China and its Discontents

Below is a recent article I published in the U.S. Naval Institute’s magazine, Proceedings.

If war broke out in the western Pacific tomorrow, how would U.S. Navy ships be supplied and repaired? Given China’s copious inventory of long-range missiles, virtually every Navy installation in the region could be attacked.¹ During a conflict, none of the United States’ handful of regional bases could service the Seventh Fleet without risking ships being sunk in port. Similarly, replenishment ships, which load fuel and supplies out of those ports and deliver them to ships underway, could not do so without facing the same risk. The Navy’s entire supply chain could be forced to move thousands of miles to the east, to Hawaii, or even worse, to the West Coast of the United States.

Meanwhile, China’s supply chain would remain about 70 nautical miles long, the width of the Taiwan Strait at its narrowest point. As soon as the missiles started flying, as many forward-deployed U.S. ships as possible would get underway and stay underway, leaving their homeports far behind. If the Navy expects to keep those ships underway and operational, it should revive a battle-tested capability from a time when the Navy’s control of the seas was similarly not assured—the destroyer tender.²

The Logistical Challenge in the Western Pacific

In October 2022, the Navy conducted the latest in a series of vertical launch system reloading tests between an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer and a Military Sealift Command ship.³ The pierside exercise was designed to demonstrate an “expeditionary ordnance reload” capability far removed from existing ammunition onload/offload sites, which are primarily pierside. As many observers have pointed out, U.S. Navy ships equipped with Mk 41 vertical launch systems carry a limited number of missiles, which would be expended quickly in wartime.⁴ During a conflict, a ship that has expended its ordnance would have to steam thousands of miles from the fight to reload, thereby removing it from the theater for at least a month.

The problem, however, goes far beyond ordnance reload. Ships require an enormous supply chain to remain underway.⁵ This logistical infrastructure provides food, fuel, and ordnance. It also is critical for the repair parts needed to keep ships operational. The Navy keeps most of its repair parts in a limited number of Defense Logistics Agency distribution centers located in the continental United States.⁶ Often, the Navy’s inventory of repair parts is kept quite low, especially for the most expensive parts. This is the result of decades of cost-saving measures predicated on the supposed efficiencies of just-in-time logistics.

When ships are in port, parts are mailed commercially to deployed ships. This can take weeks. When ships are underway, the delivery of repair parts (along with anything else the ship needs) relies on replenishments with the closest supply ship and the port from which that supply ship loads out. Or, if the ship is part of a carrier strike group, parts can be delivered by carrier onboard delivery aircraft. If a ship cannot get important parts in time, they might be cannibalized from other ships in long-term maintenance. And when a ship’s crew is unable to repair a piece of equipment, the Navy relies heavily on depot-level installations such as the ship repair facility in Yokosuka, Japan.

This logistical model is not going to work well in wartime. It often barely keeps ships underway in peacetime, even with the superb expediting services of the Navy’s Priority Material Office. The current model depends entirely on fixed, shore-based logistical infrastructure. This includes the commercial logistics companies that ship most repair parts, the airports that receive those parts, the ports in which supply ships are loaded, and the ship repair facilities themselves. None of these is going to be reliably available in wartime.

Tenders to the Rescue

To mitigate these risks, the Navy should recapitalize destroyer tenders in the fleet. The last destroyer tenders in service were prematurely retired in the mid-1990s as part of the post–Cold War defense budget drawdown.⁷ This was one of many decisions concerning the Navy’s force structure made in the 1990s and 2000s that have left the Navy strategically incoherent and adrift at exactly the moment it might be called on to fight a war at sea with a peer competitor for the first time since World War II.⁸

Tenders bring many advantages, including:

Vertical launch system (VLS) reloading and maintenance. As many have argued, tenders could provide an expeditionary ordnance reload capability in protected harbors when fixed ammunition onload/offload sites in Japan or Guam become unavailable.⁹ It is unclear whether the Navy’s next-generation logistics ship, being developed for production starting in 2026, will have this capability.¹⁰ In addition to the need to reload cells, VLS modules also require depot-level maintenance after a certain number of missiles have been fired. While this maintenance today is performed infrequently, as the Navy does not fire many missiles in peacetime, in combat this requirement would increase significantly. It might be possible for a tender to carry this work out.

