Testament, and the Greek equivalent, charis — translated as "grace" — over one hundred times in the much shorter New Testament. As a friend of mine once explained it to me, "Grace means there's nothing you can do to make God love you more, and there's nothing you can do to make God love you less. God loves you. That's the beginning and the ending of your story and mine."

The story of Mrs. Hunter's holy life and happy death is rooted firmly in this biblical tradition. J. Wood tips his hand in the very first words of his account: he is about to introduce a woman who was determined to communicate in her living and dying the grace made known to her in her -twenty — six years of life.

Mary Hunter's death at the age of -twenty — six may strike us as premature, but her fate was entirely common among people living in England and America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Death in infancy and early childhood was a matter of course, as is made clear by the experience of Cotton Mather, the Massachusetts clergyman famous for his role in the Salem witch trials of 1692: Mather fathered fourteen children, but seven died as infants and another at age two. Or consider the case of John and Charles Wesley, the brothers who in -eighteenth — century England founded the religious movement known as Methodism. John and Charles were two of nineteen children born to Samuel and Susanna Wesley, but only ten reached adolescence and John was given names — John and Benjamin — of older siblings who had died soon after birth.

Neither did surviving childhood guarantee longevity in Mrs. Hunter's day. Women were especially vulnerable during their childbearing years, and with the industrial revolution advancing rapidly, living and working conditions in England's cities were notorious. Disease ran rampant and popular folk remedies were widely practiced, often with devastating consequences: bleeding was still a common treatment for routine infections; drinking lye was believed to help cleanse the body of ulcers and tumors; smoking tobacco was common for easing the pains of toothaches and the like. Hospitals offered little help — not yet institutionalized as establishments for the study and cure of illness, they were run, in the historian Jacques Barzun's estimation, as "indiscriminate refuges for the poor and the sick."

Mary Hunter lived more than one hundred years after Thomas Hobbes had issued his famous indictment of life in the modern era: "No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Hobbes's words would remain famous for generations, however, because they seemed so entirely apt.

Against this backdrop it made sense that even vibrant young men and women would choose to cast their lives in the light of the prospect of death.

Something curious was happening, though, in the world of -English — speaking Christianity in the generations that spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. People were not living longer — death was as present and potent as ever — but the fear of death seemed to be subsiding in the popular imagination. The change was perceptible in English graveyards, where — as the historian David Stannard has shown — more and more tombstones featured engravings of sunrises or angels' wings, instead of the traditional -skull — shaped "death's head." It was noticeable in the preaching of the eighteenth century's great revivalists, too, who were gradually shifting their emphasis from the traditional threats of eternal damnation to such sayings as John Wesley's "All people can be saved; all people can know they are saved; all people can be saved to the uttermost." It could be heard in church music too, where the optimistic hymns of John's genius brother Charles were beginning to dominate.

The uplifting doctrine to which the Wesleys were giving popular expression went by the name "Free Grace," the title of one of Charles's favorite hymns. This doctrine asserted that an individual's salvation could be had by God's grace alone and could not be achieved by any human endeavor. This sentiment had fueled the Protestant Reformation on the European continent — so called for its adherents' "protests" against the perceived abuses of the Roman Catholic Church. In England the same impulse had given rise to an era of Puritan reform, whose adherents wanted to "purify" the beliefs and practices of the Church of England. Protestants and Puritans alike understood that the gift of grace was entirely unmerited: as the contemporary preacher George Regas has said of God's grace, "you can't earn it, you can't buy it, you can't win it, you can't deserve it — all you can do is accept it."

So it was that by the time Mary Hunter died a happy death in 1801, she had behind her generations of religious ferment. She had been taught that God's grace alone was sufficient for her salvation, and she had available for her inspiration a treasure trove of hymns, stories, and sermons, and the examples set by countless others who had died before her in the faith. Having had the grace of God communicated to her so powerfully, she came to view her dying as presenting a golden opportunity to convey this same grace to others.

A few years into my tenure as the pastor of Westchester United Methodist Church, a midsized congregation on the west side of Los Angeles, a couple named Jim and Barbara Wislocki started coming to church. In his fifties, of English and Polish ancestry, with a round face but a pointed nose, Jim was as outgoing as his wife was shy. More than once after Sunday worship, over a cup of coffee and between pleasantries exchanged with other members of the congregation, Jim and I debriefed the day's sermon while Barbara politely listened in.

Jim was a theological novice, but he had an active and inquisitive mind. An engineer with a strong background in science, he was pleased to find that I was willing to entertain rationalist critiques of the Bible and was interested to explore how I, as a Christian pastor, might account for the spiritual renewal he was experiencing at this time in his life.

As he explained it to me, it had all begun with his meeting Barbara, who had loved him in a way that he had not believed he was capable of being loved. "I've done some awful things in my life," he told me on more than one occasion, "but Barbara just refused to let the past get in the way."

Copyright © 2006 by John Fanestil. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

John Fanestil, a native of San Diego, is a graduate of Dartmouth College, Oxford University — where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar — and the Claremont School of Theology. Since 1992 he has worked as a pastor at United Methodist churches in Southern California.