With some Christmas decorations still in place in Sydney suburbs, it was hard to believe the Lenten season was already drawing to a close.
How quickly we have moved from celebrating the birth of Our Lord to receiving the ashes and preparing for His death and resurrection. This year, my move from reflecting on birth to death has been painfully fast.
My year began working on two submissions to the NSW Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2022 review. Then, some weeks ago, I lost my uncle, Brother Julian Quinlan FMS. I was present at the moment of his death. I have now witnessed the deaths of four close family members. Each experience has been different, but each has left a lasting impression.
This may sound odd, but each time I have witnessed a death, it has reminded me, in some way, of the birth of my children. Each has been a time of wonder and pain. Each involved waiting, uncertainty, and predictions that ultimately proved to be only estimates.
I recall well the births of our four children. My wife, Kate, delivered each of them without pain relief. While I will never experience that pain myself, I witnessed enough to know how real it is. There was anxiety, fear, and at times a sense of helplessness. And yet, after that period of uncertainty, we were able to hold new life in our arms. It was both traumatic and deeply beautiful.
There are, it seems to me, parallels with death. Like a natural birth, a natural death can unfold over an uncertain period. In Maurice’s case, his final journey involved three days in a coma following a cerebral haemorrhage. During that time, family members and Marist Brothers came and went, at all hours, to be with him.
Those three days, though difficult, proved important. They gave us time to gather, to pray, to share memories, and to prepare for life without him. I learned things about Maurice’s life as a Marist Brother that I had not known before. He had lived a life of quiet service across Australia and overseas. His life, like his death, was not his alone – it touched many others.
Maurice received respectful and compassionate care from hospital staff. I am confident he was not in pain. His death came calmly and slowly, as his breathing eased and he slipped away. It was, in every sense, a deeply human moment – sorrowful, but also dignified and relational. It seemed to me a “good death”.
This experience has shaped my understanding of what that term might mean. A good death is not simply about the absence of suffering. It is about the presence of others. It is about recognising that our lives – and our deaths – are bound up with those around us.
This stands in stark contrast to the logic of voluntary assisted dying. A key aim of VAD is to deliberately hasten death, often framed as a way to secure a “good death”. But in doing so, it risks reducing death to an individual act, detached from its wider human and communal meaning.
I was recently made aware of a case in which an elderly man, grieving the loss of his wife and suffering from illness, chose to self-administer under the VAD regime. His family, though aware of the approval, did not know when he intended to act. He died alone. It was his son who found him.
That experience, like many others, highlights the reality that death is never purely individual. It always reaches beyond the person to those who love them. The manner of death matters, not only for the individual, but for the community that remains.
In the Gospel, Jesus stands before the tomb of Lazarus and asks, “Where have you put him?” He does not turn away from death. He does not reduce it to a problem to be solved. He weeps. And those around him say, “See how much he loved him.”
This, perhaps, is the point. Death is not simply a moment to be managed or controlled. It is a moment that reveals love, relationship, and the limits of our own power.
As Easter approaches, we are reminded that Christ enters fully into the reality of death. He does not bypass it. He transforms it.
To be present at the moment of death is a privilege. It is also a confrontation with something terrible, powerful, and awe-inspiring. But it is not without meaning.
Just as birth brings new life through pain and uncertainty, so too death, in the light of Christ, is not the end. It is a passage – one that calls for patience, presence, and, above all, trust.
Michael Quinlan is an emeritus professor of the University of Notre Dame Australia.