Forward logistics hub. Tenders could serve as mobile and distributed logistics hubs, putting critical repair parts in the theater where they are needed and not stuck in depots thousands of miles away. This would require an increase in the stock of many repair parts. A tender’s supply of repair parts would not be a cache never to be used during peacetime. A ship is a complex system-of-systems. The allowance parts list for a given ship is constantly changing as more reliable parts are developed and ship systems are upgraded, making any static cache quickly outmoded.

Intermediate maintenance facility. Tenders could serve as what the Navy terms intermediate maintenance facilities—repair facilities one step below that of depot-level, staffed primarily by sailors who have the training, tools, and resources needed to make repairs the ship’s crew cannot accomplish on their own. This would include technical experts who could troubleshoot problems (such as marine gas turbine inspectors), the ability to manufacture common parts on site, and specialty equipment needed for services such as calibration.

Port services. Many of the ports or protected harbors the Navy might end up using in a conflict do not have the services necessary to support warships. Ships in port or anchored in a protected harbor are unable to discharge sewage or make their own fresh water through reverse osmosis. Without shore power, ships also are forced to “auxiliary steam” (run gas-turbine generators) to generate electricity, burning fuel. While the Navy should invest in constructing infrastructure in such ports in advance of a conflict, and the Civil Engineer Corps (Seabees) would undoubtedly be tasked with rapidly building up port infrastructure during such a conflict (as it famously did in World War II), tenders could provide a stopgap when port infrastructure and services are lacking.

Unmanned surface vessels (USVs). Finally, tenders could service and repair USVs. While it has only begun to field these systems, the Navy envisions introducing a wide variety of unmanned, optionally manned, or minimally manned surface vessels by the end of this decade.¹¹ Forcing these vehicles to return to existing Navy ports for servicing and repair would be suboptimal and potentially impossible given the distances involved in the Pacific. Requiring amphibious ships or expeditionary sea bases to service and repair USVs would also be suboptimal, as such ships would have their own missions and maintenance workload to complete, and neither ship type was designed with servicing and repairing USVs in mind.

Reestablishing a Tender Fleet

Given the Navy’s anemic shipbuilding program, even if the service did decide design and acquire new destroyer tenders, it is unrealistic to expect them to be fielded quickly. The Navy could shorten the timeline a little by modifying existing ship designs for new construction, retrofitting Military Sealift Command ships, or piggybacking on the contract to replace the Navy’s two aging submarine tenders.¹² Another concern is that tenders would be highly vulnerable to attack. They have few organic defenses and present an enticing target with all the matériel needed to keep dozens of other ships operational. However, shore-based infrastructure is far more vulnerable than a moving ship.

Destroyer tenders are not a new idea—they are an old and practical one. In the decades following the Cold War, during which the U.S. Navy enjoyed uncontested command of the seas, they were also a luxury, easily discarded as superfluous. This is no longer true. The Navy tells itself that its raison d’etre is to “operate forward.”¹³ Destroyer tenders enable just that.

1. CDRs Thomas Shugart and Javier Gonzalez, USN, “First Strike: China’s Missile Threat to U.S. Bases in Asia,” Center for New American Security, June 2017.

2. For proposals along similar lines, see David Alman, “Bring Back the Seaplane,” War on the Rocks, 1 July 2020; and LT Jonathan Z. French, USN, “Bring Back the Dirigibles, Maintain the Undersea Advantage,” U.S. Naval Institute Naval History 37, no. 2 (April 2023).

3. Gidget Fuentes, “Navy Tests Reloading Missiles on Destroyer in San Diego Bay, Open Ocean Tests Tougher Task,” USNI News, 18 October 2022.

4. Bryan Clark, “Commanding the Sea: The U.S. Navy and the Future of Surface Warfare,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2017.

5. Edward Lundquist, “Delivering Parts, Fuel, Mail Over 52 Million Square Miles,” Maritime Logistics Professional, 1 July 2019.

6. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Managing DoD’s Spare Parts,” Watchblog, 23 June 2016.

