Francis Bergsma, a 17-year-old boy whose father, John Bergsma, is a widely known professor of biblical theology at Franciscan University in Steubenville, died Feb. 28 following a nearly two-year battle with brain cancer, leaving both his family and friends stricken with grief and incomprehension. Why must someone so young and so dear to so many be made to suffer for so long? Where is the justice in that?

There isn’t any. At least not by any human reckoning. But because we live in a fallen world, a world infected by sin and disease, such things, while certainly shocking and deeply dislocating, ought not to come as a surprise. The serpent has long since insinuated its poison into the fruit. Death remains the most banal and predictable of all happenings that will, ineluctably, carry us all off in the end. You can take that to the mortuary. No one gets out alive.

At the same time, however, it remains the most painfully bewildering of all mysteries, an intolerable affront to our dignity as children of a God who neither made death nor delights in the death of the living. It was owing instead to the envy and malice of the devil that death entered the world, thus forcing us to endure that which God never intended from the beginning.

To be sure, it has been a very long time since we first left Eden, the cost of disobedience having driven us into a world of pain and suffering, there to lament the loss of those we love. Asked once by an interviewer what bothered him most about life, the poet Robert Lowell replied bitterly, “That people die.” Including especially the very young, who, having the most to live for, ought never to have been so cruelly cast off before their prime.

“It is the blight man was born for,” says the narrator of Gerard Manley’s Hopkins’ haunting poem “Spring and Fall,” to the young child who has wandered innocently into the late autumn woods where, weeping but not knowing why, she watches all the fallen leaves die. “Margaret,” he asks, “are you grieving 

Over golden grove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.

And why is that? For whom exactly does she weep? In the final line of the poem, she will be told:

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Let’s face it, life is not the least bit fair, nor will it ever be. Especially not for the youngest among us, when they go sooner than we do. “Golden lads and girls all must,” Shakespeare reminds us, “As chimney sweepers, come to dust.”  There are no exemptions, no loopholes for the lucky few, including the very young. With each rise and fall of the sea — the dread, implacable sea — we are drawn nearer and nearer to death. Sooner or later we shall all sing the same dirge: “The bright day is done / And we are for the dark.”

But, again, these are human calculations, not measurements made by God, whose timeline is not for us to know. “What if this present were the world’s last night?” asks John Donne in one of his Holy Sonnets. And because we’ve no idea when Closing Time will come, it is a question we need to ask ourselves afresh every day, preparing for what we cannot escape. We must not be like the rich man of whom Christ speaks in the parable taken from St. Luke’s Gospel, who will go most woefully ill-prepared before his Maker for failing to ask the question.

Here was a man who possessed so much wealth that he needed to tear down all his old barns in order to make new ones to house all that he owned. “I shall say to myself, ‘Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!’”

Alas, he takes no account of God, who will sooner than expected pronounce sentence:

‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’ Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves but are not rich in what matters to God.

“Mark in my heart,” continues Donne, “where thou dost dwell

The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether that countenance can thee affright:
Tears in his eyes quench the amazing light,
Blood fills his frowns, which from his pierced head fell;
And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell
Which prayed forgiveness for his foes’ fierce spite?

The answer, concludes Donne, recalling the saving blood shed by Christ to redeem both he and a fallen world, is No. And while we must all die, that being the debt we owe for sin, God will surely remedy all our losses on the other side, meanwhile fortifying us with hope to endure the sufferings on this side. Provided, of course, we soldier on his company, mindful of the tasks he has given us to perform. And so the bereaved are not to be left permanently bereft, shorn of all hope. The consolations of God are the promise given to those annealed in the expectation that Christ, who died for us all, has gone to prepare a place for those who love him.

“You are going to be with Jesus soon,” the grieving father tells his son in his last moments as death draws near. “The rest of us will follow and will join you there, sooner than you think. It won’t be long.” And what does his dying son say, so near to the end? “Okay.” Only then does he take leave of this world, catapulted into eternity on the wings of hope, there to await the tender mercies of a loving Father.

For those who seek the city that is to come, who anchor their lives in Christ, death is not the end. Our lives were made for God and Heaven is the place where we find him. May he receive us with a love far greater than death.