The Atlantic
Growing My Faith in the Face of Death
I spent a lifetime counseling others before my diagnosis. Will I be able to take my own advice?
March 7, 2021
Trent Parke/ Magnum
I have spent a good part of my life talking with people about the role of faith in the face of imminent death. Since I became an ordained Presbyterian minister in 1975, I have sat at countless bedsides, and occasionally even watched someone take their final breath. I recently wrote a small book,
On Death, relating a lot of what I say to people in such times. But when, a little more than a month after that book was published, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I was still caught unprepared.