A Generous Life and Death
Friday, November 6, 2026
Drawing on the wisdom of Henri Nouwen, Father Ron Rolheiser explores the opportunity to give one’s life, and even one’s death, away for the sake of others:
In one of his last books, Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring, Henri Nouwen says that at a certain point in our lives, the question is no longer “What can I still do so that my life makes a contribution?” Rather, it becomes “How can I live now so that my death will be an optimal blessing to my family, the church, and the world?” and the central question should not be “How much time still remains?” but rather “How can I prepare now so that my dying will be a new way for me to leave a warm, nurturing, and blessing spirit behind for those who have loved me and whom I have loved?” [1]
For Nouwen, this is predicated on the fact that our lives belong not just to us but also to others. This is also true of our deaths. If we die with guilt, shame, anger, or bitterness, that will be part of what we leave to the world, and it will burden the lives of our family and friends. If we die unreconciled, in bitterness, most every memory we leave behind will cause unease, pain. And that will be our legacy. Conversely, if we die at peace, reconciled with our loved ones and the world, with a warm and grateful heart, then that warmth and love will be the spirit we leave behind, and most every memory of us will bring others warmth so that our dying in peace and reconciliation will then be our last gift—a wonderful, lasting one—to our loved ones. Giving our deaths away as a gift to our loved ones means that at some point in our lives, we need to stop focusing on our agenda and begin to focus on our obituary, on what kind of spirit we will leave behind. [2]
Rolheiser looks to Jesus’s life and death as a model for our own:
Ultimately, all the invitations in the Gospel can be summarized in one word—“surrender.” Our final human and spiritual task is to let go and, like Jesus in his final act, hand over our spirits in an act of love and trust. But this is also the most difficult task in life….
Dying is the ultimate surrender in trust, and it besets us un-invited. However, God and nature have arranged that the natural debilitations that come with aging give us lots of practice in letting go, long before our deathbeds…. One of our salient spiritual and human tasks as we age is to learn how to let go, how to surrender, so that the spirit we breathe out with our last breath or (ideally) long before our last breath is one that, like Jesus’s last breath, issues forth without bitterness as it says, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” [3]
References:
[1] Henri J.M. Nouwen, Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring (HarperOne, 1994), xvi.
[2] Ronald Rolheiser, Insane for the Light: A Spirituality for Our Wisdom Years (Image, 2026), 12–13.
[3] Rolheiser, Insane, 46, 47
Image credit and inspiration: Ines Iachelini, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, China. Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like a pomegranate broken open, we are invited to share the abundance that has grown in us over the years, offering our gifts freely to the beloved community.
