When Death Comes to Visit

I recently started reading Sarah Wilson’s latest book, “I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World.”[1] It is a beautiful and disturbing book. Disturbing in the way that it names the darkness, it invites us to sit with the uncomfortable, and suggests that in the systemic collapse and bombardment of our nervous systems, being able to hope may be a step too far, and we need to live fully and abundantly, taking in every moment and loving at full capacity – now.

As a Christian reading the book, I was challenged to wonder whether it is possible to give up on hope. I can’t.

The title of the book comes from a poem written by Astronomer and Poet, Rebecca Elson (1960-1999) Rebecca died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma at age 39. She engaged with poetry and science in such a way that made science and spirituality friends, as they are always meant to be. The poem ‘Antidotes to Fear of Death’ is inherently (as antidotes suggests) hopeful:

Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.

And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.[2]

Upon discovering Rebecca Elson’s work I was taken on a journey into her poetry and life. I have taken a brief hiatus from Wilson’s book as I am challenged to eat the stars and to hope beyond hope.

In my chaplaincy context, like for many others, death comes to visit, this year seems even more than previous. I say death has come to visit because it is just that, a visitor. We Christians affirm that death is not the end. I firmly believe this is why chaplains are called upon in the “death visits”. Because there is inherent hope in each of us that death is just a visitor, not a permanent eternal state. In a culture that runs from death, and avoids talking about it, it is hard to find language when death inevitably arrives.

We are a school founded by the Sisters of the Society of the Sacred Advent. This year our final two professed Sisters died and joined the great company of heaven. This has meant that throughout the year, death has been a part of our everyday dialogue as we honour and remember the Sisters. I have sat with staff and discussed death and dying and what we hope for when we face this reality ourselves.

The most recent funeral I took changed me. We are changed by all of our experiences, but this one had a significant impact. It was a funeral of a Father and Daughter.  The deceased taught me, even in their deaths, to eat the stars. They lived big. They breathed life in. I have been challenged since – to what extent I am ‘living big,’ how deeply am I breathing in life, and, am I eating the stars?

While preparing for the funeral I learned a lot about the concept of petrichor. Petrichor is the pleasant, earthy smell that fills the air when rain falls on dry soil or rock. The smell itself comes about when increased humidity fills the pores of stones/soil with tiny amounts of water. The name itself comes from the Greek “petros” – Rock and “ichor” – the ethereal blood of the God’s.[i]

Petrichor is hope for growth and renewal, hope for the next crop, hope for a good season. Resurrection. Perhaps because of the inherent hopefulness of this phenomena, this scent brings us closer to the divine, reminds us that the earth is imbued with the love and light of God and the love of all those who have walked the earth before us resides in the colours of the sunset, scent of the rain, and the contours of the land.

Faith invites us into this abundance of hope. Because we believe in a different concept of time. We hold Kairos as the hope in the midst of Chronos. As we try to control time, with it’s boundaries and beginning and end, God’s abundance breaks in with a concept of time that is expansive and unending. So when death comes to visit, Kairos steps in.

“The theologian Paul Tillich describes Kairos as the moment when the eternal breaks into the temporal. Such moments are the grace notes in the plain chant of everyday life.

As we hurry through our days, perhaps we can slow to a pace that encourages us to make time to look within,”[3] … to eat the stars.

When death comes to visit we are invited to slow down, to reside in the most important moments, to stretch time out, to linger with the ones whom we love, to exist with all those who have gone before us in God’s time – Kairos.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8. 38-39.

[1] Wilson, S. (2026). I eat the stars: How to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world. Crown.

[2] Elson, R. (2001). A responsibility to awe. Carcanet.

[3] https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/everything-in-its-own-sweet-time-20251009-p5n1ha.html

[i] The smell of rain: how our scientists invented a new word – CSIRO