Dying

The story of young Matthew Huffman came across my desk the week I was writing this chapter. He was the six-year-old son of missionaries in Salvador, Brazil. One morning he began to complain of fever. ...

I was sixteen when a white deputy sheriff shot and killed my twenty-five-year-old brother, Clyde, in New Hebron, Mississippi, where we had grown up. Clyde had returned home from fighting in World War ...

The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last forever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year—the days when summer is changing into autumn—the crickets s...

Population studies indicate that something is going terribly wrong: people ages twenty-four to sixty-five are dying eight to fifteen years younger than previous generations from preventable lifestyle ...

Dying is a wild night and a new road.

How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

It is grace at the beginning, and grace at the end. So that when you and I come to lie upon our death beds, the one thing that should comfort and help and strengthen us there is the thing that helped ...

Life itself is resurrection, or else it isn’t life … death is not an inexplicable accident that happens to life; it is the very engine by which life runs. It is by the deaths of chickens, chicory, and...

When it comes to life and death, there's no third option.

Every day opportunity shortens, our scope for learning our Redeemer's love is narrowed by twenty-four hours, and we come nearer to the end of our journey, when we shall fall into the hands of the ...

They, then, who are destined to die, need not be careful to inquire what death they are to die, but into what place death will usher them.

To novices it is a beginning; to those who are advancing, an increase; to those who are concluding, a confirmation.

A very old man lay dying in his bed. In death’s doorway, he suddenly smelled the aroma of his favorite chocolate chip cookie wafting up the stairs. He gathered his remaining strength and lifted himsel...

While lying in bed due to a serious illness, the poet and pastor John Donne heard over and over again the funeral bells at his church, which would ring to announce the death of someone in the parish. ...

No one here gets out alive.

Brennan Manning tells the true story of a father dying from cancer who struggled to pray: The old man’s daughter had asked the local priest to come and pray with her father. When the priest arrived,...

It is often said that people die as they lived. This was certainly true of the great Protestant Reformer Martin Luther. As Luther came close to the end of his life, he suffered from severe headaches w...

He's what we really need. If your friend is sick and dying, the most important thing he wants is not an explanation but for you to sit with him. He's terrified of being alone more than anythin...

I saw a study that said speaking in front of a crowd is considered the number one fear of the average person. Number two was death. This means to the average person, if you have to be at a funeral, yo...

If you attempt to talk with a dying man about sports or business, he is no longer interested. He now sees other things as more important. People who are dying recognize what we often forget, that we a...