When he retired from his parish about fifteen years ago, Jeff came to live in Swanvale Halt and found a new sort of ministry here, helping out with services when needed and lending his support and advice (without being intrusive) to my predecessor and me. He'd been increasingly poorly and breathless over the last couple of years, and a week or so ago had a series of mysterious nosebleeds. He took communion on Sunday but needed a bit of help getting about, and felt too tired to come to the evening service. For a few nights he'd slept downstairs in a chair as it was easier on his chest. He seems to have died about 4am on Monday morning; his wife found him on coming downstairs a couple of hours later. He was lying on the floor, but appeared peaceful. As very often happens, death has been anticipated but is still unexpected when it actually arrives.
The Coroner will determine the cause of Jeff's death, but his experience - his thoughts, his degree of awareness, what really happened - remains closed to us until the End. Yet of course this is what we would really like to know. I looked back this morning at Edgar Allan Poe's stories The Colloquy of Monos and Una and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and their attempts to imagine what it is like to die, at least in relatively normal and non-catastrophic circumstances. Tomorrow is my forty-fifth birthday, when, as I told Ms Formerly Aldgate, I will probably be half-dead or even more, and the matter of the manner of my death occurs to me more often as time goes on, yet, of course, I have nothing profound to add to what anyone else has ever said about it. The one experience that every human being undergoes is the one that remains utterly mysterious.
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