7. Steven Wills, “Tending to a Distributed Maritime Operation: The Ongoing Need for More Navy Tenders,” Center for Maritime Security, 12 September 2023.

8. Steven Wills, “End the Navy’s 30-Year Slide in Capability and Capacity,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 149, no. 4 (April 2023).

9. Bryan Clark et al., “Restoring American Seapower: A New Fleet Architecture for the United States Navy,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2017.

10. Ronald O’Rourke, Navy Light Replenishment Oiler (TAOL) Program: Background and Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service, 12 December 2024.

11. Ronald O’Rourke, Navy Large Unmanned Surface and Undersea Vehicles: Background and Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service, 19 December 2024.

12. Richard Scott, “NAVSEA Intends to Award AS(X) Submarine Tender Design Development to NASSCO,” Janes, 17 May 2024.

13. HON Kenneth J. Braithwaite, Advantage at Sea: Prevailing with Integrated All-Domain Naval Power (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 2020).

Below is a recent article I published on Earth & Altar, an online magazine committed to inclusive orthodoxy.

“They that go down to the sea in ships and occupy their business in great waters,

these men see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.” Psalm 107:23-4

It is difficult to maintain devotional practices on a warship at sea. The environment seems naturally hostile to contemplation—always loud and often hot, with plentiful opportunities to injure oneself, constant distractions, frustrations small and large littered throughout the day, and a relentless schedule. Warships are exemplars of the concept of entropy; they are in a constant state of degradation and disrepair. The operational necessity to repair the ship creates a steady stream of anxiety, and if there is any emotion more inimical to the religious life, it is anxiety.

Admiral James Stavridis, in his memoirs of serving as commanding officer of USS Barry—my most-recent ship—claimed that a ship at sea was akin to a monastery:

There is little here but work, work, work. A few minor amusements—not dissimilar to the books and quiet games of a modern monastery—but in the end, life on a ship is about devotion to work, conducted for the common good, with an agreed upon construct of rank, structure, order, and purpose. And good shipmates, if it is a good and lucky ship.

To sail in a modern ship of war is not unlike walking into a desert with a few companions. Everywhere around you is nothing but the sky and the distant horizon. There is a little outside input and an endless cycle of work and sleep.

From all of that comes—in some—a contemplation that is not, at the end of the day, unlike the meditations of medieval monks. For others, it is inchoate, unrealized—but it is a rare Sailor indeed who does not find himself or herself at least once a day standing at the rails of the ship, watching the hopeful gentle rise and swell of the ocean, and staring, staring, staring…at what?

At the realization that the sea and the sky roll on forever, unmoved and unmoving for all their motion. It helps keep the day-to-day concerns and frustrations a little bit in perspective, I suspect. (1)

The incongruity here, however, lies in the fact that contemplation and work in a monastic environment has a purpose—it points to something outside of itself, namely God. Work on a warship points to nothing except itself. Yes, warships are maintained so that they can accomplish some larger mission, but I think there are few who would credibly argue that mission has much, if anything, to do with God.

And yet, there is some grace to be found at sea. I find it largely above deck, standing watch on the bridge, often at sunrise or sunset, or on nights where there is at least some illumination from the moon or bioluminescent creatures below the water. When sunlight in varying shades of red, orange, yellow, and purple breaks through tufts of cumulus clouds on the horizon. When the churning ocean crashes over the bow of the ship, dense white streaks of frothy foam and spray are whipped up onto the bridge’s windshields, the ship pitches and rolls, and my hands grip the steel wire above my head that traverses the width of the bridge. Conversely, when the sea is like glass, and even the movement of small flying insects is visible breaking the surface of the ocean. At times like these, Baron Gottfried van Swieten’s quotation of Psalm 19 in the libretto of Haydn’s oratorio, The Creation, comes to mind:

The heavens are telling the glory of God. 

The wonder of his works displays the firmament. 

To day, that is coming, speaks it the day; 

the night, that is gone, to following night. 

In all the land resounds the word, 

never unperceived, ever understood. (2)

Nature does strike me as truly awe-some in those rare, fleeting moments. And contemplation, even some measure of devotion, does ensue.

