Death, the Unspeakable
An Essay by Jared Stacy
About the author: Rev. Dr. Jared Stacy (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is a theologian and ethicist whose work centers on political extremisms and evangelical theology in America. Alongside serving as a hospice chaplain, his work has been featured on platforms like TIME, BBC, and Seen and Unseen, an outlet for the Centre for Cultural Witness for the Anglican Church. He resides with his wife and children near Washington, D.C.
Death in modern life is unspeakable. I see it nearly every day in my work as a hospice chaplain. In these spaces and encounters, I enter a school, a classroom of naming and recognizing the difference between the depths of human grief and frailty and the silences that speak to our denial of death.
I am learning the contours of our modern inheritance, logic that has converged and coalesced into what Allen Verhey called the “medicalization of death.” Where death is conceived as a medical problem and subsumes the human element.
The unspeakable quality we attach to death is felt not so much in the classroom as in darkened rooms of homes and care facilities. Here, the sacred words and presence I receive from the dying and the grieving risks becoming lost in the ceaseless droll of medical intervention and machinating oxygen.
Of course, medical interventions can indeed be merciful. They alleviate pain. They can assuage our bodily convulsions as death approaches. This is what makes recent attacks on and threats against Medicaid in the United States so dangerous: they risk curtailing hospice care for Americans who, by and large, access palliative care through this program.
A Christian word and work in the face of death recognizes our need for greater medical intervention, along with a clearer awareness and deeper presence for the dying among us. Death is not merely an economic problem, or a technological one, death draws our attention to the Word of Christ like nothing else.
Yet death as that which is unspeakable transcends our deepest partisan trenches or most insidious social segregations. The day after the Presidential election, I found myself performing a funeral—the week of the inauguration, the same. Blazing red “Trump 2024” hats covered the heads of the mourning. And yet even these signs and symbols could not quite name, nor escape, the gravity of grief and mystery that confronts us in the remembrance of death.
Modern life leaves us without adequate language and grammar to articulate our experience of death, its shadow, its loss, its robbery. And if this is true of intimate death, how much more when it comes to collective death?
The unspeakable reality of death reflects its universal capture not only of our existence but of our constructed social existences, too. The Cameroonian historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe theorizes the ascendancy of modern necropolitics and its creation of death-worlds as “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.”1 A question emerges here.
Are we capable of seeing the death-worlds which defy our expectations? It is one thing to see the pulverized landscape of Gaza or the trenches of Ukraine as death-worlds today. But what about medical care reduced to ideological drives to cut the budget? What about the death-world of a host of medical interventions which obscures the human element in it all?
I’ve noticed how the acceptance of palliative care (in many cases) appears to preemptively enact the reality of death among the caring and grieving—the call to hospice can be coded as a concession, as defeat: death has already come. And an unbearable “waiting” sets in, marked by the unspeakable. Caregivers often begin to release, to put distance between themselves and the dying. Medicine takes over.
It is this silence where death speaks loudest. But in this very silence, the Word of God shatters our resignation.
I’m learning that much theological malpractice comes to light in this silence. All the concepts, all the slogans, all the correct dogmas, like the kind on Mary’s lips at the loss of Lazarus, “Yes, Jesus, I know you are the one coming into the world, but if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Only in a lived familiarity with and proximity to death can we begin to articulate Christian presence with the dying and Christian witness against death’s finality. Only by entering the silence produced by our death-worlds does a Word of victory over death become intelligible.
“Will you be speaking of resurrection?” That was the question a grieving family asked me while planning a funeral. I assured them I would. And it reminded me of Barth’s own Easter sermon, where his reflections on that startling word still shock us:
And life is not easy; on the contrary, it becomes dead in earnest and difficult wherever this word “resurrection” resounds, because this word is serious. It throws clear light upon our existence and in the clarity of it we see how dark our existence is. It proclaims true freedom to us and lets us painfully discover our prison chains. It tells us that the one and only and last refuge is God. But it tells us that only because it tells us that all our positions on life’s battlefield are lost and that we must vacate them. Against this fact we defend ourselves. We do not tolerate this assessment and pronouncement upon our lives, which inheres in the resurrection proclamation. For that reason we deny the resurrection, or we, at least, minimize it. We alter it. We seek to minimize this maximum word. We seek to bedim that illuminating light that falls upon our existence. We denature that truth of its unconditional, wonderful, divine essence. We alter it into something human. And then, in our preaching on Easter day, we say something about the rejuvenation of nature, or the romantic re-appearing of the blossoms, or the revival of the frozen torpid meadows. We interpret the message that Jesus is victor, not in its literal sense, but we interpret it as a symbol or a human idea... [But] the resurrection is not simply one word, one idea, a program. Resurrection is fact. Resurrection has happened. The contradiction is broken. The life of man has already become the stage of the divine triumphant mercy.2
This word of resurrection illuminates the death-worlds of our own construction. But if we dare to domesticate it, we plunge ourselves back into the unintelligible abyss of death and its enclosure, even the word “resurrection” can come to us as little more than our own voice of sentimentality—and not as a shattering, unsettling witness to the Word.
In a moment where death-worlds seem to converge and collide, provoking chaos and uncertainty, perhaps Christians would do well to school ourselves once again in the witness of this Word of resurrection amidst all we find to be unspeakable.
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Duke University Press Books, 2019.) Loc. 1861, Kindle Edition.
Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, Come, Holy Spirit: Sermons, trans. George Richards, Elmer G. Homrighausen, and Karl Ernst (Wipf & Stock, 2015), 151–2, 157.
