When I first went to see Rose a few days after Bob died, I remember thinking what a resilient person she was. Despite her profound grief, she showed an immense strength of spirit in the acceptance, in the steady eye contact and in her clear and calm manner of expression. I surmised it was a strength which she and Bob had homegrown together across over 60 years of deep love and suffering, as I remarked at Bob’s funeral in early April. So, I can in my own small way echo Moira’s description of Rose’s incredible strength when she was faced with the inevitable reality of her own mortality. I would link her strength, too, though, with something else which Moira mentioned, that is Rose’s strong and lifelong faith in God. It was lovely to see her coming for Communion at Mass in St. Mary’s on a number of occasions after Bob’s funeral. Her face betrayed a great serenity and was giving the message that she trusted deeply that Bob was with the Lord.

Death is something we prefer not to think about, especially our own death. It raises too many difficult questions and faces us with the impossible job of trying to find answers to them. Surely it doesn’t make sense that life will die? Can it be that all the effort to love, serve, create and build a life of meaningful relationships, of achievement and of happiness comes to nothing? Doesn’t the absurdity of death somehow make life itself absurd? What, then, is the meaning of life at all, of love, of suffering? Death would appear to pull the carpet from under everything and everyone we hold dear in life, making life seem like a cruel trick as if we are led along thinking that things will get better until we realise with bitterness that one today we will have no tomorrow.

Great minds across the ages and cultures have grappled with the enigma of death, but no matter how clever and ingenious their conclusions, they, too, have all died. Only one man, Himself the Son of the living God, has conquered death, not by a magical potion or by a brilliant formula, but by Himself dying … and rising from the dead. He defies death not by avoiding it but by entering into it head on, conquering it and walking free from it. And by what power could he do that? What power is stronger than death? By the power of sinless and eternal love. As God, Christ knew we could not prevail over death, since by sin we had given it the upper hand. And to show that His love for us was stronger than our sin and our death, He took on our mortal condition as a man. Before the Father in that humanity, in his oneness with us, he said: Father, don’t hold their sin against them, let me take the blame for it all since you know that my love for them would rather I died than that they died. Here is the great mystery of the Cross of Christ. On it meet all the justice and love of God, all the sin of mankind, all the fury and hatred of Satan: they all land on Jesus and like the Mighty and Valiant Hero he was, he let it be, he let it happen. But His goal was to crush Satan, sin and death from the inside and to give us a second chance, a new birth, the new life of the Resurrection if we would but believe in Him. Whoever believes in me has eternal life, he once said, because risen from the dead, He has become the resurrection and the life of all.

The answer to all our questions about death and, yes, about this life we live, all come back to Christ. Not the Christ of holy pictures or the dumbed down versions of Christ which we dream up for ourselves, but the real Christ, the truest man whoever trod this earth and who is also true God. Death is not merely a physical or biological thing. Its roots are deep in the human soul, in whether it opens up to Christ or shuts tight in on itself in the illusory notion that we can somehow hack it on our own. Christ appeals to us with all his divine and human heart: Believe in God; believe also in me. I have a place for you in my Father’s house. Death need frighten you no more. I have conquered it and when the moment comes, I will come and take you to myself, to my Father and to all whom you have known and loved in this life and who have died believing in me. Beyond the horizon of death lies not some dark and solitary wilderness, but my Kingdom of light in which redeemed humanity rejoices in the love and glory of God.

Some might wonder: can this also be true for me? I think Christ would answer: it is especially true for you. He’s not asking for perfection, but for trust in His merciful love. He’s not asking anyone to know the bible or the catechism back to front: He is asking the question he once asked of Peter after he had denied him: Do you love me? You might even say, Jesus is begging us to love Him for He knows that without Him we have, in the end, nowhere else to go. Jesus Himself is our way to victory over death. He is the Truth, so we can trust every word He speaks. He is the Life, the fullness of that life which our hearts long and yearn for. In the end, there is no other.

Rose oozed this kind of faith in Christ. The Lord will know all about her, her love, her suffering, her strength, her weaknesses and her sins. But more than anything he knows about her, He knows her, her very person, her deepest heart and soul. He has loved her in her deepest heart and soul. And He know and love you in your deepest heart and soul. Our confidence for Rose’s eternal happiness will be as strong as our confidence in Christ’s merciful love for ourselves. He will have watched closely, tenderly, and with infinite care, the phases of her life’s pilgrimage from sunrise to sunset. He will now, we pray, give her the peace of eternity – well, that is, after Bob has calmed down and stopped shouting for joy that he has her once again by his side.