Natural beauty is not the only motivator of devotional practices at sea. Properly understood, the ocean is a terrifying and dangerous place. Even today, with extensive safeguards and training, shipboard accidents, collisions, and groundings occur frequently among both warships and merchant ships. People die. Mariners of previous generations had an even keener awareness of the dangers of the sea, and more readily connected their safe navigation upon the sea to God’s providential action.

I currently keep three prayer books onboard my ship—the Episcopal Church’s 1979 Book of Common Prayer and 2008 A Prayer Book for the Armed Services, and IVP’s International Edition of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer—but I find myself turning to the 1662 BCP most often. In no small part this is because I am naturally attracted to the archaic vernacular. (3) It is also true that the 1662 BCP provides resources peculiar to my profession not found in the 1979 BCP, or even the 1928 BCP. Towards the back of the 1662 BCP is a section entitled, “Forms of Prayer to be Used at Sea.” The prayers, which supplement Morning and Evening Prayer, recognize the inherent danger of going out to sea, which was all the more dangerous in the seventeenth century at the time these prayers were written. 

Attendant to that danger, “Forms of Prayer to be Used at Sea” echoes many of the themes found in Psalm 107 in emphasizing the contingency and frailty of life, and recognizing God’s providential action upon the sea:

O most powerful and glorious Lord God, at whose command the winds blow, and lift up the waves of the sea, and who stillest the rage thereof; We thy creatures, but miserable sinners, do in this our great distress cry unto thee for help: Save, Lord, or else we perish. We confess, when we have been safe, and seen all things quiet about us, we have forgot thee our God, and refused to hearken to the still voice of thy Word, and to obey thy Commandments: But now we see, how terrible thou art in all thy works of wonder; the great God to be feared above all: And therefore we adore thy Divine Majesty, acknowledging thy power, and imploring thy goodness. Help, Lord, and save us for thy mercy’s sake in Jesus Christ thy Son, our Lord. Amen. (4)

In an age of ever-increasing material comfort for many of us in the developed world, too often we blanket ourselves in that false sense of safety as described by the author of this prayer. We attribute our wealth and success to our own efforts. Some techno-utopians even believe that humanity can save itself and defeat death. Not even a pandemic that has killed millions of people can rid us of these illusions. It is difficult for us to accept that “none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. For if we live, we live unto the Lord; and if we die, we die unto the Lord. Whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s.” (5)

There is another way in which the danger inherent in getting underway and going out to sea can offer a point of reflection on the Christian faith and devotional practices at sea. In the 2020 film Greyhound—one of the best films ever made about life underway on a warship—Tom Hanks plays the beleaguered commanding officer of a destroyer escorting a merchant convoy across the Atlantic Ocean during the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II, defending the convoy from relentless attacks by Nazi U-boats. During one such attack, three members of the crew, including the captain’s steward, Mess Attendant George Cleveland, dies, and Tom Hanks’ character performs a burial at sea.

The scene is a brief but profound example of prayerbook spirituality portrayed in popular media. Astonishingly, Tom Hanks’ character reads verbatim “At the Burial of the Dead at Sea,” found in “The Order for the Burial of the Dead” from the 1789 and 1892 editions of the Book of Common Prayer, the text of which echoes Paul in his Letter to the Philippians: (6)

We therefore commit his body to the deep, looking for the general Resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose second coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his glorious body; according to the mighty working where by he is able to subdue all things unto himself. (7)

Even in our deepest grief, our common Christian faith gives us hope in the general resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. The character of George Cleveland, who as a black man in a still-racially-segregated military, is serving in one of the few jobs open to him as the equivalent of a servant, dies a painful and violent death, his body mutilated. But not only will George Cleveland be raised from the dead,  his corruptible body will be made like Jesus’ glorious body.

