Death and grief are the most difficult and unavoidable problems of human life. The realities of dying and grieving pose essential, painful and mysterious challenges to every person. The key to understanding these mysteries is love.

Each person knows inherently that love is eternal and should never end. But all that we experience of love in this fallen world is that human love fails, is incomplete, and becomes lost – and we know that it is not how it ought to be. Love should not fail; love should be true and should be complete and never end.

The failures of love are also the key to understanding violence and crime. Persons lash out violently, plot and plan crimes in anguished responses to disappointments and betrayals of love. The brokenness of love stems from the cataclysm at the beginning in Eden. In God’s original plan, love and life were complete and eternal. The falling of Satan, and then of Adam and Eve, broke the bonds of love, and the binding of heaven and earth, God and man, and ushered in the horrors of sin and sickness and death.

No human answer has ever or will ever solve the problems of those ruptures and their consequences. God has provided the necessary supernatural solution through the dying and rising of Jesus Christ.

Why then must we continue to endure earthly suffering and the loss of our loved ones through illness and death? I believe that there are many more precious persons yet to be born and to take their place in the history of this world, and that the teleological rules of reality will apply until the plan of God has been completed.

Our human nature is centered on the need to be loved and to love.

Icon painted on reverse glass in the naive orthodox style of Eastern Europe depicting Virgin Mary and Jesus on the cross.

So, we require love. Our human nature is centered on the need to be loved and to love, yet the love from each person in our life will be incomplete and will fail in a greater or lesser degree. Nonetheless, love of others will always be the hallmark of meaning for our lives, and our greatest losses will be the deaths of our cherished ones. Our gravest anguish will be the bearing of our grief over those losses. If the human landscape was our only perspective, we might lose hope and despair. The only factor that can sustain hope and endurance beyond all earthly losses is faith in God.

Jesus and his mother alone have loved to the full without failure – but we are not equal to either of them. Our sinful failings are built into our fallen human nature.

On our own we cannot eradicate concupiscence. We must humbly surrender our pride, and acknowledge our need for the freely given life of Christ, and commit our inadequate efforts to the noble task of growing in our ability to love, while frequently admitting to ourselves, to God, and to our loved ones that we have failed, that we have come up short, that we need correction and forgiveness, and perhaps an endless number of extra chances to come closer to fulfilling His commandment to love one another.

copyright Tom Medlar 2026