Forrest Church’s Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow is a fine book.  Church has thought deeply and fully about death and how to prepare  for it, and has good advice on making the most of life. He began this book in response to a diagnosis of terminal cancer, and the mixture of sermons and essays serves his readers well in presenting his most profound and heartfelt thoughts on life, love, and death.

For Church, love is the antidote to death: love lives on, the love we give and the love we get: “Not only is our grief when someone dies testimony to our love, but when we ourselves die, the love we have given to others is the one thing death can’t kill.”  Church believes that Christ was reborn at Easter not literally but through love, his love (shown by his forgiveness of those torturing him and his willingness to die), and the love he had engendered in his followers through his example (that lived on as Christianity). Church says the grief we feel when someone we love dies is a testament to the love we have for them and from them, and is a sacrament of love, a shared proof of its existence.

Church also believes that our being alive at all is such a miracle, we should be grateful:  “Consider the odds… Your parents had to couple at precisely the right moment for the one possible sperm to fertilize the one possible egg that would result in your conception….the odds were still a million to one against your being…and that’s just the beginning of the miracle.  The same unlikely happenstance must repeat itself throughout the generations.  Going back ten generations, this miracle must repeat itself one thousand times ….one and a quarter million times going back only twenty generations… And that’s only the egg and sperm part of the miracle.  Remember, each of these ancestors had to live to puberty…and there were tragedies around the globe...”  The fact of existing at all is a miracle not to be taken lightly.

I disagree with very little of what Church offers on the importance of both gratitude for life, and of manifesting love through our life and through death. But the lessons he offers, and all of the advice he gives, I’ve received through literature, through poems, novels, and short stories, and I find literature a much more persuasive teacher.  Church preaches and literature demonstrates; Church sermonizes in folksy, warm language and yet literature offers me real people in real situations facing up to death, living life, or running in fear from both, and I learn from reading about them (without even realizing it until the book is over ad I sit back and think).  Church himself says that he learned how to live not from his parents telling him the right and wrong ways to do things but by showing him, though their own lives.  He uses illustrations about the importance of living fully, with gratitude and acceptance and awe and joy, but he is preaching.  Good fiction evokes reactions from all my senses, and from my heart and my brain.  I learn more from fiction; I learn deeply because I am using all my senses.

So I recommend literature as the path to find the truths of how to love, live and die.  But there is nothing wrong with following Church’s mantra, which he repeats throughout the book, “Want what you have, do what you can, be who you are.”  Go with whatever works to bring you to that place of awe, gratitude, love, and wonder, no matter where you are in your life, or at what point you find yourself when facing death.