Taken together, life underway at sea, which at first glance seems a godless enterprise, does provide several narratives or images that can help both sailors and non-sailors alike in their devotional practice and to see God in new ways, either reflected in His glorious creation, or as a providential actor in history, or in the person of Jesus outside of history at the eschaton, transformed and transforming us in return. Contra one interpretation, the sea is not “unmoved and unmoving for all [its] motion,” (8) but rather, to paraphrase Paul, moved by the one in whom everything lives and moves and has their being. (9)

1.  James Stavridis, Destroyer Captain: Lessons of a First Command (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008), 108-109.
2. “The Creation (Joseph Haydn),” Choral Public Domain Library, accessed October 17, 2022, https://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/The_Creation_(Joseph_Haydn).
3.  See Ben Crosby, “In defense of the archaic vernacular in public worship,” Draw Near With Faith (Substack), November 15, 2021, https://bencrosby.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-the-archaic-vernacular.
4. Samuel L. Bray and Drew Nathaniel Keane, eds., The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2021), 563.
5. Rom. 14:7-9 (Authorized Version)
6. Phil. 3:20-21 (AV)
7.  “1789 U. S. Book of Common Prayer: The Order for the Burial of the Dead,” The Society of Archbishop Justus, accessed October 17, 2022, http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1789/Burial_1789.htm.  Of note: this text is different from that found in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, and different still from a similar prayer found in “Forms of Prayer to be Used at Sea” in the 1662, 1789, and 1892 editions of the Book of Common Prayer. In using the 1892 prayerbook in a film set in 1942, Tom Hanks’ character appears to be something of a liturgical antiquarian of his day.
8. James Stavridis, Destroyer Captain: Lessons of a First Command (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008), 109.
9.  Acts 17:28 (AV)

Below is a recent article I published on Covenant, the blog of the magazine The Living Church.

My mother died of pancreatic cancer at age fifty-six; I was fifteen. For ten months, she endured chemotherapy and radiation treatment, until she collapsed and was hospitalized. She spent two weeks in the hospital, in and out of consciousness, until she was moved to a hospice facility, where she died.

It is difficult to remember the day-in, day-out experience of her illness — it was all a blur of family coming and going, of waking up to go to school but not really being present there. But I remember the day of her death clearly, as if it had been branded onto my memory with a white-hot poker. I was visiting my aunt for the weekend, and she dropped me off at home before returning to the hospice facility. My father hadn’t returned from running errands when she called. By the time we had arrived at the hospice facility, a white sheet had been laid over her body. Our parish priest came, and we prayed from the Book of Common Prayer.

When we stepped outside, we faced a torrent of rain. It felt as if each drop of rain hit the ground with such force as to indent the pavement; perhaps, collectively, the drops of rain would dissolve the scene in front of us, carrying us away with it. Or perhaps God was crying, too.

I don’t know why, but I wasn’t carrying an umbrella. Or else, the umbrella I was carrying did very little good, because I was soaking wet by the time we ended up at the burger joint across the street. A burger joint — how absurd. The absurd jumbled together with the tragic.

I think about this day often. The memories never “soften” over time — my mother died fourteen years ago and yet she is just as present with me today as she was then. There are no “stages” of grief. I was once asked at an interment whether I felt “closure.” Again, the absurd jumbled together with the tragic.

Modern culture doesn’t just fear death. It smothers grief. Fear of death, after all, is age-old. Our refusal to grieve properly is new. I hear so often of “celebrations of life.” What life is there to celebrate? Similarly, we blunt death’s impact with shallow euphemisms like “passed on” and “at rest.” Passed on to where? Is the person sleeping?

Our culture enforces grief-avoidance like a diktat. Death, and grief especially, are generally ignored by the popular culture; when not ignored they are sensationalized and trivialized, as in crime procedurals and horror movies. Our addiction to screens makes it harder to read books; but it also numbs our emotions, including both joy and grief. Most young people I know who don’t go to church don’t generally socialize with many older people. As a result, they rarely encounter death. This is one way in which church is unique in human society: it is a community which encompasses people of all ages, at all stages of life, from birth, to marriage and child-rearing, to death, and beyond.

Maybe we felt death more keenly when more people died young, when plagues or wars wiped out every other family member. Then again, that is a large price to pay just to remind us of our mortality. Perhaps we moderns have made a worthy trade-off. Or perhaps we’ve merely substituted earthly death for spiritual death.

I can’t help but think that this cultural phenomenon is in part to blame for our easy acceptance of euthanasia. We are told that euthanasia is “death with dignity.” What is a dignified death? What is a dignified life, for that matter? We don’t ask these questions much anymore, except occasionally in freshman seminars at small liberal arts colleges.

