To me, one of the priest’s hard works is to encounter the deceased and the family whom I don’t know at a funeral home. Sometimes, I find myself presiding an infant baptism right after the Sunday Eucharist and then going to a wake service. Life and death seem to go together.
My experience of death had been negative. When my grandpa died in the time of my military service, my aunt’s sudden death and my uncle’s tragic death made me feel a tremendous loss in which I had to realize that I couldn’t see and touch them anymore. It was like a black hole that sucked up every living being to extinction. So my reaction to Jesus’ saying was unenthusiastic: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.”
It is a gradual and long process for me to step forward to take death and embrace it as it is and furthermore to talk about it. For this, I am indebt to many: first of all so many deceased that I buried in the Christian burial here at St. Anthony and the close ones.
Now I would like to share one of them. She was a secretary of the parish where I stayed and worked for two years as a seminarian. About a year and half ago, she was diagnosed with brain tumor and then she died last January. It was shocking at first and then painful to see her gradual loss of memories and abilities to walk, talk and joke. After much more suffering and anguish, she was called to God, leaving us behind. After the funeral, I needed time, time to be away from death and then time to recollect myself. I questioned myself, what if someone asked me why? What if I stood by the grieving family of the deceased?