Recently, someone kept referring to a dead family member as being "gone" or "lost". For some reason, that rankled me. I felt that the person using that phrase was not facing up to the reality of the situation. I attributed it to our current culture's reticense to face death squarely. Dying, death, dead are not words to be used in polite conversation. When is the last time you heard someone say "My wife is dead". The more I thought about it, the more self righteous I became. If there was one thing my mother taught me, it was to seek to grab reality by the throat. "Don't sugar-coat things"! So, I thought, we need to grasp firmly the harsh reality of our own mortality - we are dying! In doing so, we are in a much better place to prepare for the inevitability of that experience.
And yet. When I read the bible - it does not hesitate to speak of death AND to use euphemisms. The most common - sleep. Paul speaks of dead saints as those that are "asleep". Why? Perhaps it is to take the edge off of the harshness of saying they are dead. Jesus spoke of Lazarus being asleep. Because, for the Christian, the harshness of death has been taken away in Jesus. The essence of the euphemism is true. Our loved one who has died is "gone". They are, if believers, absent from the body and present with the Lord.
Using a euphemism does not mean we are have not grasped the reality of the situation. The next time someone tells me that their Christian oved one is "gone", I shall not protest. Gone indeed!
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