It seems to me that “death with dignity” in this context is generically defined as “death without suffering.” Is suffering to be avoided at all costs? Does that then mean that “life with dignity” is the pursuit of pleasure at all costs?

The Christian tradition has its own way of seeing death. As Fleming Rutledge points out,

Christianity does not recommend suffering for its own sake, and it is part of a Christian’s task in the world to alleviate the suffering of others. By no stretch of the imagination, however, could Christianity ever be said to recommend avoidance of suffering in the cause of love and justice. Perhaps the clearest way to sum this up is to say that Christian faith, when anchored in the preaching of the cross, recognizes and accepts the place of suffering in the world for the sake of the kingdom of God. (The Crucifixion, 50)

History and the popular imagination are filled with images of redemptive suffering: the martyr nailed to a cross, or tied to a wheel or stake; the soldier on the field of battle; the heroes of the civil rights movement, though many were bombed and shot and lynched, persisted in bringing about a measure of justice. In each case, suffering is transmuted into some greater ideal, the greatest of which is love. It is Jesus’ death on the cross, though, that truly allows us to see how and why suffering can be redemptive.

The greatest challenge to the idea of redemptive suffering is the absurdity and nihilism implicit in death. There is more than a note of despair and desolation in all tragedies, none more so than the great tragedies of the 20th century — the concentration camps, the gulags, the killing fields, and the people’s communes. What could possibly be redemptive about suffering on so monstrous a scale? The line that “one death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic,” may be misattributed to Stalin — but what could be more true of Stalin’s character, or of our own human nature? I lived in China for two years, and while there, tried to expose myself to the horrors of Maoist China as much as any Westerner could be exposed, and yet I cannot possibly comprehend a million deaths, never mind tens of millions. This is the eternal problem of evil, against which any formal theodicy rings hollow. The only answer I am left with is the Christian demand to have courage in the face of — not in spite of — evil, despair, and suffering.

And, indeed, the way of the cross does not avoid this absurdity. In Matthew and Mark, Christ dies with his plea to God unanswered.

The lesser challenge — but the challenge we more often face in the culture today — is that of shallow pieties, Enlightenment utopianisms, or just plain mindlessness, which can be crudely summarized by the “death with dignity equals the avoidance of suffering/life with dignity equals the pursuit of pleasure” formula. Whether conscious or not, this dichotomy too often characterizes the most naïve forms of secular progressivism and liberal Christianity.

Christians are, of course, called upon to help the distressed and relieve their suffering, but all too often this imperative is twisted such that we ignore our sinfulness, God’s judgment, and the eschatological hope for the Kingdom of God. We reduce suffering and its alleviation to a purely political problem, to be resolved with better policy and technique. But if all the church has to offer is yet another political program, then we are offering thin gruel, indeed.

In the end, this brand of liberal Christianity is worse than thin gruel, because it actually impedes meaningful action in the cause of justice. Without the cross, what is the point? The cross leads us to take real and substantive action for justice, because it recognizes the true depths of our problem.

I started with my mother. What does this have to do with her? Shortly before she was moved to the hospice facility, my father made the difficult decision to remove parenteral (intravenous) nutrition. While even the Roman Catholic Church recognizes the licitness of removing the nutrition of a patient who is close to death, I still have to reckon with the fact that she survived sixteen more days without nutrition, her pain palliated only by a tremendous amount of morphine.

In situations like these, most academic or theological discussions of end-of-life care or euthanasia fall flat. It is easy to say generically that all life has inherent dignity and that euthanasia violates that inherent dignity. But it is harder to see why pain in specific situations becomes morally necessary — after all, at a certain point, any additional morphine stands a chance of accidentally killing the patient.

As before, I am left with only one recourse: Jesus’ passion, death, resurrection, and ascension, in which Jesus both identifies with and participates in our suffering, and inaugurates our common Christian hope.

In dying, my Mom showed me how to live. Her death was a sacrifice in the pure sense of the term. And I think this is generally true of those we love. Grief constitutes immense suffering, and yet without it, are we even human? When we insulate and immunize ourselves against death and its effects, we make death cheap and life a commodity. This warps not only how we view death, but ultimately, how we live.